You post a bunch of articles, blog posts, and social media posts.
Your website starts showing up on internet search results as you become a respected guru in your industry. Your website starts attracting thousands of visitors. Most of them become loyal customers and give you great referrals.
Your business becomes highly successful.
According to many digital marketing experts, content marketing will do all this for you, without the need for traditional advertising and aggressive marketing techniques.
Unfortunately, this is simply not true for most small businesses.
While a large, established company might attract a lot of sales leads through a passive, inbound / content marketing strategy, smaller businesses need to find more proactive ways of attracting customers.
This means that businesses still need to implement traditional marketing techniques to get the best results from their content marketing. Small businesses need to go after clients and customers – not simply offer free educational content. That’s the only way to stand out from your competition.
Your Content Needs to Solve Relevant Problems
The whole point of content marketing is to gain the trust of potential customers by providing them with useful information that helps them solve common problems in their industry.
Creating relevant articles, blogs, and e-books also attracts the attention of search engines by showing them that you are in expert in your field.
That’s why it’s a waste of time producing a bunch of unfocused, poorly researched content, hoping that it’s going to improve your ranking on Google.
Irrelevant content also attracts less website visitors who are willing to give you their contact information in exchange for free downloads.
The only way to make content marketing work is by producing content that provides answers to the questions your potential customers ask.
Answering the right questions consists of creating articles, blog posts, or videos around the keywords used by prospects during their online searches.
Content Marketing Needs to Supported by Traditional Marketing
Just because you’ve created a bunch a free content doesn’t mean thousands of people are suddenly going to visit your website and interact with you.
Unless your business is widely known in your industry, you will have to make use of traditional direct marketing techniques to separate yourself from hundreds of other competitors who are also offering free educational content.
Small businesses need to work with professional copywriters to create promotional content, such as landing pages, email messages, and online ads, that generates more website traffic and email signups.
The only difference between this form of direct marketing and traditional direct response methods is that the ads you place will promote your free content and downloadable reports, instead of directly promoting your products and services.
Combining inbound content marketing with outbound direct marketing techniques makes the best use of both digital and traditional marketing techniques.
You won’t just passively upload content to your site and hope that people notice it. At the same time, your direct marketing promotions won’t seem overly aggressive or pushy.
Conclusion
Potential customers expect to get free information when they visit your website. They can visit your site, download your booklet, and leave your site in a matter of minutes, without even noticing your name or what services you offer.
That’s a major problem with content marketing.
It’s up to you to pursue those who show some interest in your content, and use direct marketing efforts to build a relationship and eventually persuade them to buy from you.
The best way to do this is to offer a free report or booklet that helps potential customers solve a major problem. This downloadable content becomes available once people enter their contact information on your web form.
Today the use of marketing automation software makes it easy to plan and create complete funnels that manage your educational content and direct marketing campaigns.
These tools ensure that you get something out of your content marketing. Otherwise, you are simply giving away your knowledge for free.
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