It’s about them, not you.
It’s marketing at its heights, targeted to an audience, and then telling a story.
It’s called content marketing.
And it’s about switching your focus -- realizing people aren’t searching for you, they're searching for solutions and answers to their questions.
With content marketing, you provide great information and relevant resources to your industry, the target audience you seek. Basically, you place content on your website relevant and meaningful to them not geared towards your specific brand.
Many companies have websites that highlight everything about them and everything they do, but fail to highlight the value they can add to potential clients and customers.
Content marketing is about having a marketing game plan for content in all its different forms. Whether it’s a blog, video, tutorial or topical conversational piece, these types of content are all relevant to end users. So, position your website and content on the site to eventually bring the end users into the sales funnel.
This involves strategy. It’s not just about handing out free information to show you‘re an awesome brand. It’s great if you have a lot of fans and people like you, but if you’re not capitalizing on it, the content marketing is for naught.
Ultimately, content marketing is two-fold. It’s providing relevant information to people, but then positioning yourself in a way to say, “Hey, we're giving you all this great information, and by the way, we’re also really good at this. Here’s how you can reach us.” Or, “Here are things that we have done in this area that could help you even further. Contact us.”
Need an example of how it all works?
A freelance web designer who lives in Cleveland no longer works for a particular company. If you search “web design,” on Google, even outside Cleveland, his freelance website shows up because he’s geared his website to focus more on providing really great information about web design.
On his site, he isn’t touting. “This is what I've done. This is what I do. This is the technology I use.” Rather he offers up tutorials, “Hey, here are 10 tips on how to optimize your website with SEO. Here are three design techniques used on a navigation menu.” He provides this type of information on a consistent basis. That's all.
He actually doesn't do a lot of SEO coding -- that's on the back burner. Instead, he focuses on providing relevant content. As a result, within the span of seven to eight months, he went from being on page 33 on Google in terms of web design to landing himself in the top three consistently. This can all be attributed to the fact the content he provides is relevant for people searching for anything having to do with web design.
In turn, he has an easy contact form on the website. Basically, you visit his site, learn a lot, read the tutorials, and eventually come to a threshold finding yourself saying, “I actually need help with this. Let me contact this guy. This guy is a thought leader. He knows what he's doing.”
A tremendous number of leads come in for actual outsourced freelance work all because he's focusing on delivering content relevant to those who visit his website.
It’s all about them, not him.