If you’re not familiar with content marketing, it is the process of producing pieces of valuable content, marketing it to your prospects, and when they consume the content, your business benefits in one of two ways. First, you can gather contact information in exchange for the content, providing you with a way to continue the sales process via email marketing. Second, by providing a valuable piece of content for free, you are building a relationship with that prospect.
Content marketing is all about finding ways to give your customers and prospects something of value in exchange for their contact information. People love free things, especially if it’s truly valuable to them, and many times they are willing to give their name and email address to get it. With contact info of your prospects, email marketing funnels can be built to share more information about your business, send them a special offer and much more. The goal is to build a trusting and lasting relationship with your prospects.
The key to any piece of content is to create something of value, ideally something viral. Many people are willing to trade a name and email address for a resource if it is truly valuable to them. If they choose to do so, you then have a lead you can nurture through email marketing and automation. If your content goes viral in some way, even better!
Content marketing not only helps generate leads, but it can help improve organic search rankings and overall brand awareness. It’s a great strategy for almost every business, but it does require time and resources to be consistent with coming up with content ideas, the publishing schedule, tracking the success of each piece of content and following up with leads that are generated.