Marketing is changing. It has changed a lot since the start of the 21st century. With the internet, social media, mobile etc. marketing is less and less about one-sided broadcasting of marketing messages, like we know from traditional media like TV, print and radio, and more and more about pulling people in – attracting them.
Marketing is becoming less about grabbing people and more about being there when people are looking for what you have to offer, or anything related to it.
Marketing is less about pushing things on to people and more about pulling people in.
The marketing jargon is that we are moving from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.
A lot of marketing today is about producing content and sharing it with people – just like I am doing with this post. The content is made to pull people in and to build a relationship with them.
As I have mentioned before, and will no doubt mention again, marketing is all about building relationship. Building your relationship with your prospective customers to get them to become customers, and with your customers to get them to be repeat customers and then to bring you more customers. This kind of marketing, content marketing, builds a mutually beneficial relationship which ultimately involves people doing business with you.
Content marketing is something that requires time and effort, but not necessarily a lot of cold hard cash, so it can be a very powerful marketing tool for cash-strapped small businesses.
Rich content that has value for people also has a great deal of value for your marketing. Think about it. We all go online to look for things, such as information, advice, answers, entertainment or motivation. We like those who give it to us. If you can be the one to give this to people, and if you can also use it effectively to build your relationship with them, move them through the marketing process and build your reputation as an expert in your field, this could be worth a lot in your marketing.
As an added bonus, good content which uses your keywords can be very beneficial for search engine optimisation – i.e. being found online by the search engines.
Content marketing can include a lot of things. It can be blogging, using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, sharing videos on YouTube etc. etc. I have a feeling you are doing at least one of these things – so for that you need content marketing.
Which is why I have made more content on content marketing (pun intended ;) Hope you’ll find it useful ;)