You'll love this post if you don't love content marketing
Content! Content! Content!
It’s all you hear these days from marketing experts if you’re a business owner, salesperson, startup, mom-and-pop, or even a multi-level marketer. To make things worse, content comments and advice come in many forms and often contradict themselves:
There’s the overly zealous experts: “Content is king!”
The scare tactic pros: “If you don’t have good content, you won’t be able to compete.”
The trend people: “Get your brand on TikTok yesterday or you’re basically obsolete and should just retire now, you old person in your 40s.”
The quantity over quality camp: “Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just write 154 blogs a week.”
The quality over quantity proponents: “Less is more if it’s really high quality.”
Let me give you the bad news first: They’re all correct.
But the good news is they’re all kind of wrong, too.
Yes, content can do a lot
Content is incredibly important if you want to become or stay competitive in whatever business you’re trying to start or continuing to succeed in:
It helps boost your rank in search engines so you’re more likely to show up on that first page of Google.
You can establish yourself as an industry expert, which instills a greater sense of trust with current and potential customers.
It creates engagement with readers when you share a story, anecdote or insight.
It allows you to see where your readers are coming from when you have access to analytics.
You get to delight your readers, listeners and viewers with a personality that is all your own and one they’ll want to come back to if you’re consistent about it.
But you don’t have to do it all, nor should you
I know content can do a lot. I love content. I make a living writing it!
Before you pull up your business plan and begin pouring everything out of your operations budget and into marketing, here’s what’s really important: You don’t have to do “all of the content” to develop a content plan that’s right for you.
Instead of ignoring what the advertising and marketing experts tell you to do (after all, they are the subject matter experts when it comes to content), why not pick and choose content channels that make the most sense for you and won’t eat up your marketing budget, your time or your sanity?
It all depends on your ideal customer, what you want them to see, where and when.
Popular content channels
You have so many amazing places you can use content to drive your marketing to the right audience. Don’t just think about podcasts, video, blogging and other forms of new media. Think about some of the old-school stuff, too, because believe it or not, it’s all still relevant.
Print - newspapers, direct mail, letters, flyers, brochures, leave-behinds
TV and radio - interviews, commercials, sponsored content
Outdoor - billboards, out-of-home signage (the ads you see in bathroom stalls, for example), auto wraps, bus stop benches, marquees, bumper stickers
Social - Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Medium, blogs, podcasts, microvideo, YouTube
Sites and apps - static and rotating content, newsletters, ebooks, downloads and other gated content
Some of the content channels listed are free for you to do on your own, while some you have to pay to play. No matter what, you have the power to choose your own content adventure - one that hopefully encompasses your company’s mission, vision, story and future.
Which channels are right for your needs and efforts?
Here’s where things get sticky. While we (myself included) tend to get stuck in the digital ecosystem (blogs, enewsletters, gated content, etc.), there are certainly instances when, say, a flyer is perfectly appropriate. For example, it’s a lot easier to hand someone a piece of paper that highlights what your business can do for them than it is to pull up a blog post at the flick of your wrist.
Lucky for all of us, there are a few essential questions that can help you a la carte your content!
Where do your customers live, work and play?
If you have a business plan (and you def should), check there to see what kinds of research you’ve already done about your target demographic. If, say, you’re a shoe store and find out your ideal customer lives in a mid-scale apartment in a mid-sized city and has teen kids, then Instagram might be a great place to focus.
How much time do you have to spend on creating content?
This one is a biggie. If you’re doing it all yourself, it’s best to stick to one channel and dominate in that space, or sprinkle a little love across all the channels, as SEO expert Michael Quinn would advise. If you’ve been blogging but don’t have time to commit to writing twice a week, then maybe you could do shorter articles on LinkedIn. Or if you’re on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but you’re really only getting engagement on Instagram, maybe just focus on Instagram for a while and see if you can get users to migrate to that network.
Who can you ask for help?
A lesson I wish I would have learned a lot earlier is to ask for help more often. While I wouldn’t advise you to hand off your social media marketing to a friend’s niece, maybe someone at your business has an interest and acumen for Twitter. As long as Twitter fits your company’s brand personality, your story, mission and vision, why not?
An even better option is to ask for professional help. Hire a marketing strategist to research and audit your current content offerings. From there, she’ll be able to tell you which channels make the most sense for you, so that you can let go of the ones that don’t.
That, friends, is content freedom!