I’m a firm believer in the success of content marketing. I love that the loyal customers it brings to your business will be loyal for a long time and they’ll tell your friends about it because they appreciate you so much. However, content marketing takes nurturing, consistency and time, and not all businesses have the ability to stick it out. Take heart, because there is another way.
Content marketing’s premise involves a long-term social media strategy that’s designed around content. In most cases, your goal is to provide educational value through your social media, use that interest to drive your customers to provide you with their email address, and then target them more directly through an email marketing strategy. Content marketing is focused on staying in touch with these followers and building credibility, trust and loyalty over an extended period of time. People in this sales cycle will not only buy from you, but they’ll tell people about you, and they’ll buy from you over and over again. Genius!
However, as much as I trust the content marketing strategy, I find a lot of customers particularly in the small business sector, just don’t have the faith to see it out. Content marketing relies on providing regular, quality content, consistently, not just a couple of times. If you don’t have the ability to write that content yourself, then we can certainly do it for you, but then you still have to proof-read it and approve it, and you have to pay for someone to do that work for you. For a service like this you need to be committing $1,000 per month or more. This is normally no problem for people when they can see a direct return straight away…but that sort of marketing commitment for businesses who won’t see results for months and sometimes over a year, will struggle to justify it.
It’s a simple fact that businesses want quick turnarounds on their investment. This is the number one reason why businesses I see don’t follow through with a content marketing strategy. It’s a shame because the long-term rewards for such a strategy can be very powerful. When you have a nurtured community of loyal followers you can sell anything.
This post is not meant to knock businesses who don’t have the stamina for content marketing. Rather I am only trying to make sure that you know what you’re in for. Content marketing will not work for you if you have a scattered approach. It must be strategic and it must be consistent. Some businesses just don’t have the budget or the man-power to pull it off. You’re better off knowing upfront and adjusting your strategy accordingly.
So in response, I would recommend that you do a combination of content marketing and some online ads investment. You’ll have that straight away satisfaction feeling from your online advertising strategy and you can be building your content marketing processes in the background. It’s a sure-fire way to feeling good about your investment whilst seeing results for your business that justify your marketing spend, coupled with the ability to build a long-term fan-base that will support your business well into the future.
In so doing, your content marketing strategy will be much less intense than it needs to be to ensure timely success, but you’ll be putting in the stepping stones to build a content marketing platform that will grow and build leads for you over time.
You’ll need a bigger budget for those upfront ads, but then you’ll be seeing immediate results so you’ll have no problem justifying it. After all, no marketing will definitely get you no leads. You need to be putting your dollars in the most effective places for your business.
