What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is about educating potential customers over time, gaining trust, and establishing credibility. It does this by creating knowledgeable, interesting, and shareable content of value to the reader.
Content marketing is the act of creating stories to promote your business. Every blog post, tweet, or email you send out is an asset your business now uses as part of it’s overall marketing platform.
Once a blog post is created it can be repurposed, cross-referenced, or re-used in a variety of different ways. For example, a blog post could be summarized in an email, and then further summarized into a tweet. In the same way, a series of blog posts can be strung together as a white paper, a special report, or an ebook. Images created for blog posts can be pinned to Pinterest or used in a Slideshare.
As the business owner or expert in your field, you have acquired a ton of knowledge about your craft – that’s very valuable information and people will look to you for insight. Content marketing is a way to educate and help your clients and potential clients – all while boosting your profile and enhancing the value of your product.
Why Building a Platform for Your Business is Important
Let’s say you’ve just developed an awesome new product or service and you want to let the world know about it. How would you do it?
You could pay to put the message out in a newspaper or magazine, you could post it on Facebook and pay to have it promoted, or you could publish it to your own platform for free.
A “platform” is the collection of business resources you own for the purpose of promoting your business. The central hub of this collection is your website, but primarily, your blog.
If you were to build a house, would you build it on rented land? Your best assets should be built on your own platform, not one someone else runs. Those other sites can point back to the blog.
That’s why having a blog is so important. It’s a critical part of your overall marketing platform. It serves as the hub for all social media, email marketing, and other promotional activities.
In other words, your blog is kind of like your business itself, and should reflect it.
Why Do I Teach Business Owners About Blogging?
I believe that blogging is the single most important thing a business can do to gain more customers, streamline internal processes, and grow the business. But why do we teach it?
Business owners create jobs that help people take care of their families. Our mission is to help people make more money and the best way we can do this is by helping businesses grow.
I have worked with large and small companies. I understand what it’s like to be just starting out and what it’s like to grow as an established company.
I also understand how powerful stories can be to communicate your company’s value to current and prospective clients and how blogging does that while building a community around your business. The best way to tell great stories is to have great stories and we want to help businesses and business owners share how great their story can be.
I’ve taken our shared experiences in helping businesses manage people, processes, technology, and marketing to take your business to the next level – whatever that level may be.