3 Reasons To Make Content Marketing Your Top Priority
You're already super smart and savvy so you know that digital marketing's where it's at these days. EVERYONE'S online, right?
But how do you decide which marketing route is right for you??
The options are pretty freaking overwhelming.
There are lots of ways to market online...but should you be doing all of them? How do you pick the best route??
Here are some of the top marketing strategies you may have heard about:
SEO (Google, Pinterest, etc)
Paid advertising
Content marketing
Video marketing
Email marketing
Automated funnels
Influencer marketing
I'm all about doing what's SIMPLE and SMART, so — hands down — my favorite way to market online is through content marketing...primarily through social media then repurposing to your blog and email list (I'll explain repurposing more in a minute).
Content marketing is best when you can get simple and focused because a FOCUSED and SIMPLE strategy is an EASY strategy.
With content marketing, you're not trying to be everything to everyone. Instead you're zeroing in on ONE specific group of people (your ideal audience) and creating content that THAT group of people will find relevant and valuable.
And once you get focused it's easier to become consistent, which we'll talk more about next week :)
For now, I wanna focus on 3 BIG HUGE REASONS you should focus on content marketing if you wanna grow your brand.
1. Content marketing is perfect for any entrepreneur, even shy introverts.
Since you're zeroing in on a VERY specific group of people (aka "your people" — the kind you wanna be hanging out with and talking to), it's much easier to get visible even if you're shy or introverted.
Once you tune into your people...
...You won't dread showing your face (they'll love you, accept you and validate you) and showing up online becomes a lot easier.
...You start having conversations that show you EXACTLY what to talk about in your content so you never have to wonder.
...You won't tell yourself lies like "I don't wanna be in my DMs all day" (I've had too many introverts talk my ears off in DMs to believe this lie!) and you stop being the bottleneck in your business growth.
Related: 9 ways I "hide" in photos when I'm feeling shy or unphotogenic
2. Content is how you build community and connect to humans online.
If you wanna have a business, you have to have a network. That's true in both traditional marketing and digital marketing.
Modern-day digital networking looks like growing a community of YOUR PEOPLE on one or more platforms (my favorite is Instagram* but you should go where your people are).
And content is how you speak directly to them and build up warm leads and interest in your offers without paying for ads.
*I love Instagram because nowadays, consumers are purchasing from brands that they’ve developed some sort of relationship with, and IG is the perfect place to build the know-like-trust factor and engage with your people regularly.
3. Content scales your reach and visibility like whoa.
Think of a door-to-door sales man in traditional marketing. This dude can only get new potential customers when he's on the clock and putting in a lot of time and energy. On top of that, he also has to hear a lot of "no's" because he's literally just going down a list of addresses (his list isn't very targeted). This is an example of push marketing where you're basically "pushing" yourself into someone's life when they may or may not want you to do that.
Related: Push vs pull marketing: which one's best for you?
Content marketing is the exact opposite of the salesman example in all the best ways:
Instead of injecting yourself into someone's life, you're attracting people to you by sharing your opinions, personality and knowledge and making it relevant to your people's interests, goals and needs (pull marketing).
Your energy and effort are multiplied. The hours you put into one piece of content will be seen by hundreds or even thousands of people over its lifetime instead of just one person. You start reaching more people with the same (or less) amount of effort.
Good content = assets for your business that you can repurpose. This is probably my favorite thing about content marketing! When you create just one amazing piece of content, you can spread it across multiple platforms and scale your visibility with minimal effort. You can also take the highest-engaging content and repurpose it. I've done this by literally copying and pasting old Instagram content a few months after originally posting, and I've done it by repurposing my best weekly emails into fancy automated funnels. The options are endless!
BONUS: Here's an example of exactly how I scale my visibility and create assets out of my content:
I create 4-5 Instagram posts* a week that focus on relevant, helpful content that my ideal audience is interested in.
I repurpose those directly to my business Facebook page (there's even an option within Instagram to automatically do this).
And I also pin my Instagram posts directly to Pinterest.
I pick a post that got good engagement on IG and create a blog post (you can literally copy/paste but you may want to spruce it up a little since you can add images, buttons and format the text within a blog post).
I send an email to my list that points to the new blog post.
Then I create 10+ Pinterest graphics (using templates) that point to the blog post.
*You could also post one blog post a week then break them into smaller posts for IG — I've done both strategies and it really just comes down to how you wanna spend your time (writing one big post or a few smaller posts).
Have I convinced you yet that content marketing is the way to go?? I've been blogging and creating content for over 10 years now and can tell you it's been the BEST marketing strategy to build community and grow my business without paying for advertising!
If you liked this blog post then be on the lookout for my next post where I’ll deep dive into what consistency should even look like to be effective!
