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Content Marketing Avoids Promotional Messaging
There is a key difference between content and traditional marketing materials, and it's essential that you grasp this difference, as it defines success or failure in content marketing. Content is not promotional. It isn't like an advertisement that reaches out and grabs the customer, urging them to buy. Content marketing works in a much more subtle way.
Advertising legend David Ogilvy developed a highly successful strategy of advertising under the radar. As consumers grew used to promotional messages, they began shutting them out. So he wrote ad copy disguised as editorials. These pieces read like news stories, informing the reader while also encouraging them to buy.
Today, we're being bombarded by marketing everywhere we go. The traditional approach to advertising doesn't work anymore. Content marketing goes one step even further than Ogilvy's cleverly disguised advertisements. It doesn't try to promote or sell. Its only aim is to inform and help.
Your content informs, entertains, engages, helps, and answers the questions your customers have. All promotional or sales language is left out of it. The idea is that the customer will use and enjoy your content, which leads to building a relationship with them. Then, when they have decided that they want what you have to offer, you'll naturally be their first choice.
Content Marketing Is An Ongoing Process
There's another way content marketing is different from marketing methods of the past. Unlike an advertisement which you write once and then use to drive leads for weeks or months, content creation and publishing is ongoing.
In order to do content marketing successfully, you need to keep a steady stream of content coming. You leverage the relationship you build with your audience, not any individual piece of content, to drive sales.
Why You Should Care about Content Marketing
So, why should you care about content marketing? Is it even relevant to your coaching business as a marketing strategy? Well, it isn't just a passing fad. Content marketing is the primary way in which we consume information online.
The shift to content marketing is a response to the changing ways in which we get information in our 24/7 online economy. Today, all of our media is on demand. We can skip the commercials that used to be the main form of advertising on commercial television.
Online, we can go straight to the website, video, or article that we want. In-your-face promotional content can be skipped over (and is skipped over). Instead, you need to provide something that your audience will choose to consume, and it should be something they choose over another competitor’s content.
You can think of it as push vs. pull: traditional marketing pushed customers to make a buying decision. It was an aggressive tactic. Today, we try to pull customers in with content that interests and engages them.
Finally, you should care about content marketing because it's relatively inexpensive. Advertising is a major part of a company's budget. However, content marketing requires little cash to do successfully.
It does require a significant investment of time, but it's a great way for a small business, such as as a solo-entrepreneur without a large advertising budget to gain a loyal customer base. The costs involved in content marketing are a mere drop in the ocean compared to the cost of advertising in the mainstream media.
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