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Prospects Consume Your Content Before Buying
Before your prospects feel comfortable buying your coaching or consulting services, they may want to get to know you as a person, and what you stand for. The easiest way to start building your professional profile with future clients in your niche market is through content marketing.
Even major brands that have massive, loyal followings are investing their resources in content marketing. In fact, it is often the quality and relevance of their content that earned them their loyal following in the first place, even if they didn’t know what they were doing at the time.
So, what exactly is content marketing? Let's define it first. You can find many definitions online, but here's one from the Content Marketing Institute that sums up quite well what content marketing is about:
"Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action."
As the above quote says, the idea behind content marketing is to create and distribute content that engages your audience and leads them to take action.
Provide The Content Your Prospect Wants
The core of your content marketing strategy is your content brand. Like a business brand, your content brand is how people view your content and view you as a content publisher. It's similar, but different in a few key ways.
In traditional branding, you create the image you want your customers to have of you. Content branding is a more client-centred approach. Rather than striving to gain exposure for your brand, your sole mission is to provide the content your prospective client wants. You create and publish content with them in mind, and through this content, you establish the brand. Whenever a prospective client sees your content, they’ll know what to expect from you because they have consumed it before.
Your goal in content branding is to establish a reputation as a publisher who provides only relevant, useful and high-value content. You never let your audience down. If you can accomplish this, your clients will always come to you to get their needs met, even while they're being bombarded by content and marketing messages from others.
Four Keys To Building Your Content Brand
What do successful content brands do that unsuccessful brands don't? There are the five keys to building a timeless content brand.
1. Understand The Motivators and Drivers of Your Prospective Clients
This is the most important key and it's the basis of your entire content brand. You have to know your prospective clients well before you can deliver the content they like. Aside from discovering their demographics and tastes, you also need to connect with them wherever possible and listen to them. Social media is a great way to accomplish this.
2. Serve And Solve The Needs of Your Prospective Clients
A good content brand passionately serves its clients' needs. They think of themselves as content publishers rather than marketers. You're more like a television station, creating and choosing the programming that your viewers like. Your job is to deliver what your audience loves, whatever content that may be. This content is interesting, informative, helpful, entertaining, and/or helps your customers solve their problems.
3. Deliver Consistently High-Quality Content
Two of the key elements of any brand is quality and consistency. All of your education, training, coaching and marketing and materials need to deliver the same value and quality to your clients. in order to stay on the cutting edge, you have to remain in touch with the latest advances in scientific research and be aware of how current market trends may be shaping the attitudes, beliefs, feelings and behaviours of your clients.
4. Build Your Reputation As An Authority Within Niche Markets
By consistently delivering quality content, you can start positioning yourself as an authority or expert within your area of expertise. Your followers will start to see you as the trusted authority for any information related to solving problems within that niche topic. You become the trusted advisor in their eyes. A successful content brand is seen as not only an authority on information, but on the products and services its customers and clients need.
Build Your Marketing Message Into Your Content Brand
One way to think of your content marketing is as the fuel that powers your continuous sales and referral cycle. Content helps people first become aware of you, such as when they’re casually surfing the web looking for information or answers to a problem. It helps you build relationships with prospective clients by 'serving' them rather than by 'selling' to them.
Great content marketing will organically create loyalty amongst your client base, keeping them actively engaged with your business as their future needs grow and develop. You want your content to attract the right people into your coaching or consulting business and keep them there. There are so many ways an online prospect could find and follow you online.
They may 'like' one of your social media posts, or download a free ebook from your website, or subscribe to your blog or email newsletter. They might befriend you on social media or 'share' your content through their own social media channels. Content can serve many different purposes. You need to identify the specific purpose for which you're building a loyal audience. Ask yourself what you want your content to achieve for both you and your audience.
If you want to remove the barriers and obstacles that are preventing you from building and scaling your coaching or consulting business, please click on the button at the top of the page and register for your FREE Business Strategy Session.