By now, you should be able to see the vast benefits that content marketing can bring to your business. What you need now is the what and the how to move forward with your marketing plan. First, let's explore the different types of content that will bring you the best results.
Articles
One of the first things that should be included in your business-marketing plan is high quality, informative articles. These articles are what your target market is looking for. Articles give your niche audience a taste of what you know, leaving them wanting more.
Just like fishermen use bait on their hooks to catch fish you will use articles to catch visitors. The bait they use depends on what kind of fish they're looking to catch on that day. The fish they want to catch are looking for certain types of morsels to nibble on, so the fisherman provides them with that taste.
When the fish takes a bite of the bait, the fisherman sets the hook and reels in the fish to the fisherman's hands. Without the bait, the fish never would have jumped onto the boat and into the waiting fisherman's hands. Well, maybe on an extreme rare occasion, but for the most part, the fisherman has to work hard to get the fish to come. Articles are pretty much your bait. You plant your articles in various spots throughout the Internet to tempt Internet surfers to find them.
Once they find them, they view the article to see what information you're baiting them with.
If the content is good, then you set the hook with your website link that's provided within the article, and they get reeled into your website where you can then sell them on your products or services.
E-Books
E-Books are books in digital form. They're books that can be viewed on a computer screen. These types of books are popular for Internet users, because they can learn extended information about a topic by purchasing or downloading for free an eBook without having to drive to a store or wait for a print book to arrive in the mail.
E-Books are a great way to show off your knowledge on a particular subject. It helps to define you as an expert on the topic of your book. This placement enables your potential customer to view you as a person who knows their stuff well, making you the perfect person to buy additional products from.
One of the great things about creating an e-Book is that it is very inexpensive and doesn't require you to be a famous novelist in order to get an E-Book published on the Internet. Of course, these E-Books will need to be high quality, but once you know how to create them they are really not too hard to do.
Reports
Reports are smaller versions of an e-Book. Typically, they are lead generators to your e-Book or to your products themselves. Reports are a great way to get visitors to come back to your site again.
You can either charge a small fee for a report or give them away free. Either way, your potential customers will get great content that will lure them back to your website. The more they visit your site, the more chances you have to sell them one of your products.
This kind of content has flexibility as far as what information to provide and how long to make it.
E-Books tend to give the most information to consumers, but reports can do the same if you choose. You can split reports to provide both benefit information and the actual how to content. Or you can put them both in one longer report and offer it without the extra fluff that e-Books usually give.
Website Content
Your website is like your business card or your online catalog. This is where your products are sold or your services are viewed and contracted. The site's content is what essentially will sell your prospects on what you're offering.
A brick and mortar business will usually have sales person that can work with prospects face-to-face in order to close the sale. Your online business deals mainly with the Internet where face-to-face sales aren't an option.
The content on your website needs to be your sales team. It needs to address your website visitors when they stop in and it needs to show them that your products or services are the answer to their problems.
Blogs
Blogs are mini- websites. They help get you known as a business owner as well as help Internet surfers find you and your business website. Every so often websites contain informative articles but Blogs are websites that contain lots of information that can be updated every day or every few days to be noticed by the search engines.
Your business needs great content in order to stay in the forefront of your prospect's minds. The more content you can throw at them, the better your chances are. Blogs are a great way to do this as they provide them with shorter tidbits of information on a regular basis.
Blogs are also a more relaxing atmosphere. People can learn information about a topic without feeling as if they're being hounded to buy something. They can also get to know you as a person behind the business. People want to deal with people and not just a website.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to present content to your prospects over and over and over. They work along with your autoresponder e-mail marketing programs. Newsletters provide short bits of news on a topic that a prospect receives on a regular basis.
They can be sent out every week, month or every couple of days if you wish. People that do stumble onto your site can choose to opt-in to your newsletter sign-up list where they can be sent information regularly in their e-mail inbox.
Imagine giving your prospects the information they want on a weekly or monthly basis, while exposing them to your business repeatedly. Using a newsletter autoresponder makes getting your prospect back to your website a much easier task.
Now, that you have taken a glimpse at the power of content marketing as well as which types of content you could be harnessing power from; let's move onto the nitty gritty. How to create the most successful high quality content that gets you long term results for business marketing.