Friday, June 14, 2013

Content Marketing Tips

By Carlyle Randel


Nowadays, the basic act of making content is no longer enough. To really stand out, content needs to be dynamic, interactive, and timely. Some great ideas on interactive content would be things like holding a contest for the customer to name a product or come up with a slogan, or surveys and polls work well. The data that the visitor will leave for a contest for example will be invaluable to your company to create leads in the future, and it's easy to get the data this way. For any company doing business online, people expect an engaging experience.

Social media has made the already important interactivity on websites even more important nowadays. Creating interesting and engaging experiences online is a necessity. Important information will be left by your potential customers on your site, blog, through emails, or of course on Twitter or Facebook, and this data is really valuable.

When you want to create a good relationship with a customer, interacting with them in a conversation is a good way to do it. When a customer finds they have similar interests and goals as the company, they gain trust and respect each other more, improving the quality of the relationship. By asking questions through polls or surveys, for example, brands can quickly open the floor to customer or community opinions and react accordingly to any expressed needs, wants or trends.

Leads are gathered in a variety of ways, but collaborative content has been proven to be one of the best. When everyone is contributing content, all of sudden Sales is collaborating with Engineering on a blog and Project Management is partnering with Quality Assurance on a video. Everyone shares a piece of their expertise and the content gets better. When these departments share their knowledge and experience, everyone at the company gains a deeper understanding of the business. The staff will find more information from other professionals to research the content, and they will also get a lot of new ideas from collaborating with each other. Because of the speed of play that comes with a culture of collaborating, learning, teaching, listening and communicating, the environment breeds a mentality of continual improvement.

Many content marketing strategies end up failing when the different departments of the business don't collaborate and contribute to it. Making this plan a reality is not an easy task. It is not easy to get all of the different personalities in different departments to work together at times, but it's important that this is orchestrated.

The benefits of developing a set of ideal buyer personas are huge if you're looking to attract more prospects and generate more leads for your company through content marketing. The benefits of good buyer personas are more effective lead generation and customer retention. Creating content and offers that your customers are interested in is key, so you need to understand who they are.

Buyer personas are about every area of marketing, from messaging plus targeting, segmentation, prioritizing marketing investments, and sales enablement. When a company has effective buyer personas, the content marketing can be carefully tailored to suit them, and will be much more effective.




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