Most businesses are still creating marketing silos, so taking each activity in isolation. They work on SEO strategies and social media strategies but never the twain shall meet.
Well to really maximise your marketing, the real benefit is when all these activities come together and the piece of glue that can hold it all together is simple, it’s called content.
These days you need content for SEO, you also need content for effective social media (whilst it’s really nice to share stuff you really won’t grow your business if all you do is share other people’s content!) you also need content to run promotions, events, offers and in an offline world you need brochures.
Now a piece of content in the online world is simply an asset that you can host in the cloud, but of course we live in a world of multimedia, your audience will expect a combination of different content forms.
Multimedia normally includes a combination of text, audio, still images and video or some kind of animation, and the great thing about today’s world is that we can all have access to these, and more importantly can all produce these effectively.
So to run a great integrated successful marketing campaign, you actually need to become a great publisher as these days, online marketing to enhance relationships with your customers and future customers really boils down to one thing, content.
As a business owner you need to be creating enough content to pull people to your website and convert them into leads. There are multiple distribution channels that you can use to engage with people but they will only act if you give them the interest and desire to do so.
That’s where content marketing comes into its own, it establishes you as a thought leader, it provides the medium to create attention, interest and desire and done correctly it will encourage people to take action.
Once you have a fantastic piece of content it can then provide the basis for some marketing campaigns, can you re-produce it into something else? can you make it part of a series? if its really valuable can you give it away free in exchange for an email?
With 80% of business decision makers preferring to get company information in a series of articles rather than an advertisement (stats taken from http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk) you really should be taking action
What are you waiting for? stop marketing in isolation pull it altogether and you’ll find the results will be worth it!