Web Podcast - Episode 17: Content Marketing

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So guys, 2018, this is episode number 17 or, I should say, the second episode for 2018. I just wanted to go through, quickly with you guys another bit of an insight that you could consider this year with your marketing efforts, and your online presence. That is content marketing.

So content marketing is a sort of a different way of marketing as opposed to your normal way of where you might spend money on ads or radio or print.
Doing marketing using content, so we’re writing articles, doing podcasts, like this. Doing videos giving away free content. Things like that, that are informative for people so we’re not necessarily spending money getting our stuff in front of people through Facebook or the newspaper.

But we’re writing regular content and getting as much of it out there as we can, so people can use it. Ideally get use out of it, and it gives you that expert status as well, so if you can make content that's gonna help a person make a decision as to what they're gonna do in terms of using your company, or another company in your industry, then that's gonna add value.

If I’m, for example, an architect. I could do content marketing articles. Write some several hundred word articles, I'm no wordsmith myself, but i write an article and then get it up on my website. You can write an article yourself. Let’s say your an architect. You might do an article on ‘2018 Top Color Pallette’. Or, ‘One Of The Top Colours For 2018’. Or ,something like ‘5 New Building Materials in 2018 That Will Save You Thousands’.

Stuff that's interesting. Especially if you’re offering a service that people have an emotional connection too. For example building a new home. It could be good as people get into the way of thinking ‘Ohh what can i do with my new house that im building?’. It’s an emotional thing.

If you're a lawyer, yeah you may not have the sort of customer that isn't emotionally attached to what it is you do. It's still good to write stuff that they would be interested in. Maybe ‘Ten Reasons Why Wills & Having Power of Attorney Is So Important’. It’s just stuff like that that's very helpful.

If you could write a series of articles over this year, one a week, that's 52 articles, that’s a lot of articles. If you could write one article a week this year, in 2018, and get those up on your website. Also have them in PDF form, so when you get new enquiries you could print them out and get them to a person you're having a meeting with, or you could simply email it to them. You're giving them that content and telling them you're an expert at it, because they're getting that feeling that you've written these articles, they're informative, they are getting value out of them. So, obviously if they engage you to use this service, then they're gonna definitely get value out of that as well.

Obviously you're not gonna have all of them come and use you, you may only get, say, 20-30%. That you send them to come and engage you. That’s still better than 5-10% if you didn’t. Because a lot of your competition, I’d be very surprised if they weren’t doing this already. Just go and have a look at your competition anyway. You should know who’s your competition. Don’t assume, but just go and have a look at their site. Do they have articles? If they have articles are they recent? Is there a good amount of them or is it just one they did 2 years ago? That’s the key I believe here. So doing regular content marketing is proving to be more effective now than ever.

You’ll probably see it on Facebook and my Facebook feed I see that come up often. I see all these different articles about ‘Ten Reasons To Do This’ or ‘5 Things To Do That’, this is changing how this industry works.

That's what we’re doing here and it is proving effective from what I’ve researched. I've been doing it myself for just over a year and a half now. So, it's definitely valuable from my own perspective.

When doing content marketing especially articles, it's good to have a call to action in there somewhere. At the end, you might have talked about a certain thing, go back to the architect example. ‘Top 10 Colour Palettes’ or, ‘2018s Top Trending Colour Palettes’. You might have at the end of the article, “if you're unsure if these would work send us an email and one of our professional colour consultants can come and have a no obligation quote or meeting with you”.

Obviously they still know the article is from you and whether that was there or not, they know it’s from you then they might engage you. But at least you’re giving them that lead right at the end which tells them “hay we are here, if you need a free consult come to us”. So add your call to action at the end.
There's a difference between giving this information away for free, in good faith, and then trying to sell everything to them. So still keep it genuine, we’re wanting to have lots of good value in the article, then at the end a no obligation call to action, “give us a call, or flick us an email if you need a hand”. So that’s another thing to consider when writing the article.

Keep them relatively straight forward. Don't make them too long. As i said 300-400 words maybe. Put some photos or multimedia in there, especially if your doing something like colour palettes or something else visual. That's very important as well.
Just have a google of content marketing to get some ideas. That’s what i do if i need some help with finding what I can do.

It’s definitely a good thing to focus on this year, I hope that was helpful. So I’ll talk to you guys next time. Cheers