If you are looking to grow your business online, then no doubt you would have heard about content marketing. It’s a buzzword that gets frequent use, but sometimes, it is misused, and its meaning can be somewhat confusing. It is an ever-changing and evolving trend that can be difficult to keep up with; particularly when social media and technological changes are so frequent these days.
In this post, I will discuss the five methods we have used to grow our own businesses and also clients’ businesses, so keep reading.
1. Inbound Marketing
The first method we will discuss is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is fundamentally the exact same thing as content marketing. It was actually started by a software company; HubSpot, who designed their services and software around the methodology of inbound marketing.
What is inbound marketing? Essentially, inbound marketing is basically creating content that is solution based. The main objective should be creating a solution for your target audience.
For example, if your ideal customers are looking online for a solution to fix a specific problem, principally, you create content that puts forth answers to those problems. Then, you format that content to ensure that Google places it at the top of their search results; so when your target customers go on Google looking for a solution, they will find yours.
In a nutshell, you are providing solutions and answers to your customers, and ensuring the answers are easily displayed on search engines like Google. This is a very good and strategic marketing method to adopt, especially if you have a product or service that has a long consideration period.
So, if your customers have to go through a long buying journey before finally purchasing your product or service, or there is a long research period involved, then I recommend you implement the inbound marketing strategy.
2. Utilise the Power of Audiovisuals
Another method you can use is creating videos or creating long-form videos. For long-form videos, it could be tutorials or vlogs, it could be a Q&A show, it could be an interview show or a podcast; the list is long. Essentially, it would be a long video that should give a lot of value; a lot of successful entrepreneurs in this business use this method.
One of the more popular entrepreneurs is Gary Vaynerchuk, who makes daily vlogs, and films a weekly Q&A show that doubles as a podcast. You are more or less using the platform of video to give a ton of value to your customers.
3. Re-purpose Your Content
The third method you can use is repurposing your content. On what I said about long-form videos, one of the best things you can do to maximize them is by chopping it down to micro-content to be posted on Facebook and the likes.
The microcontent you can find on social platforms is more or less snippets of what your service offers because people on Facebook will not want to sit and watch the full length of your videos. The best way to get the most essential parts of the video is by identifying the parts of the long form video that might really resonate with your audience.
The length of the videos could vary, but it should remain brief. Your video length could be 15, 20 seconds, or even a minute long, as long as it talks about something valuable to your audience.
And then, you can bait your audience into going to your page, your channel, or watching your long-form videos to know more about what you offer.
You can also repurpose these long-form videos into graphic cards, taking out quotes, tips, statements, tricks, facts or anything else you have mentioned in the video that seems worthwhile.
Or, in interview videos, you can take whatever the person you interviewed has said, and put it into graphic cards. Employ the help of a graphic designer to create good pieces from the show. This way, you are taking a one-foot long piece of content, and turning it into multiple pieces of content.
4. Determine Your Buyers’ Personas
The fourth method you can implement is familiarizing yourself with your buyers. The buzzword for this is ‘buyers’ persona,’ it can also be referred to as ‘customer avatars.’ But, what it is, is understanding who your customer is, all the way down to giving them names and building personas around them.
So, instead of you saying ‘I want to create content for 30 – 45-year-old males who are interested in so and so…’ you can make your end goal more personal by building personas around people and giving them names.
It is so much easier to create content for a specific persona or person than creating content for a very wide, diverse audience.
5. Implement a Sales Funnel
The fifth method you can use is implementing a sales funnel. Now, you should be well aware of what a sales funnel is if you are in business and advertising online.
You are probably well familiar with the term ‘sales funnel’, and probably already have a funnel set up for yourself. So, I just want to touch on some of the things that have worked for our customer service.
A traditional sales funnel is where you put up an ad on Facebook or an ad on any other platform, promoting a service or product, and getting people to click on it. The click takes them to a landing page where they get a free piece of content, and then they essentially start getting a series of emails.
With this way being the traditional method, basically, every random person jumped on the bandwagon. So, a couple of sales funnels that we have implemented for our clients and us have been using Facebook ads to create a funnel by having cold audiences, warm audiences, and hot audiences.
While doing this, they still maintain a way that they provide relevant content to the right people and also doing that in conjunction with the traditional sales funnel by utilising email marketing.
What that means is your sales funnel is built up of you showing up on people’s timelines, and their inboxes. And one other thing that has been working really well for us other than emails is chatbots. If you didn’t know this already, you could implement a chatbot into your Facebook Messenger.
So, rather than sending someone off to a landing page, they can essentially click on your ad and be automatically sent a message within Facebook messenger. The benefits of this are that it takes away the excess hassle of having to first go to a landing page, put in their email, and wait for the piece of content or whatever it is you are offering, to be sent to them. They just click on the ad, and it goes straight to the Facebook messenger.
And, one more tip regarding the use of sales funnels. As I said, you put a video up, and some will go through a landing page, but what is happening now is the trust factor for online marketing is dipping fast. So, you need to create a more personal touch with your audience. The best way to create a good rapport with your audience is by staying relevant and maintaining consistency; two vital things.
A lot of people talk about engagement on social media; like someone liking your post, sharing your post, or commenting on your post. All these are very good, but there are many passive Facebook and Instagram users. You might be showing up on their timeline and resonating with them, but they are not liking, commenting on, or sharing your content.
But, this does not mean that you are being longer relevant to them, or that you are building a rapport with them. However, they might still become a customer eventually. So, it is all about maintaining relevance and consistency. And one of the best ways to do that is by giving value without trying to sell anything.
And also, just maintaining a steady and consistent delivery of content. So what I do is that I’ll film once a month and then it will go through a Crewdo Engine. The editor will edit the video, and the graphic designer will also do his part with the graphic quotes and all. So, we do that for our customers often, and I’m a bit slack on it because I’ve just been too busy.
But, implementing and being strict on making content once a month is something I shouldn’t have any excuses to slack off on.
So there you have it; five marketing methods that have worked wonderfully for us and our clients and hopefully will work for you too.
If you want to learn more about video and content marketing, or just learn more about me, feel free to make a visit to any of my social media channels like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. And, if you haven’t already done so, please like, follow or subscribe. Thank you.