4 Key Marketing Factors that Even Experts Forget

As a marketing consultant, I have worked with a lot of different businesses. Both with past employers and my own company, I have developed many business-marketing strategies.  One thing I’ve experienced when it comes to marketing is that companies (from small to high-profile) can get in their own way of their success by being so locked into the “driving home” of what they want to push to their customers; and in the way they want to do it.  They can forget the basic crucial elements that drive success.

Here are a 4 key factors that are important to building your marketing strategies and should not be overlooked:

Listen to Customers

Many companies see marketing as a one-way street. They put their message out for customers, and then stop before an exchange can occur. They talk to consumers without listening themselves.

Proactive listening, however, can do wonders for a company’s marketing campaign. This means listening to current customers and their responses to the company’s marketing and products. This also means listening for potential new customers expressing a need that the company can fill. Online social media makes this listening easier than ever.

Connect as a Human

Successful companies are massive organizations with lives of their own. As such, it’s easy at times for marketers to present the company as a hive mind. But consumers are all individual people. Connecting with them as such means a better chance for a company to actually get heard.

For marketers, this often means approaching campaigns with authentic, simple messaging.  Do not talk over your customers’ heads with your promotional language and positioning. Talking to customers frankly about a product and what it does is what will get results.

This also means remembering that consumers have lives and commitments outside of consuming. However much they love a brand, they are not thinking about it constantly. Businesses shouldn’t expect them to. Instead, marketers should focus on making the brand relevant to daily life in regular conversation. This requires approaching customers as one group of humans to another.

Action over Argument

Marketing is a creative endeavor that requires a constant influx of ideas. Some of these ideas will work better than others. However, marketing teams can often disagree within themselves on the value of any given idea. There are two ways to go about this disagreement.

The inefficient way is for marketers to argue with one another over ideas. Even polite and relevant debate gets a marketing campaign nowhere.

The better method is to test the idea empirically for its effectiveness. This shows the whole team just how good or bad an idea really is. Argument then becomes unnecessary. Instead, marketers can move right on to implementing the idea or brainstorming a new one.

Content is King

Content makes up the bulk of any marketing vehicle, from advertisements to homepages. Marketing is often represented in terms of a funnel. At the top of the funnel is simple brand awareness. The bottom is where responses from customers occur. In the middle is the content of the marketing campaign.

Many companies focus their attention on the top and bottom of the funnel. They pour resources into spreading brand awareness. They optimize feedback avenues for customers to get in touch with them. But they neglect the middle of the funnel, which is where the real work happens. Content is where hooked customers come to learn more before responding to a campaign.

A flashy homepage with no information on it tells consumers nothing. Neither does plastering a brand everywhere without saying anything about why consumers should care. This is why good content is absolutely vital to a marketing campaign.

For more on content marketing strategies, check out 5 Quick Tips for Great Content Marketing.

5 Quick Tips for Great Content Marketing

Content marketing and other online search engine optimization strategies have become more and more important as print media has slowly been challenged in favor of Internet interaction. As I have grown my business and worked with other companies to grow theirs, I have seen the Internet grow from a niche marketing tool into the primary vehicle for companies of all shapes and sizes reach consumers. This has included the growth of content marketing from a relative marketing strategy to an essential tool of building brand trust and image.

Here are a few major do’s and don’ts for how business’s can successfully use content marketing to help advance their bottom line.

1. ESTABLISH YOUR AUTHORIAL VOICE

One of the biggest pieces of advice for content marketers is a tip that has likely been repeated hundreds or thousands of times since content marketing became an industry essential: Make sure all content marketing materials have a distinct authorial voice. While there is much to be said for attempting to adopt the voice of an entire business or corporation, there is also something to be said for creating content that is compelling, well-written, and sparked with personality. Most good content marketing writers innately know how to blend an undercurrent of compelling authorial voice with a professional and engaging tone. Do not publish content articles written like dry business memorandums. Content marketing is aimed at an everyday audience, either browsing a business’s website for case studies and blogs or searching Google for articles about specific topics. In both cases, readers will be more drawn to writing that feels like it came from a down-to-earth blogger than they will be to content that is clearly aimed at boosting internet traffic and selling products or services.

2. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY

Content marketing articles are more or less worthless if they have nothing new to say on the topic at hand. Many content marketers trawl popular buzz topics in an effort to find out what is trending on Google, Twitter, or Facebook at any given time. There’s nothing wrong with this tactic as long as you take a news story and uses it as a springboard for an article that offers unique viewpoints, adds to the news story with updates or other relevant information, or poses questions of its own. Simply paraphrasing articles or blogs already published by reputable news sources will prove counter-productive. In other words, content marketers need creativity, analytical skill, and journalistic prowess to be successful. However, if a content provider can add his or her own spin to a popular topic, authorial voice will likely appear as well, and readers will reward the extra effort with more clicks and shares.

3. KEEP IT FRESH AND INTERESTING

It is far too easy for content marketers to fall into a rut with their material by not thinking outside of the box. For instance, a content marketer running a campaign for an educational institution should not only write blogs and articles revolving around schools and students. Myriad topics can be connected to education, from the state of the job market to trending health topics to questions of finance and inflation. Content marketers who are willing to venture into unexplored subject matter will stand a better chance of increasing their client’s Internet presence and boosting their own effectiveness.

4. KNOW WHEN TO WRAP UP

Similarly, content can become stagnant or dull even in the space of a single article or blog. A good content marketer is a writer who knows instinctually when he or she has run out of interesting things to say on a topic and when the content needs to move toward a conclusion. That is not to say that lengthier articles don’t have an audience—they do, especially among academic types—but traditionally, the attention span of Internet readers is shorter than that of the print media audiences of old.

5. STAY RELEVANT

It is easy to go browsing through news topics for content ideas. However, if a news story is more than a day or two old, chances is that the content’s lifespan is already running out, at least in terms of search engine optimization. A writer who believes he or she has something vital to say on a topic should not be scared away by “old” news, but in most cases, the same rules apply to content marketers as apply to journalists: if you aren’t one of the first to weigh in on a topic, there may be little point in expending the time and effort to weigh in at all. Instead, content marketers should consider holding off on old news topics and waiting for a similar story—or better yet, a news update—to come along and reignite the conversation.

Core Basics for an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

No matter how powerful social media and the presence it creates can be, efforts towards social marketing are inhibited by a company’s ability to publish high quality content that accurately — and subtly — publicizes the brand’s messaging. There is a lot of clutter out there on the Internet, and to keep your company alive and surging you need to form the right strategy in order to stand out against competition.

Content publishing – whether it is a whitepaper, blog, press release, news article, or webpage – requires interesting and informative material. People often skip right over chunks of text, because there are so many other (shorter) options to read; it is crucial for marketers to form well-found messages and write content around them.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

·      Timeliness: Whatever the post or piece is, it needs to come out at the proper time. This is especially important when companies are sharing industry-related trends and popular information that could get lost in an upsurge of publications.

·      Quality versus Quantity: The age-old battle is easily settled in the content war. Companies can benefit by promoting as much pro-marketing content as possible, without sacrificing its quality. This is important for reasons explained in the next section.

·      Exposure and Ranking: The primary goal of online publishing is to support a brand’s websites and online assets. Every article, mention, blog, and post increases the chances a potential client will find a company in the first place. Due to technical reasons with modern search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), Internet powerhouses have begun efforts to meet the needs of online users in order to provide well-meaning content on search results. In essence, poor-quality content is ranked lower and disappears. Long-lasting, quality, and timely content on the other hand, can silently generate exposure with minimal effort.

·       Share-through: Create content that is worthy of a share and post it on major platforms where is can easily be seen and forwarded.  This necessitates making sure the content is relevant and interesting and taps your audience’s attention to want to take the time to pass along and/or share via word of mouth with other people within their social networks, both online and offline.