Hey everyone. Jason here, digital marketing consultant. And in this content marketing guide,
you're going to learn what the heck content marketing is and how you can use it to begin
to drive more traffic and attention to your business. So timestamps below,
along with some other helpful videos, if you decide content marketing is right for you.
Here we'll go through the basics. And then of course, the five components that make up the
power of content marketing. So let's go ahead and jump in with what on earth content marketing is.
All content marketing is, is the creation of media to engage prospects, educate potential customers,
position you as a trusted authority and see the value of your paid offers. And even though the
last two parts are about you and your paid offers, the focus of content creation should
always be your ideal customer. Now, of course, you might have multiple types of ideal customers.
You might have multiple products and services and different customers for each one of those.
And that means you'll just make more content for each one of those customers.
But when it comes to content creation, it's about the power of one. After all, when you create a
blog post video or YouTube video that tries to speak to everyone, it winds up connecting
with no one. So it is very important that as we dive through these five components of content
marketing, and you see if this is a good fit for your business, your products and your services
that you focus on creating audience centric content, and of course, content, it needs to
be engaging and valuable. We'll go through some examples of that, but if you don't already have an
idea of who your ideal customer is, I'll link up in the cards and the description to a video that
walks you through a data driven method of figuring out who you should be creating content for.
So now that we understand that content is pretty much just media, that's designed to grab our
ideal customer's attention, let's go ahead and talk about the 5 components. The very first one
is “Attract”, and that is the power of content marketing is. It allows you to create a piece
of media that is going to go out into the internet and do all of the hard work of bringing
in the right type of customers by grabbing their attention, which builds brand awareness,
of course, drives more traffic. And the great thing about this is it’s very easy to scale
because once you create a piece of content and it takes a little while to start seeing
results, but once you do, those results will continue to come in unlike say paid traffic,
where you're going to have to continually feed the traffic platform with ad dollars. Whereas
content can stand on its own and continue bring in new brand awareness. And of course,
most importantly, leads and potential customers. This YouTube channel is a great example of that.
We actually started it as a way to find more clients for our digital marketing agency. And
after three and a half years, it's actually turned out to be one of the best decisions we made,
in terms of how to actually find new clients. Now, when it comes to content marketing,
of course, we need to figure out where our ideal customers already are. And we have to choose a
platform to create our media and content. And there are three platforms that reign supreme:
YouTube for video, Podcasting for audio, which technically isn't a platform because
everyone uses a different podcast app, but we'll just blunt podcasting together.
And then of course, blogging via a WordPress blog. It is important that you actually own
the hosting and the WordPress site, and you're not using a page builder or some sort of out of
the box solution for hosting your content that way. So it needs to be your own WordPress site.
So no matter which one you choose, it's very important that you focus on one, you choose one
and you focus on it because as your content begins to bring in more clients and customers, and of
course, grows your email list and your business, eventually you'll be able to take that content
and hire other people to syndicate it to other platforms. And so that way you begin to really
scale and leverage your time where you create one video, one podcast episode or one blog post.
Of course, that's still bringing in attention and brand awareness and most importantly customers,
and with that added revenue, you'll be able to hire a team to begin to syndicated to the
other platforms. So you definitely don't want to try and spread yourself too thin,
making content for all of these platforms. Just choose one to focus on and really master.
And of course at this point, the next big question in content marketing and figuring out if it's
right for you. Once you've chosen a platform, or you have an idea of which platform is, well,
what should you talk about? What type of content should you make? Well, when it comes to content
marketing, specifically to drive leads and sales or new strategy calls, there are three
types of content that you should focus on. So the first type is going to be “How to” Then
we have “Reviews” and a “What” decision guide. So a how to post is simply an in-depth tutorial,
taking someone from point A to point B. Reviews looks at different products or services in your
niche and weighs the pros and cons of going with one versus the other. Of course, it is important
that you aren't weighing pros and cons of your competitors. So if we were a personal trainer, it
would make sense for us to maybe review different diet plans or workout gear, but it wouldn't
necessarily make sense to review our personal plan against maybe another personal trainer or
a competitor. So you want to make sure that you are talking about reviews that are related to your
product or service, but not indirect competition to. And then finally we have the decision guide
and that's just simply a piece of content that helps someone make a decision by either just
going through a general overview of a particular topic or subject or weighing the pros and cons of
going with decision A versus decision B. This video would be an example of a decision guide.
Now, once you have an idea of the type of content you want to make,
you can use some tools like “BuzzSumo”, “Answer The Public”, “semrush” or “Ubersuggest”,
and you can actually go to some big websites in your niche or industry and check out the type
of content they're making. And that will also give you some ideas as to whether or not content
marketing is a good idea in your particular case for selling your product and services.
Now, the second big component of what makes content marketing so valuable and powerful
is that it answers questions. It is genuinely helpful to your potential customers and can
also handle objections through the buying process. So take a look at this diagram. Let's say in the
center we have the big problem that our product or service solves. And around it, we have all of
the different types of ideal customers that might find value in our product or service. And we'll
say the longer the line, the further away they are from understanding or realizing that they might
find value in that product or service. Take for example, the tools you just talked about: semrush,
Ubersuggest, Answer The Public and BuzzSumo. Well, someone who isn't interested in content marketing
or doesn't like content marketing would find any value in those products or services and would need
to watch some videos or read some blog posts about why content marketing is so important.
And then eventually they would see the value in keyword research tools.
After all, if you took a random business owner and said, “Hey, you should use this great, great tool
for keyword research. It has all this data and will show you what your competitors are doing”
If they don't understand the basics of what makes WordPress the best solution or what makes content
marketing better than paid advertising, then the software really isn't going to be all that
valuable to them. So content allows you to educate people and bring them closer to being aware of
how your product or service is actually going to be helpful in them achieving the results that they
actually care about even if they didn't even know that content marketing was something that
could help them get more clients, right? And so if you were to zoom in on one of
these particular lines, each piece of content would be filling an information gap
or overcoming an objection or handling a roadblock. And so you are able to easily
prime and prepare people to see the value in your product or service. Also, as you create content,
you're going to get a lot of questions directed at you because you'll begin to build affinity,
which is a next component. But as you can see here, I get a lot of comments on this channel
of related marketing questions, and it helps us better understand how we can create better content
in the future and helps us better understand how we can be more effective in our sales processes,
because we know the types of objections and roadblocks and questions our ideal customers have.
Now component number three is going to be “Building Affinity” And that is,
as you create content, even though you're creating it for the purpose of grabbing attention
and answering questions, so you can begin exceeding the value of your products and services,
you're also going to start building an audience and rapport and loyalty with people who haven't
done business with you yet, but simply find your content valuable. And so, this is a really, really
nice side benefit. And again, as an example with this channel, as people begin to watch our videos
or read our blog posts, they'll ask for additional resources and it gives us ideas for other types of
content to create. Now, of course, this only works if you're posting consistently. And I recommend
posting at least three times a week with no matter what type of platform you've chosen. And then the
other days of the week, you can syndicate the same content you made to the other platforms.
And of course, you don't have to start off with syndication. It really takes a long time. And
it's more important that you focus on your core platform and get as good as you can. You don't
have to be perfect but get as good as you can with creating content for that specific platform.
Here is a quick diagram that you can take a look at, feel free to pause. With the estimated
costs of how much it might cost to pay someone to syndicate content to the other platforms. And so,
for example, if you were writing a WordPress post, you're looking at $25 to $75 for someone
to either turn it into a YouTube video with you just recording the audio of going through the blog
post, adding a little bit of commentary or turning it into a podcast episode and posting it for you.
Now, the next component, component number four of content marketing and why it can be
powerful and helpful to your business is of course it builds “Authority” After affinity
comes authority. And eventually someone who's just following your content and enjoying it,
begins to see you as the expert in that field or sees your company, if you're having someone else
create the content for you and your business, seeing you and your business and your team as
the authority and go to resource, and they will start coming to you first to just ask questions
about whatever your niche or industry is, as opposed to doing a Google search. And that is
incredibly, incredibly powerful because not only can you answer their questions, but
you're learning even more about the marketplace and getting invaluable data as to how you can
better position your products and services. Again, with this channel, we get a lot of
questions and positive feedback from people who've watched the videos and genuinely enjoyed what they
saw. Now I'm using these just as an example, I'm not trying to brag at all. We have a lot of
negative comments as well, which is something that you'll deal with if you decide to be a content
creator, but there will be a good percentage of people who find value in or content just
as there will be a good percentage of people who don't find value in your content. But as long as
you're focusing on your ideal customer and being valuable to them, you can just ignore the haters.
And before we move on to the fifth component, that makes content marketing so powerful.
I do want to quickly touch on replying. So this is something that a lot of content marketers
just seem to forget because they post it and forget it. Just hope algorithms do their thing,
but you do want to reply to comments. This is an incredibly, incredibly powerful way. Again,
to learn more about your ideal customer, and it's going to increase the value of your future videos.
A lot of the examples and tips and extra things that we include in videos now
are a result of comments from way, way back when we first started the channel. And that's because
over time, we've replied to the comments, we've talked to different people and we've understood
how to improve our delivery and style and just what's included in different content videos.
And so this nice snowball effect where you learn more, your audience learns more, and of course,
you begin to generate more leads and sales. Now, speaking of leads in sales, this whole
process doesn't work without number five, the fifth component of content marketing,
which is having a clear call to “Action” So unlike advertising, where you have to pay for every
single click and every single impression, with content, you're able to create a piece of content
using some ranking strategies and search engine optimization strategies you're able to rank that
content. And then that content will continually of course, attract new potential customers,
building you up as an authority, building affinity with your audience and inside of
those pieces of content, you can have calls to action to check out other pieces of content. You
can have affiliate links, if you don't necessarily have a specific product or service, or of course
you could offer a lead magnet or direct people to your sales funnel or hop on a call with you.
And even if you don't have any calls to action inside side of your content, you will get people
reaching out and asking, “Hey, how do I contact you? Do you do offer this service? Or do you
offer that service?” And once you start to see those types of questions or comments, you know
that your content really is working and you have a group of people who have genuinely been helped
by your content and are interested in actually doing business with you. And because you're not
paying for every single click and every single impression, those content pieces can last months,
if not years, bringing in that attention. And of course, you have that call to action one time in
your content, and it continually drives traffic to your business, your website, and your funnel.
So, thank you so much for watching. Sincerely hope you got some value out of this video.
You have some ideas about how content marketing works, these different components and of course,
whether or not content marketing might be right for you and your business. So, comment below with
your content marketing questions. Hit that “like” button. Subscribe from our marketing videos,
just like this one. And until the next, keep building the business you love.