Guest post from Lisa Murton Beets, Research Director, Content Marketing Institute
Are you delivering valuable, relevant, consistent content to your audience? If not, prepare to be ignored. There is just too much information available today, and only so much time in a day for your target audience to consume it. This is especially true for tradesmen, who spend most of their time in the field.
That said, you should be delivering valuable content consistently (hopefully, to a subscribed audience via vehicles such as email newsletters), so when your prospect does need a product or service, your company is top of mind.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines content marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Note the words “strategic marketing approach.” CMI research consistently shows that those who are most successful with content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy. The strategy will help you determine:
- Who you want to reach (and why)
- The type(s) of content you need to create for that specific audience
- Where you should distribute that content to get the best results
- How you’ll measure the results.
Importantly, the documented strategy will help you determine which initiatives you have time and budget for, so you can prioritize the most important activities (versus trying to do too much all at once, aka “trying to be everything to everyone, everywhere”).
CMI research also shows that the most successful content marketers are those who are extremely or very committed to the approach. It makes no sense to invest in content marketing if you’re not committed and willing to give your efforts time to bear fruit. You won’t see results overnight. Patience – and realistic expectations about what content marketing can achieve – will be key. We talk a lot about these topics on our CMI blog, and provide actionable guidance on how to get results.
To learn more about how manufacturing marketers are using content marketing, see Manufacturing Content Marketing 2018: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America. It will show you which types of content, social media platforms, email marketing, and digital technologies your peers are using to reach their audiences, among other interesting and helpful insights.
Lisa Murton Beets is the research director at CMI. She has led CMI’s research initiatives since 2012. Prior to that, she was a B2B journalist and a freelance writer with two decades experience in custom publishing. Follow her @LisaBeets.
