Well, everyone likes to feel smart and the smart people are talking about content marketing. Let’s take a step back. What is content marketing? Short strokes, you produce specific content geared to marketing you, your services, or products, and then market that content, either through your own distribution channels or social channels. Now, that doesn’t sound so mysterious does it?

However, its the power associated with Content Marketing that can’t be ignored. Content marketing is more than just a new buzzword. That’s why Marketing managers, CEO’s, CFO’s are all talking about it, because when done well, it works.

Focus And Purpose Are Key

Content Marketing goes south when it is implemented without focus and purpose. The first mistake novices make is focusing the purpose on better search engine rankings. That’s nice when it happens, but nothing you can count on (see SEO is DEAD for the reasons why). Good Content Marketing gets the right audience interested in what you have to say because you are answering the questions they have. It works because the audience your Content Marketing finds are your natural customers.

Your content can be about specific products or services, or broader topics that try to reach a wider audience. Here is where your content team is critical — you need to produce a cutting edge article, not a sales pitch. What we have found to be the most effective way to produce this type of content is called Leadership Casting.

Leadership Casting takes a thought leader (most often the CEO), who has their finger on the pulse of an industry, and can be counted on to bring about educated and trailblazing ideas. Next, all their brilliance informs a strong informative article that is posted to a number of platforms based on their business including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg and other social and alternative distribution platforms. This requires a heavy technical formula that has to be worked out in the background to make Content Marketing as potent as possible. An effective campaign needs to be scheduled on a repeating basis as one hit wonders are, well, one hit wonders.

K.I.S.S. and K.I.S.S. Again

It’s simple:

1. Understand customer issues
2. Create compelling articles that also help answer questions (think newspaper, not user manual)
3. Keep it fun and interesting
4. Get those articles out to all possible distribution mediums starting with social media
5. Repeat, repeat, repeat,....

This is why Leadership Casting is powerful Content Marketing. Our business is Digital Strategy, and Leadership Casting is one of our products. If you think about it, you just read what we hope was an educational and interesting article about Content Marketing, and because of that, you got this far and enjoyed it, i.e. you are a willing recipient, and a potential customer. That means we delivered our product to you in a way that you enjoyed. We didn’t dupe you, we educated you. We don’t expect you to buy but we do expect you try. We want you to be interested in what we have to say, and possibly, come back for more. Content Marketing is all about building relationships between you and your potential customers.

Think about how this would work for your business. Think about how many potential customers are out there right now waiting for your brilliant articles to help them better understand your products and services. Think about who is going to do this for you ….

Finally, don’t ever sell your products or services inside of content marketing articles. Leave that for a big call to action at the end and let that do the selling for you. Ohh… by the way. Look below.