Traditional marketing and advertising are telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing them that you are one.
It’s important to recognise that your customers generally don’t care about you, your products or services … they care about themselves, their wants and their needs. Content marketing addresses this by producing relevant, timely and engaging information that your target audience wants and can include blogs, reports, videos, infographics and more.
The big difference between content marketing and inbound marketing is that content marketing focuses on customer retention and loyalty, as opposed to filling the top of the sales funnel with new business.
The rule of thumb is that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. According to Harvard Business School, an increase in customer retention by just 5% can lead to a staggering increase in profits of between 25% to 95%. Although new business is always an important driver to any operation, more companies seem to neglect the most profitable marketing strategy – keeping and growing the current customer base. It makes sense to focus first on their needs to maximise business opportunities and, by developing a content plan, you’ll avoid common marketing mistakes.
5 steps to developing your content marketing plan:
- Identify key customer information needs and pain points
- Map your content to these customer personas and digital journeys
- Optimise your content marketing material and create an editorial calendar plan
- Secure the right resources to help you develop and distribute your content
- Focus on the three R’s of content marketing – reorganise, rewrite and retire
Do you have a content marketing plan?
Source: Yoegel, Smart Insights, Harvard Business, Carney [abridged]
