Valuable Content Marketing

How to Make Quality Content Your Key to Success

Sonja Jefferson, Sharon Tanton

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780749473280
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

WINNER: Small Business Book Awards 2016 - Community Choice - Social Media Category
WINNER: Small Business Book Awards 2014 - Community Choice - Marketing Category (1st edition) Make sense of content marketing in the digital world with this award-winning, practical guide to using content to grow your business and raise your brand. From websites, white papers and blogs to tweets, newsletters and video, content is king in the digital world, now more than ever before. Get it right and you have a huge opportunity to connect with clients and customers in ways they appreciate and trust - they will be knocking at your door wanting to do business with you. Valuable Content Marketing shows you how to create and share the type of information that clients, customers and search engines really want - on your website, using social media and through more traditional methods. Including new ideas and examples, step-by-step action lists, quick tips and goal-driven chapter summaries, this fully revised second edition will show you how to get better results from your marketing efforts with valuable content that really works.Whether you are starting a business or aiming to grow, this book makes understanding the key concepts easier than ever, providing inspiration from small companies like software development from Desynit to household names like HSBC.

PART ONE

WHY VALUABLE CONTENT?

Why valuable content is the focus of all successful marketing today, and how to play in the new game

Marketing is no longer about stuff that you make, but about the stories that you tell.

Seth Godin1

Marketing has changed enormously over the past decade. People buy differently, so we need to sell differently. Marketing with valuable content has developed as a way to bridge the gap between the way people like to buy – researching online and via recommendations from social networks – and the way smart businesses like to sell – by demonstrating empathy, purpose and usefulness, not by shouting loudest.

This first section of the book explores this new marketing landscape in more detail. What is it about valuable content that is so right for the way we think and act today? And what principles underpin content marketing success?

If you’re new to content marketing, this section will help you find your feet. If you have been marketing with content for years, you’ll find new insights into the changes we see happening all around us. If you’re already convinced that marketing with valuable content is the way forward, do feel free to whizz through this first part. If you need to convince others, there is a lot in this section that will help.

We’ll show you what makes truly valuable content, and share examples of businesses that are winning with this approach. And with the groundwork in place, we’ll get you thinking about what will make the most valuable content of all for you, your customers and your business.

CHAPTER 1

BUYING HAS CHANGED. HAS YOUR MARKETING CAUGHT UP?

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

General Eric Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, US Army1

In this chapter:

• Business development is tough.
• Who’s winning?
• What are they doing right?
• The factors transforming buyer behaviour.
• The new buyer mentality.

Think about a big purchase you’ve made in the last 12 months. What were the steps you went through that led up to you buying? What drove you to make a purchase in the first place? How did you do your research? What or who influenced your decisions and how did you feel along the way? What was it that finally tipped you over the edge to make that important purchase?

Chances are that your journey to buy has changed a lot over the last few years. Yet a lot of marketing acts like it is still 1985.

In this chapter we look at why some companies are winning the sales and marketing game, even in very competitive markets. We want to look at today’s discerning and cynical buyers, and dissect the key trends influencing their behaviour. Don’t be concerned – their discernment and cynicism are an opportunity for your business.

The business development challenge

Selling stuff has always been tough. Ask any business owner about the biggest challenge she or he faces and nine times out of ten ‘business development’ will come out on top. Seventy-two per cent of professional firms that responded to a worldwide survey by US firm Hinge Marketing put ‘attracting and developing new business’ as their number one challenge for 2015.2

How do we find new customers/clients? How can we differentiate and prove our value? How can we attract more referrals? How do we drive long-term profitable sales results?

Tried and tested activities for getting customer attention don’t work like they once did.

• The response to mass cold calling campaigns has dropped off a cliff – you get voicemail 80 per cent of the time, and short shrift if you do get through.
• You used to email your way to leads but the blanket bomb approach results in emails unopened or junked.
• It’s hard to justify the cost of press advertising (and like most people you screen out most adverts yourself, so this doesn’t seem to be the right way to go).
• Trade shows cost a fortune, take a huge amount of time and for what return?
• In a tough market even the network of contacts you’ve relied on for so long fails to deliver all the leads you need.

We don’t want to labour those points. If you’re reading this book you’ll know that something has to shift. Most likely you’ve already joined the digital revolution and started marketing your business online. But still the profitable sales results you desire seem frustratingly elusive.

• You may have invested in your website but where are all the promised leads?
• PPC and SEO drive some traffic to your site, but visitors rarely stick around.
• Twitter takes up your time and can feel like shouting in an empty room.
• You may well be blogging but it’s a lonely old slog – does this content marketing thing work?
• The marketing automation system you bought with so much promise shows you exactly what’s happening at the back end of your site (and it’s clearly not enough).

If any of these statements ring true you’re not alone. You are expert in what you do and know that there are people out there who would really benefit from your product or service. How on earth do you get their attention and build their trust?

It’s enough to put some off marketing all together. Especially when you waste your time and money on ‘techniques’ that just don’t work.

Surely there is a better way?

Who is winning with their marketing?

Some companies are winning the business development game, even in a tough market. They are consistently getting a stream of good leads – from their websites and from social media too. Their networks are expanding rapidly and delivering warm referrals that are quicker and easier to convert. They are doing all this without resorting to cold calling, expensive advertising or mass email blasts. In fact, clients and customers are calling THEM. To top it off, they say that they enjoy marketing too!

• Information risk specialists Ascentor attract a stream of inbound leads: www.ascentor.co.uk
  For the last three years Ascentor has published up to four blog posts a month, and offere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Valuable Content Marketing
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Doug Kessler
• About the authors
• Introduction
• PART ONE Why valuable content?
• PART TWO What valuable content?
• PART THREE How to supercharge your business with valuable content
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and references
• Index
• Copyright