I was chatting to someone recently that I’d never previously met and they said to me “you’re known for being very generous with your knowledge”.
That made me smile!
It made me feel very happy, for a couple of reasons.
How do you wish to be known?
Firstly, I remembered an exercise I ask the delegates on my Social Media Marketing workshop to do, which is to come up with 3 words they would like to be known for.
For example the luxury brand Mulberry wishes to be known for timeless design coupled with traditional quality and a sense of the here and now.
This brand identity is extremely important, especially if someone else is doing your social media for you. It provides them with a guide to the image you wish to portray and helps to ensure the integrity of your brand.
When I did this exercise for myself I chose:
- Knowledgeable
- Approachable
- Helpful
So, you can see why the comment to me by someone I’d never met before, made me smile! My reputation had preceded me.
If you’ve not done this exercise yourself, give it a go. What 3 words do you wish to be known for?
Be generous with your knowledge
Secondly, it made me think about the enthusiasm I have for encouraging business owners to share their knowledge generously; in particular by writing articles.
Articles (or blogs) are a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Sharing nuggets of useful information with your prospects puts you in the frame as the ‘must go to’ person when the time is right for them to seek help. It also keeps you in touch with your existing customers, reminding them that they made the right choice. You!
Even the readers that are unlikely to become a customer are just as important. If they are taking the trouble to even skim your content, they are highly likely to recommend you.
Content is king
You’ve probably heard that as far as Google is concerned, content is king. Google likes to see good quality content added to your website regularly.
The Content Marketing Institute’s definition of content marketing is:
“Content marketing is 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.”
It makes sense that only valuable and relevant content about the problems your audience is grappling with is a factor for getting your articles read. And sharing tips and solutions will create some kind of action, such as an email, telephone call or download.
But, there are two further words in this definition that I’d like to focus on:
- Consistent and
- Distributing
Consistent
I have a feeling that many people are put off content marketing, because they fear that it’s something they will start, then after a few months the ideas dry up, the motivation fizzles out and the time – well there’s always something more important to do!
This doesn’t have to be so.
You can make it easy for yourself by using systems and processes to make sure you have a yearlong plan of great content to create and share. (Want to know more email me.)
And why wouldn’t you if it’s going to drive profitable customer action? The results are retention of loyal customers, new customers and an increase in revenue.
Distributing
Now we have the content machine working, what next?
You’ve put a lot of effort into crafting a great article, the first job is to post it on your website.
Hopefully, your website has an SEO (search engine optimization) tool within it. This will help you to complete the on-page SEO and give the article a better chance of being found by Google and other search engines.
But you can’t rely on this alone. You must do a bit of distributing work yourself. A distribution checklist might include:
- To your database, introduce the article in your monthly eNewsletter and include a link to read the full story
- Post on your Facebook page
- Update your LinkedIn status
- Update your company LinkedIn page
- Create as a post on LinkedIn
- Tweet about it with a link back to the website
These are the most obvious Business 2 Business places to share your article, but there will be others (Instagram, Pinterest etc.) that are either relevant to your industry or to the network and business community you work within.
For example, I belong to a Facebook Group called Nicci’s Trusted Sales Club. Nicci has a different theme for each day. Friday is Free Friday. This is when you can freely promote your business. This is a great place to share your articles (as long as you participate in the group!). Check it out!
Some networking groups allow you to post your articles on their website – so make use of it.
You can also re-purpose the article and offer it as a guest blog to a company that compliments the products and services you offer.
Breathe long life into your blog articles
This is all great, but following the check list above only creates ‘one off’ instances for each article.
Hopefully, your articles are shared by others, which helps to spread the reach and gain you more interest.
But, what else can you do to gain the reward for the blood sweat and tears you put into it?
When you posted the article on any one of your social media sites there would have been many followers and connections who missed it. This could be because they weren’t online, your post became lost within all the other ‘noise’ going on or the social media algorithms just weren’t in your favour.
The solution is to re-post your content again and again.
Now this doesn’t mean bombarding people with the same message. The wording of the post can be changed slightly to highlight a different point within the article. This different choice of words may resonate and gain a click through to read the article, whereas the first message didn’t quite hit the mark.
This re-posting might sound time consuming, but there are tools that can help you. Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule posts. You can spend just ½ hour each week scheduling your posts and posts to other interesting articles.
Missing Lettr
I’d like to introduce you to a nifty blogging tool called Missing Lettr. It automatically creates a yearlong campaign every time you add a blog article to your website. Clever!
What’s more it creates an image to appear with every post.
This is great, because as an example, Tweets with images gain 150% more retweets that those without (source).
All you have to do is check and approve each post. You can change and tweak the words as you like. Finally, set the campaign running and hey presto your article lives on for a year.
There’s an entry level free version of Missing Lettr if you’d like to give it a go.
Next…
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you of the importance of content within your marketing. If you would like help either getting this going for yourself (Attractive Marketing Coaching) or outsourcing the process (Attractive eNewsletter Package), get in touch. Either give me a call on 07565 382803 or email me.
