Answer: content marketing.
We sincerely hope you appreciate that we didn’t drag you through 1,200 words to give you this answer :).
In case you’re interested in why this is, let’s get into it..
First, what do we mean by content marketing?
Content can be:
- A blog post
- A web page about a product or service
- A video
- A podcast
- A flyer or brochure
- An infographic
- A social media image
At a basic level, content marketing serves to inform and educate your prospects and customers about what you do, what you offer or what your business is up to. When done right, it can have the best return on investment of any marketing activity you engage in.
Why don’t more businesses focus solely on content marketing? Well..
- It’s time intensive. Putting out fires and other priorities easily disrupt most content marketing initiatives.
- They don’t think to engage in it. Many businesses focus on outbound approaches and not inbound marketing.
- They don’t understand the return on investment. And that’s because no one has explained it to them!
A 3 Step Content Marketing Approach We Believe Will Help All Businesses
At Judicious, Inc. we are true believers in content marketing. We’ve seen it help our clients and the best part is once a piece of content has been created, it keeps giving for years afterwards.
Here’s a snapshot of one of our clients’ Google Analytics reports for a specific webpage. We made this page for his business and it’s been delivering inbound website traffic for months now:
You can see that we didn’t publish this webpage until June of 2020. And after that day it was published it started to get traffic to it. All on it’s own!
What if you kept publishing new web pages week after week?
We hope your mind is exploding with ideas :). Let’s get into how to get going.
Step 1 – Create a list of what needs to be said
Your clients probably ask you the same questions over and over again. You probably run into customer pain points and objections. You probably have a running list of frequently asked questions in your head. And if we had to guess, you are always educating people you network with about what you do all the time.
All of this is content that probably needs to be published on your website. The single most important reason why is: once it’s published on your website it will begin to attract searches from Google and other search engines.
This is the easiest marketing you can do. By announcing what your company does and discussing questions and problems surrounding what your offer solves, you’ll begin to drive traffic and brand awareness to you.
This doesn’t cost any money. It just has to be written and published. If you have the ability to self-publish website content, you can get started right away.
Step 2 – Create an editorial calendar
The number one challenge to this approach is simply execution. It’s incredibly common for businesses and business owners to put a content marketing plan together and never follow through on it.
Determine a realistic timeframe to get each piece of content written (or filmed) and published. We suggest aiming for one piece of content a week. Be sure to block out time on your calendar to get it done.
Step 3 – Use it!
Post your content to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Email it to your list.
You can let your content sit on your website and let search engine traffic flow to it. But the real value of content marketing is now you have a marketing asset you can use over and over again.
Share it on social media. Email it to a specific list of people. Send it to your sales team (sales teams love company content because it gives them something to share with their prospects). Have your employees share the content on LinkedIn. You can easily see how much amplification your content can get if you use it intelligently.
The simple fact that content can attract search engine visits every month it’s online, for years to come is reason enough to engage in it. Couple that with the fact that it can be used in your other marketing efforts – and really be a seed for other marketing – makes it a no brainer!
So Why is Content Marketing the Best Type of Marketing to do During COVID?
1. Things might be slow for your business
And that means you have time on your hands. Now’s the time to knock out all that content and ideas you’ve had over the years. You may have written some notes to yourself about things you wanted to write, videos you wanted to make. Look at this period as a blessing! You now have time to focus on the best marketing at your disposal.
2. It’s possibly the worst time to engage in paid advertising
Ironically, we’re seeing more interest in Google Ads currently. And there’s one problem with paid advertising right now. Times are strange which makes for bad data.
Paid advertising can work really well, but if you dip your foot into it during uncertain times, the data and learnings you collect aren’t based on normal consumer behavior. People and businesses may not have the same buying habits right now compared to “normal” years. For one, they might not have any money to spend. But that doesn’t mean they can’t click on advertisements (which means you might be paying for a lot of window shoppers).
The worst thing that can happen is if you don’t get good results from paid advertising and you tell yourself, “I tried it and it didn’t work”. That’d be an incorrect result in our opinion. It’s more like, “You tried it during a bizarre period in human history and so you got abnormal results. Wait to engage in paid advertising until things return to normal”.
On the other hand, the effort you put into content marketing today is really an investment in your business that has lasting effects and it builds upon itself. As a matter of fact, a lot of content pieces (like blog posts) only get better with time because they build more trust and backlinks in the search engines. Really, the only reason to engage in paid advertising is for faster results. And you usually pay a premium for it.
3. It’s the marketing you should be doing anyway
We’ve touched on this a bit earlier in this post. Content marketing is the best ROI of any marketing activity. But every business should really be using content marketing as a core part of their marketing strategy. When things are slow, this a great time to light this fire.
4. When things get better, you’ll be glad you did it
“How’d you find out about us?”
“I was reading your blog..”
That’s what happens years later. All your content marketing efforts will start boosting your business when things are already going smoothly. If you stuck to your guns and published great content regularly you’ll get to experience that wonderful feeling: industry domination.
What do we do at Judicious, Inc?
Like we said, content marketing is time intensive. Most of our clients do not have the time or people to do the research and work required. We know how to determine what content you should be publishing that will have the most business value. It’s one thing to have an editorial calendar of topics your team came up with. It’s another thing to have an editorial calendar that’s been carefully researched to bring in the most website traffic possible that targets specific interests to convert into real business.
If you’re interested in having us research, plan, write and publish your content please schedule an appointment with us below.