Marketing What You Know

KAREN A. NEWMAN, GROUP PUBLISHER, karen.newman@photonics.com

Successful companies are filled with smart people, from R&D to marketing, engineering to customer service. The accumulated knowledge and passion for your business found in your team can be a priceless asset. Today, smart marketers are learning to put all that brilliance to work in new ways to take advantage of proven and emerging media platforms in an effort called content marketing.

The Content Marketing Institute defines the white-hot term this way: “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/

Based on that definition, clearly one essential ingredient for successful content marketing is having strong knowledge in a particular area, one that is relevant to your desired audience. If you have that covered, the other key component is having access to a high-quality targeted audience.

You can certainly reach your website visitors with strong content, and express your authority in an area through your own blog, if you have one. But you can greatly expand your audience in many ways. Once you’ve decided on the story you want to tell and the audience you want to reach, select the best format and opportunity to deliver the audience you seek.

Justin Fishaw, director of content marketing & social at DigitalSherpa, recently posted an expanded list of content marketing opportunities to the organization’s blog (http://digitalsherpa.com/10-effective-con tent-marketing-techniques/):

Ongoing business blog
Guest blog posts
Images
Infographics
Video
Illustrations
Testimonials
Email newsletters
eBooks
Memes

Three of these options are very accessible to most marketers. Blogging is not limited to your internal experts posting to your company blog; experts now agree that your talented team members should seek opportunities to guest on other relevant blogs. With this and other options for content marketing, be sure you understand the audience the opportunity is delivering before you begin sending in posts and other content.

Video lets you expand on written content by adding sound and visuals for showing data and demonstrating technologies. Marketers are catching on to the power of video, choosing it over just about every other content marketing device, according to the B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey for 2012. (For more on video, see the June P.S. newsletter or www.photonics.com/video.)

An industry publisher’s email newsletter lets you push your message to a targeted subset of its readers who have identified themselves as being prospects for your products and services. Your ad or other message can ride along with a publisher’s weekly e-newsletter, or your new product announcement or white paper can be sent to a clearly defined group of readers in a topical, focused e-newsletter.

As Fishaw points out, this is by no means a complete list. The media you choose for your content marketing efforts will depend on a number of factors. Missing from the list above but also to be considered are sponsored and custom webinars and white papers.

Another aspect of content marketing is the quality of your content. This year, 18% of marketers are making quality content their top priority, according to marketing software purveyor Hubspot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report, and noted by blogger Pamela Vaughan (www.hubspot.com). With more businesses embracing blogging and other content marketing strategies, an emphasis on quality can make your content stand out in an ever-widening pool of online resources.

You can learn more about content marketing by visiting the websites mentioned in this article, and by contacting your advertising representative at your favorite industry publication.