Content marketing is still steadily holding on to its role as a strategic marketing approach. But there is still a big challenge convincing business owners that it requires focus on doing two things consistently
- Content creation
- Content distribution
For small business owners, the thought of spending $$$ fears the living daylight out of them. The usual feedback we get from business owners we talk to are:
We wanted to focus our effort on lead generation
We prefer to beef up our sales team
We don’t have enough budget to do content marketing.
Let me, dig down a bit deeper and show you the bigger picture and help you identify the role of content marketing in each of these areas:
Focus on lead generation
In lead generation, you always need to start with the right question “How do you get the attention of your target customers?” The answer is not “create a landing page,” “set up an ad campaign” because before you can do these things – you need content! Need I say more?
Beef up the sales team
What is the best thing you can do to help your sales team? Give them qualified leads. Point them in the right direction. And without content, your sales team ends up selling to almost everyone on the planet; content helps you and your sales team come up with a process to qualify the people that you sell to. Content helps you identify if your target customer is ready to buy from you or they are still roaming about looking for the best deal.
Lack of budget
Content marketing is not about hitting the target budget first before doing it. The proper perspective is, you need to understand better where to invest your companies resources, and what investment brings you long-term results. Content helps you to engage, nurture and benefit your target audience from leads to customers. It gives you a reason to keep talking to them, to engage them in long-term conversation.
It’s not rocket science that the internet is still in a stage where content generation is still anybody’s ball game.
According to the 2017 benchmarks and trends report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, more than 60% of B2B marketers reported that their content marketing strategies are more effective than the previous year.