One of the core initiatives of today’s marketing plan is content marketing. If you are unfamiliar with the term, content marketing is a form of digital advertising.
Instead of being an “in your face” hard sell advertising or chest-pounding promotion, its goal is to first build a relationship with your audience by providing value in the form of useful information.
Business visitors to your Web site are looking for content that can help them make more informed decisions. By providing your prospects with more industry news that they can use, they will spend more time on your site.
By regularly posting new content or updating existing Web pages, you also improve your search rankings. What’s more, if you repost some of your content on a social media platform with a link to your site, you can help increase your site traffic.
When you provide your target audiences with relevant and reliable information, you build your reputation as an industry authority, as well as strengthen your relationships with your customer base. Content, which addresses questions that your customers frequently ask, also serves a customer service role.
The objective of your content marketing strategy is to turn your investment into cash, converting your site visitors into customers. To do that, the content or information that you provide must be relevant to your target audience—it must provide value, it must be unique enough to attract attention, and finally, it must provide a compelling call to action to generate a response. Doing so means that visitors are more likely to look to you as a dependable sign provider.
Why Some Companies Fail
Content marketing experts estimate between 80 to 90 percent of businesses engage in some form of content marketing (company blog, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc.). These same experts believe that only 10 to 20 percent of those companies are achieving the return on their investment in time and money that they desire.
You have to define your audience. A graphics professional will likely communicate with a number of different audiences—retailers, B2B businesses, C-stores, and fleet companies, for example.
The content of your message should be tailored to the interests and basic needs of the different audiences. Content that appeals to the food industry will likely not appeal to manufacturers. The types of signage or graphics you promote will be different for each market that you serve.
Involve your employees (especially field salespeople) in selecting the content that addresses the frequently asked questions that concern your target prospects and existing customers. This input should help you select not only the written content that appeals to your audiences, but also the type of videos and imagery that will be most effective.
By involving your employees in your content marketing initiatives, you can energize their enthusiasm in your business, which can help build the spirit of team unity.
If you want your people to become excited about your program, let them know what you’re trying to achieve and the activities that are in the works. Being in the sign/graphics business, your employees likely have the creative skills and real-world experience, which they can contribute to the content that you provide.
Measuring Content Marketing ROI
After you define the objectives of your program, determine what metrics you’ll use to measure whether you’re achieving your goals. In gauging your success, measurement should be ongoing versus an end-of-the-year review.
You probably have heard the maxim, “What gets measured, gets done.” Without measuring the metrics of content marketing, you’ll never know if the content that you are producing is working. To do that, first decide on the deliverables that you should measure.
If you want your message to connect with your audience, you’ll need to understand the problems of your target markets and then construct your content, which provides solutions.
Keep your content marketing strategy simple. After determining your target audience, ask yourself, “What are the problems, needs, and interests of my audiences in these markets?”
To answer this question, interview some of your best customers. You could conduct your interview under the guise that you’re writing a case study on a successful graphics program. That way, you can kill the proverbial two birds with one stone. You can learn more about the unmet needs of the market as you gather the information for your case study.
What types of content will be most effective in delivering your message? In addition to developing case studies, you could produce a video or develop a compelling story for a newsletter. You can also deliver the same story on several social media platforms. I’m sure that your current customer base has asked many different types of questions. You can create content using a FAQ format.
What distinguishes content marketing is its focus on producing quantifiable results for your business. Measurable results include the number of followers to various social media platforms or how many subscribers that you harvest for your email list. The best results are, of course, the leads that develop into sales.
To develop a content marketing strategy that you can turn into cash, your first goal is to build an audience. One solution is to find another company in your field that is already successful in content marketing and then model their behavior.
Another approach is to capitalize on your expertise in the graphics market. As a graphics professional, you probably excel in some facet of our industry. Perhaps you are the expert in your part of the country in retail graphics or electrical signage or vehicle wraps. You should build your content around that particular niche. This is how you differentiate your content from your competitors for whatever media platform you choose.
After you decide upon your target market and identify their unmet needs, you must address your content to satisfy your audience’s primary interest: “What’s in it for me?”
To answer that question, try to walk a mile in your prospect’s shoes and try to truly understand your prospect’s problems and their buying cycle before proposing generalized solutions.
If your audience is the retail market and you’re the expert in window and wall graphics, they frankly couldn’t care less about how you manufacture and install graphics or what type of printer you use. They care about attracting attention that entices shoppers to walk through their front door. They care about creating a pleasurable shopping experience for shoppers to browse. Most of all, they care about stimulating impulse buys.
The key to building an audience is to deliver content that is unique and different. Don’t write about what all of your competitors are writing about. Don’t follow others down the beaten path. Instead blaze your own trail. If your message is not unique and different, it will be lost in the noise of the crowd.
In building an audience, include a call to action in your content. While you can include a toll-free number or an email address, a better choice is a subscription button to capture a prospect’s email address along with their name, business, address, and phone number.
What’s important is that you collect the email address of respondents in a spreadsheet, which you can control and use at your discretion. That way, you freely use the list for future follow-up, such as a newsletter sent monthly to your subscriber base.
Content marketing doesn’t take a lot of money, if you do it yourself. Instead it takes time, considerable work, and patience. Start by collecting bits of information on your primary area of expertise.
If your primary business is vehicle graphics, build an album of pictures showcasing the programs that you developed then write a short description for each program. All you need are a few sentences that explain what the customer wanted to achieve followed by how the design satisfied their business goals.
In writing these short case studies, the problem/solution is effective. For example: “Customer XYZ was slowly losing business to a new competitor. The business owner felt that his store needed a makeover, but he did not have a large budget. To overhaul the store’s appearance, the designer developed a colorful and cost-effective window/wall graphics program, which increased traffic and sales.”
The key to a successful story is to provide your readers with value. Describe a problem that your audience can relate to with details and information that your audience can apply to their business. Make sure that your story is factually accurate.
Finally remember that the story is not about you; it’s about your customers’ unmet needs and the solutions to their problems.
