“Content marketing” has become the latest catch-phrase mantra. The concept: Produce worthy, relevant and effective content (through blogging, social media curation and deep, informative websites — with on-request white papers, (e)books and speeches/presentations, and you’ll generate credibility, search engine effectiveness, and profitable in-bound sales leads.
Not surprisingly, businesses and services advocating their resources to help you in the content marketing challenge have produced their own content, including Oracle Marketing Cloud, which posted “10 Ways to Calm the Chaos of Content Marketing.”
This document reports the “why” of content marketing (of course from self-interested sources), noting that Google+ says the average cost to generate a lead through inbound marketing ($143) is about half the average for outbound marketing ($373). ?And Oracle reports that webserve.com? says that ?content marketing produces roughly three times as many leads per dollar.
Nevertheless, you need to be able to sift through the noise and make some informed decisions.
- Realize you already have much/most of your content available. It just needs to be restructured with some simple editing, design-work, and posting/publicity. You have subject matter expertise, or you wouldn’t be in business.
- f you don’t have someone in-house, work with a competent specialist to generate, produce and market your content, at least initially. Media outlets and publishers have been producing, editing and curating content for years, and have the added advantage of built-in distribution systems. (If you are in North Carolina, see our initial content marketing service offering.)
- Develop a simple measuring tool to assess your effectiveness. In the ideal format, you will want to trace your traffic/leads and conversions. This can be done fairly easily with tracking software — ultimately you are most interested in number of inquiries/leads you receive and their conversion?rate, and in higher ticket AEC services, the numbers won’t be so overwhelming that you will need excessively complex systems to capture and understand the data.
Want to learn more?
Here are two options. You can request a free subscription to the weekly Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter. ?Or you can communicate directly with me at buckshon@constructionmarketingideas.com. And if you are in Canada, North or South Carolina, or in the Chicago area, learn more about some content marketing initiatives here.
