4 Ways Every Business Can Leverage Content Marketing for Profit

4 Ways Every Business Can Leverage Content Marketing for Profit

In today’s fast-paced, tech-driven business environment, business owners often lose sight of tried-and-true marketing strategies that can boost profits with just a small investment of time and money. Content marketing (CM) is the flagship example in this category. Once a central part of every company’s sales efforts, CM is not as commonly employed as it once was. There are numerous reasons for that phenomenon, but the fact remains that CM is a highly effective generator of profits.

The beauty of standard content marketing is that it is not technical, can be done in-house or outsourced and has a way of bringing new kinds of customers to your business. The best time to begin working on a concerted CM campaign is when all your other core business tasks are already running smoothly. What you don’t want, is a breakdown in your behind the scenes performance and needed applications. A common complaint from digital marketing professionals and content marketing teams, is that their “IT systems” and applications either experience a lot of downtime, or simply “don’t work” properly. If you aren’t already, get started with using APM tools to monitor your application performance and to root out any problems or issues before it creates a bottleneck in serving your customers.

Here are some of the first steps to take when you create a full-scale content marketing campaign:

Examine Customer Demographics

You need to know about your customer base. If you are new, you will need to understand the demographics of the customer base you hope to have one day. Content marketing is wholly dependent on who the audience is. If you want to create, or expand on, a very young demographic, there’s no point in creating content about dental implants or where to buy the best hearing aids.

Likewise, if your clientele does skew to older, more affluent consumers, articles and eBooks about skateboarding and website design will miss the mark. When you have even a general idea of your target market’s key characteristics, you’ll be able to create content that gets attention, gets read and brings in new customers.

Create or Buy Fresh Content

Try to keep the content on your site as fresh as possible. Loyal visitors, who are about to become long-term customers, often view sites to see new articles that interest them. When they land on your site three days in a row and see that same lead articles, they tend to lose interest and take your site off their visit daily list. If you do not have time or in-house people who can write regularly, visit one of the many online content stores and buy a few fresh, relevant items each week. Preferably, you will want to have at least one new piece of content on your site every day.

Think Evergreen

Fresh content does not necessarily mean new or current events. It simply means that it’s fresh for your site. Keep in mind that depending on the nature of your business, you might want to post a few breaking news types of pieces from time to time. But the general rule is to create content that is as evergreen as possible. “Ten ways to find the best bargains online,” is a piece that might need to be updated each year but is relatively evergreen. People are always looking for bargains.