MarketingSherpa Blog

At Optimization Summit 2012, Michael Lykke Aagaard, Online Copywriter / Landing Page Fanatic, Contentverve, pulled me aside for an interview about content marketing. Below is an excerpt where we discuss three tips for getting started …

Let me (I hope) exceed your expectations in this blog post by adding three more tips for how to get started, helping you, in this case, to overcome common objections you might receive in trying to launch or expand content marketing in your organization …

We don’t want to give our content away for free

Well, you’re not giving it away for free. You’re getting something very valuable in return.

When you create quality content that really helps your customers and potential customers, your company gains attention (something you pay dearly for with paid media placements), trust (something you typically can earn only after a customer has purchased), and a lever to make your other marketing investments, such as email marketing and social media marketing, more effective.

We don’t have the time to produce content

You also likely don’t show up on the driveway of 2,092,523 potential customers six mornings per week. So what do you do? You pay The Wall Street Journal to get a message in its newspaper.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you content marketing is free to produce. Like traditional marketing, it requires an investment. So if you decide to adopt content as part of your marketing strategy, you can’t treat it as a “we’ll get to it in our spare time.” Spare time never comes. You must make time. You must dedicate resources to producing content.

And once you do, you might learn that you end up saving time elsewhere that you can invest back in content marketing. For example, Marcus Sheridan, co-owner, River Pools and Spas, saw his closing rate quadruple when he invested in content because people were ready to make a decision when he showed up at their house, thus saving time that had been spent on sales.

We don’t want to give away our secrets

If you can’t give potential customers enough information about how you do what you do (whether that is fixing plumbing leaks or improving marketing performance), then why should they trust you with their business?

From social media to Wikileaks to open-source software, the era of information totalitarianism is coming to an end, and organizations that embrace transparent marketing have far more to gain than they have to lose.

Besides, as Marcus has said, that secret sauce that you hold so dear … it’s really just Thousand Island dressing.

Related Resources:

The power of free content (via ContentVerve.com)

Marketing Research Chart: Develop your audience with top content marketing tactics

Content Marketing: Mindjet’s infographic strategy boosts blog traffic 420%, Facebook views 313.4%

Multichannel Marketing: Combining email and content marketing leads to 35% conversion rate for Elsevier

Brand-side Marketing How-to: 6 content marketing lessons learned from a B2B IT company

About Daniel Burstein

Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS. Daniel oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the editorial direction for MECLABS – digging for actionable information while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine – from Web clinics to Research Journals to the blog. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications – a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 18 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement and field marketing communications.

Twitter | LinkedIn | Daniel's Posts | Send a Letter to the Editor

Categories: Inbound Marketing Tags: Channel Marketing, content marketing, multichannel, Transparent Marketing