When you create and manage meaningful content that plays to your unique style, personality and professional goals, you are investing in scalable, sustainable marketing solutions that will last the life of your business and support your marketing in multiple ways. In this video, Lorrie Thomas Ross talks about Content Marketing that Converts.
Begin by doing some healthy diagnosing and prescribing to guide your next steps so you are creating content that converts.
CREATIVE CONTENT MARKETING
The way you communicate is your most powerful tool in creating connections and generating conversions. Social media is called social for a reason. It needs to relate to society and/or your profession. To make content work for you, it needs to sound and reflect you. When you get clear on who you are, what you do and whom you serve, content marketing begins to flow.
Take some time to write down aspects about your:
- Unique Style
- Personality
- Professional Goals
FIVE FACTOR SUSTAINABLE CONTENT MARKETING SUCCESS FRAMEWORK
There are five factors to marketing success that you need to have in place to make your marketing click.
Credibility is about getting people (current and prospective customers) to know, like and trust you. Your personal brand, image, photos, content, having updated social media profiles and recommendations are all part of this formula. One of the biggest opportunities you have to boost credibility (which also boosts sellability) is to tell your story. People are more likely to trust you and/or your company and support it when they know who is behind it.
Credibility – Know, Like, Trust
• Branding
• Presence
• Story
• Testimonials/Reviews/Referrals
• Experience
• Consistent, Quality Content Marketing
Usability is how easily usable your marketing assets are. If you have a personal website, making sure it is responsive (meaning it automatically adapts to all devices, web, tablet, mobile) for ease of use is an example. Having clear call to actions in your content (Action text that links like “Learn more”, guiding people to take action) is key. If you want to build your email list, make the email signup easily accessible.
Usability – To, Through
• Clear User Experience
• Call to Actions
• Know your Stats
• Think Responsive
• Give Choices
Visibility includes search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, PR and paid advertising. If you have an optimized marketing foundation, building awareness via meaningful content marketing will help you and your organization stand out. To build awareness in a meaningful way, voice your value and values via content.
Visibility – Awareness
• Networking
• Social Media
• Search Engine Marketing
• PR
• Advertising
Do what feels right for you – this could be blog posts, emails, videos, images, Facebook lives, social media posts. Remember, don’t feel obligated to do what doesn’t feel right.
When you are passionate about what you do, you have a powerful edge –the authentic voice of you and your brand can come through via content and create very powerful connections.
Sellability is about helping people know why you are the person and brand to work with – all three factors above support this to equal building and growing meaningful customer relationships. Reviews support sellability as does staying out there and in front of your customer via creative content. Know your worth, OWN YOUR WORTH!
You don’t need a big budget to do this – content is a low-cost or no-cost way to do this!
Sellability – Value, Values, Voice
Scalability is about investing to scale. Look at scalability as a good stock – small steps over time compound to make a big difference. Don’t spend on marketing – invest! Writing content isn’t always a quick process, but when done right, content builds and compounds over time to be a fabulous marketing arsenal to support your career!
Scalability – Invest vs. Spend. Focus on Growth!
Whatever you do, don’t stress – you don’t have to do this all today. It’s about quality vs. quantity!
Start small and snowball. Content marketing is about making meaningful connections – honestly, authentically and powerfully.
EASY WAYS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR CURRENT CONTENT MARKETING EFFORTS
The pain of producing content on social media is real. To many, the question of “what to post?” is like being in a black abyss, with no hope of positive ideas emerging. We’re going to let you in on a big digital marketing manager secret…
One of the easiest ways to simplify your content marketing efforts while increasing visibility and credibility is by recycling.
Recycling old (but great) content (like blog posts, media mentions, images, articles) and sharing them again on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) is so easy and often so overlooked by busy professionals!
It takes time to write great content… why on earth would you let that great content go to waste? If the content you created is still relevant, entertaining or useful to your target audience, then re-use it!
Instead of staring at a blanks Word document or social media post box and going AHHHH!!…take a deep breath and go ahhhhhhh because you most likely have more content to pull from then you realized. Look at your marketing assets. Based on the five success factors, focus on your need-to-have’s first and your nice-to-have’s second.
Write to-do’s down:
CONTENT MARKETING AUDIT
1. Conduct an audit of the content assets you have.
- LinkedIn articles
- Website pages
- Blog posts
- Tweets
- Instagram images
- Facebook posts
- Graphics (Cover Photos, quotes)
- Photos
- Articles/Press
- Recommendations
- Videos
2. Optimize
- Do you have content that can be repurposed?
- Do any accounts need to go?
- Do any of you social media profiles need to be updated?
To get content marketing ideas flowing, describe your:
Expertise | Identity | Style
*Yes, these questions might be similar to ones previously asked, it helps the brain to reframe questions to help get the juicy answers out!
3. Invest
With an optimized foundation, take time to clarify your value as a professional and your values as a professional and come up with content you want to share. This can be posts, images, photos to share, content to repurpose (we like to repurpose content weekly on social media). Do you need to hire help to support you? It’s OK to not do it all yourself!
Get More Out of What You Are Already Doing With Content Marketing, Getting More With Less Effort:
- Canva is great for social media images
- Fotorus is great for photo editing
- Hootsuite is amazing for social media management
- Help A Reporter Out is a free signup to get media queries
Life-Lasting Content Strategy That Will Reframe How You Think About and Approach Content Creation and Communications
CONTENT MARKETING ACTION PLAN
Time to start (or reinvigorate) your content marketing!
- Projects
- Processes
- Systems
CONVERSATION INVITATION
If you would like some feedback on your personal brand and content marketing, we invite you to reach out to have a conversation. On the call, we will idea-ate, identify some optimizations and clarify some immediate action items. Note: This is by no-means a sales call. This is a 20-30 minute call to help you get on the right track. You can contact us via email at help@webmarketingtherapy.com.