Are you considering a content marketing approach for your business?
As an inbound marketer, I get a lot of enquiries from businesses nowadays that have heard content marketing is one of the best ways to get more leads and sales – and with 46% of people reading blogs more than once a day, they’d be right.
But you may be wondering, whose responsibility is it to create this content? Do you partner with an agency, hire a copywriter, or try and find the time to do it yourself?
In this blog post, I’m going talk about why not only you, but your entire team should be coming up with great content for your website’s blog.
It’s best coming from the expert
And guess who that expert is? That’s right; it’s you. There’s nobody more qualified to write about your business than you are. You’re the one with the vision, passion and drive to make your business work, and you probably spend time speaking to and answering questions from customers all day long.
You should use the questions, challenges and pain points you hear from your customers on a daily basis, to come up with helpful, quality content that addresses everything they need to know. This will help them become more informed and confident to make the next stage of their buyer’s journey.
You might be regularly asked questions such as:
- Where can I find the best solution for me?
- How long will it take?
- How much will it cost?
- What materials will you use?
- What alternatives are there to your solution?
- What are your competitors offering?
And so much more besides!
If you do want to have a crack at coming up with some fabulous content yourself, there are some great pointers in my blog ‘The 7 Cardinal Sins of Content Marketing’.
Get the whole team involved
You know who else is an expert? Everyone on your team! If you have employees dealing with sales, customer service – or in fact, anyone who’s out there talking to customers, you should get them to contribute or create valuable content, too.
Picture this: If you have 30 employees working for you, and each writes just one blog post a month, that will give you a blog post a day! Think of how cost-effective it would be compared to the amount of content you’d end up with at the end of the day!
Or, if that isn’t possible, you could simply get your entire team together in one room and have them tell you the questions they frequently hear from customers. This is a great way of getting together a content strategy, as you can use all of these questions to come up with blog titles that could last you months.
Read more about why a content strategy is so important in this blog post.
Don’t have the time? Hire an agency
As a busy inbound marketer myself, I know that it can be tricky to find enough hours in the day to create as much content as you need – and it’s true that content marketing takes a big commitment in order to work.
If you or your team don’t have the time to create content by yourselves, don’t panic. Any good inbound marketing agency will help you to put together a solid content marketing strategy and help you create great content you can put out on your blog; including articles, infographics, videos, slideshares, podcasts and more.
Just remember that the best content has to come from you; so even if you hire an agency, you’ll probably still need to contribute by telling the agency or copywriter more about your business and how things work. A good agency will always ask you questions, rather than going off and creating content without any influence from you.
In fact, because I own an inbound agency myself, I like to go one step further and say that you should be involved as much as possible (although sadly, this isn’t something that a lot of small businesses have the time for).
This is because what we’re doing isn’t exactly secret or mysterious; I actually like to think inbound marketing should really be about giving you a methodology you can follow that empowers you to create great content, and gives you the tools to help you succeed.
Conclusion
If content marketing is something you’d like to try for your business, I wholeheartedly recommend getting involved as much as possible – this is because the best content comes from you, the expert. In fact, getting your entire team involved could fuel months of fantastic blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, slideshares!
A good inbound marketing agency will help you come up with a content marketing strategy for your business, and you even if you don’t have the time to create the content yourself, you should still be prepared to contribute in order to get the best results from your content marketing.
Have any questions about how to get started with content marketing? Let me know in the comments, and I promise I’ll do my best to answer!
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