Content marketing is important because:
Content 
marketing is a way to communicate with your audience without pitching to them. Essentially, you’re providing information about your product or niche, engaging in conversations and building relationships. Copyblogger has great content marketing 101 articles.
Content marketing provides value and demonstrates your business’s authority in the marketplace. While you provide information to the consumer, you’re also building their trust in you and the credibility of your name.
Content marketing includes:
Social Media
Facebook and Twitter, YouTube or Flickr (just to name a few) are all avenues of social content marketing. They all provide excellent platforms to reach and interact with consumers. Because they are interactive they really allow you to build relationships with your fans and followers, reciprocate their actions (like retweets, mentions and comments), and monitor and respond to mentions of your business.
Blogs
Blogs are a content marketing must-have for a business’s website. You can keep the consumer updated on industry trends, events, changes or policies within your own organization, offer your opinion or take on a relevant situation, offer checklists, templates, etc… The options for blog content are endless. Most important, blogs are a great place to generate discussion in the comment area, and also provide great content to share on your other social media platforms.
White Papers
A white paper is substantially more detailed that a blog post or article – and significantly longer (usually upwards of 2,000 words). They tend to me more educational than sales driven.
Webinars
Webinars are live events – sometimes free, sometimes paid – that are hosted by experts in the field (preferably within your own organization). It’s a great chance to answer questions, educate, and show off your knowledge about your area of expertise.
Webcasts and podcasts
Webcasts and podcasts are recorded sessions that are downloadable and the consumer can watch or listen to them at their convenience. They can contain any kind of content – from interviews with other experts, to articles or white papers read aloud. If you host a webinar it’s a great idea to offer a recorded version as a webcast for people who couldn’t attend the live version.
Solving the content marketing problems
Avoid these content marketing roadblocks:
Content for your market
What are your consumers really interested in? It’s easy enough to distribute surveys, post a poll on your Facebook page or hold a focus group. Once you know what interests them, produce your content, make it accessible and exciting with headlines or subject lines that peak their interest.
Regular content
Try to set out a schedule for your organization to follow. Regular publishing will increase trust in your brand. Next, determine who will be responsible for producing the content – whether on a regular basis or shared. You can also repurpose content into various formats. For example, your press release can be repurposed into blog posts, articles for syndication, updates for your social networks, enewsletter content, and whatever else you have on the go.
Get your content found
Don’t forget to include SEO as part of your content marketing strategy. If no one can find your articles online then your efforts will be wasted. Do your keyword research and optimize your posts and articles with the appropriate H tags for a start. Your SEO campaign can be much more involved but these two techniques should bring fair results.
Finding the time
Many smaller organizations simply don’t have the time to manage a content marketing campaign. Depending on your objectives, you’ll probably need someone working on it full time. You can hire a content marketing manager to work in-house or on a contract basis.
If you’d like to discuss monthly content marketing packages, please phone or email me. I’m more than happy to answer any of your content marketing questions.
