How content marketing works
What is content marketing?
That’s a great question!
In really simple terms, content marketing is giving potential clients value before they pay for it. Crazy idea, huh? While the old school way of marketing was to wait for the customer to pay you before you’d give them something of value, content marketing flips everything on its head and provides the value first with no expectation of receiving any money.
Why would anyone do this? Because content marketing is proven to generate more quality leads than almost any other type of digital marketing. Even better, because content marketing is a great way to build client loyalty before the sale, customers of firms that predominantly use content marketing show higher client retention rates than those that don’t. That’s science, my friends.
How does it work?
Like the wider world of marketing and advertising, there are a billion ways to do content marketing. Ultimately all good content marketing campaigns, though, will be built from three key pieces: Content, Distribution, and Collection.
CONTENT
Content is the good stuff you’re giving away to your potential clients. It could be an infographic, templates they can use, eBooks, or videos. Basically, anything you create to give away to clients can be considered content.
DISTRIBUTION
So, once you got some awesome content, how are you gonna get it out to the eager masses? Through distribution channels, that’s how! You can go organic with some social media posts or links in an email campaign, or you can pay for some traction through paid search, or Facebook ads. Essentially, distribution is how you’re going to get the word out about this great content you created.
COLLECTION
This is easily the most important piece of the content puzzle, and yet the one most often overlooked. Think of it this way; it doesn’t matter how many people you get in your store if it’s a total mess inside, right? Without a good landing page to convert leads, there ain’t a piece of content in the world that will help you get leads.
“Good content marketing builds on itself over time, like a tower of yumminess.”
TRES CROW | FOUNDER AND CHIEF DREAMER
Why your marketing isn’t working
Tell me this doesn’t sound familiar.
You read a cool blog—or watch a super inspiring video—about using blogging and social media to grow your personal brand. Maybe you even purchase their “ultimate” guide to social marketing for a cool $99. You wake up on the first morning feeling refreshed and ready to take on the world, and you write your first blog.
But eventually your actual business gets in the way, and amid the flurry of client calls and emails, you miss your first blog deadline. After a few weeks you miss a few more, until you realize you haven’t blogged or posted to social media in 3 months. And worse yet, you didn’t get a single lead for your efforts. You not only wasted your money, but you wasted your time, and for a small business owner that’s the worst part.
The truth is that most of the digital marketing strategies being sold today are designed to sell software or multi-level marketing schemes that are, at best, badly aligned with the specific needs of small businesses. The strategies that work for a large corporation or a well-funded growth company are not going to be the same that work for a founder-owned coffee shop, a local attorney, or startup e-tailer.
Small business owners don’t need a social media manager, or an SEO guru, or even a full-time CMO; they need a little bit of all of these things. And more importantly, they need someone to help explain how all of this stuff works together, so that, over time, they can grow in their marketing knowledge and feel more confident in how they’re presenting their brand online.
That’s why we’re here…to help small business owners get a little bit better at marketing, one business at a time.
How DogEatCrow helps
In the end, your small business digital strategy needs to do just two things really well:
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Make sure your business gets found by potential customers looking for your products or services.
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Build a community around your brand.
Anything that isn’t serving those two goals is kind of a waste of time and resources, which is why our small business marketing packages focus exclusively on those things you need to start building your online presence, beginning with the most important: your brand, your website, and your search engine positioning. Once we have those right, we begin building a community around your brand with creative and consistent monthly marketing campaigns that focus on generating leads and establishing your brand identity.
Then we work on growing your brand through increasingly ambitious marketing efforts, using the full arsenal of digital tools at our disposal: video, social, and referral magnets that will keep the leads flowing.
