Digital Marketing Blog

Content marketing gives you a way to serve and give back to your audience. 

Content marketing allows you to do something once and have it serve and repay you for many years in the future.

To have a successful content marketing funnel you have to show the right piece of content to the right person at the right time. 

You have to show your potential customers exactly what they're looking for at the exact time they want it.

In this blog post, I'm going to teach you how to do. I'm going to give you a general overview of what content marketing is and talk about how the right content marketing strategy can get your business or brand in front of millions of people and how the right strategy can spread your message to everyone across the globe. 

Now, let's go over the definition of content marketing.

What Is Content Marketing? 

Content marketing is a strategic marketing plan focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

There are many content marketing strategies out there and everyone has an opinion about which one is the best. 

But, it's important to remember to find a marketing strategy that is best suited for your business and for your target audience.

Content marketing helps you stay top of mind with people who already interested in you, by seeing your blog posts, social media posts and ads, etc.

Many people get nervous at the thought of giving valuable content away for free and it's pretty common for people to be stuck in this mindset: 

Why give it away for free, when you know people will buy it?

This is an amazing question.  Why would someone take the time and energy to create something to give away and get absolutely nothing in return?

Get ready, because I'm about to blow your mind. 

Before you ask someone to buy your product or invest in your business, it's so important for you to serve your ideal audience with types of content that is highly valuable to them.

Here's what I'm talking about:

You wouldn't walk up to a stranger on the street and ask them to buy your $30K mastermind because you know it wouldn't work.

This person has no idea who you are and probably doesn't even know what a mastermind is.

They would probably look at you like you're crazy and walk away.

So many people are making this same mistake online.

They think the more people they ask to buy their product or service online (even the ones who have never heard of them), the more money they will make.  It actually turns people off, making them not want to do business with you. 

The most successful content marketers hit all stages of the buyer journey—from start to finish. 

They show the right message, to the right audience at the right time, or otherwise known as the R3MAT Method.

Content Marketing Is Not A Quick Fix

Here's where most marketers and business owners go wrong.

They focus on one thing, how to make their next dollar.  They search for the next BIG strategy that will bing in the most money in the shortest amount of time, by doing the smallest amount of work.  

That is the quickest way to burn through your audience and make people not want to do business with you anymore. 

Content marketing is not a business strategy that you want to invest in if you aren't willing to put in the work.  To do content marketing right it's hard and it's a long-term plan that requires you to show up and serve your people every single day.

The best content marketing plan breaks down an audience and understands each and every move that a person makes leading up to a purchase.

Here's how to use the buyers journey in your content strategy to give your target audience exactly what they want and need.

Use The Buyers Journey To Reach Your Marketing Goals

If you aren't familiar with the buyers journey, here's a brief overview:

The buyer's journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate and purchase a new product or service.  At each stage, your ideal buyer needs diverse types content, served to them at the right time, across a variety of channels and social media platforms.

The buyers journey is a four-step process:

1. Awareness Stage: Buyer realizes they have a problem.

2. Consideration Stage: Buyer defines problem & researches options to solve it.

3. Decision Stage: Buyer chooses a solution.

4. Person takes desired action.

Awareness Stage

The goal of the awareness stage is to make people aware of you. 

This is the time to create as many pieces of content as possible and distribute the content across 7-10 platforms that matter.

This is where you show potential customers informative content that could be the solution to their problems, wants and needs.  You want to make sure that people can find your business, product or service.

The main takeaway for the awareness stage is to consistently create new content.  If you are doing something cool, record it and make a promotional video out of it.  Write new blogs, create new videos and content and push it in front of your ideal audience.

Here's some examples of different types of content to generate more brand awareness:

• Informative blog posts

• User-generated content

• Social media videos showing your brand personality

• Tweets, Instagram Stories, Facebook posts, etc.

• How-to guides

• Infographics

Consideration Stage

During the consideration stage, buyers have clearly outlined and defined their goals and challenges and are looking for the best potential buying options.

Content should be focused on the buyer’s pain points — not your product or brand and especially not what you think they need.  If you ask the right questions and pay attention to their buying patterns, your audience will tell you what they want. 

During this stage, it is so important to make sure you are showing the right thing to the right person at the right time. 

You want to offer specific content and key features based on what their interests are and what they are searching for. 

Decision Stage

At this point, the buyer is ready to make a purchase. 

This is a great time to build audiences based on their specific interests, what they're searching for (or a combo of the two) to ensure they complete the buying process and become a loyal customer.

Send your audience(s) exclusive offers, promotions and fast-action bonuses that create a sense of URGENCY.  Provide reassurance that they're making the right decision by choosing you. 

This is also a great place to display customer testimonials.  Testimonials have been proven to dramatically increase credibility, lead generation and customer retention by simply using the positive behaviors of existing clients. 

Strategically Promote Content Across Social Networks & Search Engines

Stop depending on a single traffic source.

You have to have a diversified strategy feeding each and every stage of your funnel. This includes (but not limited to) warm up, nurture, direct response and post sale.

Common Traffic sources we are using that you can too: