Live from CSA: How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in Content Marketing

How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in Content Marketing, by Arnie Kuenn

Arnie’s team does content marketing workshops, and frequently hears students afterwards asking “I can’t get our management  to see the potential in this.”

• The problem: using words like “blogging” or “social media” or “content marketing” or “inbound marketing” doesn’t work.
• The solution: use words like “learning” or “helping” or “listening”

Buyers are searching info that helps them to make an informed decision. The business that provide that information win.

The question to ask upper management “when prospects visit our website, do we want to help solve their problems better than anyone else in our industry?”

Content marketing searches are skyrocketing. And yet, most people don’t know what content marketing is – which means we need to explain it to upper management.

“Content marketing is the art of providing relevant, useful content to your customers without selling to them” – this is the definition Vertical Measures came up with.

Content marketing works:

• Hubspot has shown that more blog posts increases inbound traffic.
  • Unsurprising. We move on from old data, but we keep up with new data.
• Google pulls in new content (thanks Panda & Penguin!)
• Most people will fail in the beginning
  • The average lifespan of a blog is 2 months
  • It takes time and consistent effort
  • Getting started is the only way to learn
• It takes courage
  • You’re giving something away without the expectation of an immediate return
  • It takes courage to trust that customers and prospects will reward you with sales and loyalty at some point in the future
• ROI proves it works
  • It takes awhile to ramp up – it’s the long game
  • But in 6-12 months that former content will keep working

The 8 step content marketing process:

• Measurement
• Strategy development
• Ideation
• Lead nurture
• Content creation
• Distribution
• Content promotion
• Optimization

Ideas to get started:

• Ask customer service people (anyone who talks to customers) what customers ask about
• Do long-tail searches to find opportunities for additional content that users need
• Come up with a list of content ideas
• Match the editorial calendar to the calendar of events, holidays, and other things you want to be conscious of when creating content
• Use the list of content ideas to build the editorial calendar – match the ideas to the timing/events
• Create useful content
• Pay attention to your strengths – what can you create consistently and at a high quality?
• Take advantage of SEO – 93% of consumers use search prior to making a purchase – and 86% of queries are non-branded
  • Unintentional duplicate content is a common SEO problem
  • Duplicate title & meta tags is also a common SEO problem
  • Lack of image optimization – also a common SEO problem
• Sharing new content can be very simple, thanks to social media + ad spending
  • Don’t judge success based on social media shares – not everything is meant to be shared
  • What matters is the traffic to the site and if it’s converting

You can’t cut corners or short change it – gotta do the work!!