Remember the old days when advertising used to be the only way you could be certain your message was being communicated properly? I helped buy tens of thousands of dollars of TV, radio and billboards every year, and sometimes every month, when I was with Time Warner because it made the phones ring.
You could write press releases, but you couldn’t always count on the journalist or reporter delivering the information just as you wrote it, or giving you the credit you deserve. We worked with PR counsel while at Baker & Daniels to try to get on the radar of those who wrote about what law firms and their clients do. We even had someone in-house who was dedicated to community and public relations. As we were told by reporters more than once, it’s not their job to promote our law firm. It’s their job to report the news.
NEVER BEFORE
We still have the marketing tools above at our disposal, and sometimes they even do a pretty good job for us, depending on what we expect of them, but we still aren’t sure our messages are getting across to our target audiences, our clients, potential clients, referral sources and media the way WE want them to.
Never before have we had the tools we have today to send our messages…
- The way we want to send them
- When we want to send them
- When our target audiences might need them
- As creatively as we would like to send them
- In as many formats as we want to send them, and
- When situations occur that call for them to be sent
In a perfect world, we would be able to meet everyone we are interested in doing business with face-to-face, look them in the eye, shake their hands genuinely, and talk to them about…
- Their business
- The state of their industry
- What is threatening their business
- What is causing their business to grow
- What opportunities lie ahead for them, and
- What they need to be cautious about to survive in this competitive, and sometimes dangerous, world
Unfortunately, that is not always possible, or even efficient if our target audience is…
- Hard to get a hold of
- Across the country or world
- Not yet open to taking a phone call or meeting from us
- Is overwhelmed with work demands
- Or has no idea we even exist
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
It’s not a magic term. It is what it sounds like. I’ll make this simple, and get right to the point.
Content is the words and messages you deliver.
Content Marketing is the use, or marketing, of those words to reach other people.
Content Marketing is the act of placing digital breadcrumbs in the paths of your target audiences so they will, at some point, be able to find you.
Content Marketing is your way of doing what we discussed above. It is shaking the digital hand of your current and potential clients, journalists, reporters and referral sources.
Content Marketing allows you to talk to these target audiences about…
- Their business
- The state of their industry
- What is threatening their business
- What is causing their business to grow
- What opportunities lie ahead for them, and
- What they need to be cautious about to survive in this competitive, and sometimes dangerous, world
Does that sound familiar? It should. Those are the things we discussed above that all of us would like to do if we had the time, dollars, connections and resources needed to do so.
It’s time to make sure you’re creating the content, the digital breadcrumbs and messages needed to let clients know who you are.
Create a plan to virtually…
- Shake their hands.
- Look them in the eyes.
- Find out what’s going on in their businesses.
- Discover what’s on the horizon that will impact their bottom line.
Then, I want you to go about communicating with those people about all of these things in a very deliberate, efficient, planned way that will enable you to match their needs to what you know that might be helpful to them.
Oh, and don’t forget to allow your personality to come across when you’re marketing your content. It is still all about creating relationships, and it always will be.
(Photo credit: SalFalko)
