How Some Businesses Get Great Results From Content & Digital Marketing

Do you look at some business marketing with envy and wonder how they do it so well? What are they doing to impress their social media followers and is it available to all businesses? It would be easy to say the answer is content and yes we can all use it to grow our businesses. However there’s more to it – of course.

Not all content is created equal. There is an etiquette to adhere to and mechanisms in place if we steal or plagiarize an idea or copy that isn’t inherently our own. So hiring the experts in content and digital marketing is more relevant now than ever before.

Let’s first look at what content is in all it’s glory.

What is Online Content?

Content is all information and experiences shared in various formats and channels both offline and online. Online, content is the pages and blogs on your website.

This blog is an example of content. Creating unique blog posts with wordy articles, images, and videos.

It’s also the tweets, and shares in social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. Plus the instant messages on mobile apps and of course it’s the emails too.

For email marketing, it’s the EDMs (email direct messages) sent to email list subscribers. Then there’s the advertising, it too is content and it’s visible in online banners, and also contextual marketing.

Content, is essentially everything we find online and that’s why it is really easy to fail in content marketing. We’ve been given so much to work with, it seems impossible to hone in on what information and in what format will give us what we need ultimately need, i.e. engagement and sales.

Content Marketing Strategy

The hit and miss of your own content marketing strategy, with fewer website visitors, and less customer engagement and sales suggests you need the midas touch to make it work as well as your competitors.

However, like with most things, we don’t know what we don’t know and that’s why it frustrates us more when we see businesses doing what we believe we’re doing only they’re getting the results. More followers, comments, shares and likes and no doubt that translates into conversions too with more sales!

So what are these businesses doing differently? They’ve hired in the experts i.e they use Digital Agencies.

Focus on Engagement

Campaigns driven by agencies are no longer shouting out – agency involvement like the older style of transactional advertising, and that’s why it’s hard to know if an agency is part of it.

Businesses still doing it for themselves focus on their marketing and advertising outcomes on sales, whereas agencies will focus on audience engagement which is the point of content and digital marketing.

Therefore direction and advice from marketing experts is sure to shorten the lead time to success with your advertising and marketing campaigns. They just know a lot more about content and how it can inspire consumers to take action. For example, here’s a great article, from Multiply Digital: 6 pieces of content you’re already making but not as well as you could, hence the luke-warm response for your intended audience.

Images

Taking photos is one example mentioned in that article. Nowadays we all can and do take lots of photos, think selfies, but are they worthy of fronting a marketing campaign for your brand?

Engaging a professional photographer to take a few select images for your brand campaigns is the way to go. Of course you need the creative genius in your campaigns before hiring the photographer as they will need direction and will only be as good as the information they have at their disposal.

Marketing Plan

The genius of course comes from the creative types and before you can get started on some exciting campaigns the overall marketing strategy for the business is documented in a plan.

Do you have a marketing plan and a budget to deliver campaigns during the next twelve months? This is where using digital agencies are useful too. Start out as you plan to continue. What we do know is, if we continue to do the same thing over and over we will get the same result. Therefore, it’s less of a leap of faith, hiring the experts to plan and drive it and our role is to measure its success!