6 content marketing tips for every entrepreneur

By David Ronald

Content marketing can play a significant role in helping your business to grow—it is one of the best and most effective ways for you to connect with your prospects and differentiate yourself from competitors.

The problem is, however, that when it comes to developing and implementing content marketing strategies, it’s not always easy to know exactly where to start.

(Click here to read our white paper on content marketing: http://bit.ly/1GHDSxB.)

Here are the six tips that will help you use content marketing to grow revenues.

1. Tell better stories

Your words are your ambassadors and convey to your customers and prospects who you are. Many companies still don’t differentiate themselves enough through their writing voice. A compelling brand story gives your audience a way to connect with you, one person to another, and to view your business as what it is: a living, breathing entity run by real people offering real value.

Make truth the cornerstone of everything you create. Your marketing content should feature real people, real situations, genuine emotions and facts. As much as possible, it should show, not tell. It should explain—in terms people can relate to—how your company adds value to the lives of your customers.

2. Answer questions that people are asking
Remember and apply the most important tenet of content marketing: answer the questions your prospects ask. When buyers of any kind begin their journey, they fire-up Google ask a question, and will find an answer. As a marketer, the question becomes: will it be your answer they discover?

This idea should drive the content on your blog. Ask people to leave questions and use them as the basis for your blog posts.

3. Learn the skill of writing headlines

Headlines were the key tactic to make people buy newspapers, buy books and magazines. Now they make people click and share on the web and your mobile phone. Bloggers, publishers and content marketers are always on the lookout for attracting attention to drive traffic, engage with their readers and customers and make money. No clicks and you have no traffic. It’s that simple. So where do you start?

Nothing has changed. The headline is still the step and tactic that attracts attention and drives action.

4. Maintain a consistent narrative
Early in my career a marketing leader told me to “tell your story in three ways”—and that make me see the power of integrated marketing campaigns. Think about select 3-5 themes that tell your story (eg, product, company and industry) and evangelize theme across “integrated” campaigns consisting of blog posts, white papers, press releases and so on. This should increase the probability of them moving through your sales funnel.

5. Think about content promotion first 

Content promotion is the difference between brands with fans and anonymous content. Most people create content first, then think about content promotion as an afterthought. You’re better off flipping this on its head—plan out how you will promote your content before you create it.

If, for example, you want media coverage for your business, produce content that you think they want to cover, instead of trying to get media to cover things you want to talk about. This approach is much more likely to get the results you need, especially in the longer term

6. Use employee-generated content

Content is an ongoing activity, never a one-off campaign. Building your content funnel with employee-generated content will make it more varied and more likely to attract viewers. Best of all, employee-generated content is more often trusted by prospects—studies have highlighted that company advertising is trusted 47% of the time while company experts are trusted 66% of the time.

Thanks for reading. Do you agree with everything on this list?

Did we leave anything off?

Leave us a comment or question.

The most neglected concept in marketing

By David Ronald

One of the most overlooked and rarely implemented concepts in marketing is that of the company persona.

No, I’m not talking about buyer personas, which are vital and a key contributor to the efficacy of the outbound marketing of any company—spending time and creativity in the creation of accurate buyer personas is an investment that will yield results (more on this later). Instead, I’m recommending that you craft a vendor persona that describes your company.

Think of it as the foundation of your brand.

One of my former companies, a startup that introduced several game-changing technologies to the cable television industry, selected the persona of a visionary magician. It was a perfect way of encapsulating the innovative spirit of the company. All of the content created by the marketing team from that point onwards adopted a tone-of-voice that reflected the visionary magician persona.

Not only did this approach improve the consistency of our outbound marketing, it also informed the way the sales team pitched the product; and also how we spoke about the company to analysts and media. And a serendipitous side-effect was it hinted about exciting future product developments without requiring the company to commit to roadmap specifics—which is ideal for a business in the early-stages of its life.

Life is hectic and anything that simplifies it is good, and that is where the power of a company persona comes from—it enables both company outsiders and insiders to “get” what you are about faster and more easily.

This is why I recommend that you consider coming up with a personality for your business.

And, while we’re on the topic of personas, let’s consider buyer personas, which are the other side of the same coin. Don’t hesitate to invest in crafting 3-5 buyer personas as this will increase the success of your outbound marketing.

Why do buyer personas matter?

Here’s an example of what can happen if they’re overlooked: when I started working at the cable television infrastructure vendor described earlier in this post, the company used the same messaging foundation across all its content (data sheets, white papers, presentations, press releases and so on). The sales cycle for its process lasted 12-18 months and required approval from multiple teams within a cable television company.

The key influencers involved in buying its product included technical, financial and user personas. Some personas were attracted to the company’s products because they were game-changing but others were intimidated—resulting in meetings being delayed endlessly.

Specifically, adjectives such as “game-changing” and “revolutionary” that resonated with the technically-oriented employees were disconcerting to people in operations and support inherently wary of new and untested technologies.

Consequently, we segmented our messaging according to persona—a new segment for the operations persona focused on ease-of-use and the availability of 24/7 technical support. These attributes were evangelized on the website, in solution briefs and blogs, in the trade press and at tradeshows. And, consequently, half a dozen opportunities that had been stalled were successfully closed.

The creation of buyer personas isn’t onerous and, indeed, can be fun. Start by identifying the 3-5 key issues that your target personas focus on. Next, determine how your solution mitigates these issues (and be creative if you have to). Add credibility to these benefits by mapping specific features of your solution to each benefit.

Ask your most experienced sales person to review this messaging architecture and incorporate changes. You’ll be ready to go once you’ve done that.

Thanks for reading.

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What is the most misunderstood topic in business?

By David Ronald

It’s become increasingly clear to me that, for some entrepreneurs, marketing simply equals promotion.

For some people marketing is a website; marketing is a YouTube video; marketing is a press release.

Marketing is how you are going to evangelize the awesomeness of your product and why people would be foolish not to buy it.

To some people, marketing is simply selling at internet-scale.

The reality, however, is that marketing is much, much more than this. The concept of the marketing mix (sometimes referred to as the 4Ps of marketing) was introduced by Neil Borden in the 1950s and remains an insightful way to understand the role of marketing.

Most people are familiar with the marketing mix but here it is for those who are not:

• Product—includes considerations about functionality, quality, appearance, packaging, brand, service, support and warranty
• Price— encompasses list pricing, discounts, financing, leasing options and allowances 
• Place—spans ecommerce, distribution, retail locations, geographies, channel partners and logistics 
• Promotion—includes messaging, content, social media, websites, public relations, analyst relations, and tradeshows.

As this illustrates, marketing isn’t just a few, disaggregated, outbound activities. It is, instead, a comprehensive and strategic function that should be the kernel of your business.

Marketing is important and it needs to be done right—a study by CB Insights, a venture capital database, found that ineffective marketing was the eighth (of 20) most common reason given by startup founders when explaining why their businesses had failed. (Reasons that were rated less important included an inability to attract investors, poor responsiveness to customers and employee burnout!)

So, why is marketing often implemented poorly by small business owners? Ironically, marketing isn’t difficult—and I believe the reason it’s done badly is simply because many entrepreneurs are too busy addressing topics that are deemed to be higher priority…until it’s too late.

Yes, marketing is a website; marketing is a YouTube video; marketing is a press release. But marketing is much more than these. Successful marketing requires adoption of a holistic vision of what to make, how much to sell it for, where to sell it and how to educate buyers about how it benefits them.

Until then, marketing will remain a topic that everyone thinks she/he understands but that few genuinely do.

Thanks for reading.