You've heard that content marketing is an essential part of business, but you might still be wondering how to use content marketing to get you actual customers.
Chris Marr is a content marketing expert and founder of CMA (The Content Marketing Academy) – pretty impressive stuff!
In this episode Chris talks us through how to map out your content marketing journey, and the critical steps to making killer content…
Subscribe now on your favourite podcast player:
How do you make your content marketing commercial?
- When you own a business you are deciding where you are putting your resources.
- We ultimately have to be making the right type of content.
- We have to figure out how to create content that helps a prospective customer to make a buying decision.
Should you follow what your competitors are doing or try something different?
- One of the challenges of content marketing is “well our competitors are already doing that”.
- You have to think, how you can do it differently than your competition. One of the biggest mistakes is comparing yourself to the competition.
- The ultimate factor that determines what content to create is how do your customers make a buying decision and what problems and frustrations are they having and what content can we create to make it more easy, faster and smoother for them.
How do we map out the journey of someone who has never heard of you to ultimately becoming a customer?
- If you want to build a good content marketing process you need to see the big picture but you also need to zoom in really specifically, to a point in the process where you need to build content around that.
- Ultimately what we are doing as marketers is we're predicting the intent and questions so that when someone needs us they can find us and we can serve them in the right way.
What is the most effective channel to reach customers in terms of ROI right now?
- It’s a combination of things.
- Blogs and video. I would lead with video but back it up with the blog.
- Focus on people that are already in the sales process.
Is content marketing something that business owners should be doing themselves or should they outsource it?
- It depends on the size of business you have.
- It’s more about working to do the work that only you can do.
- We really want people to do as much in-house before they outsource.
How do we decide what content we should produce first?
- Ask which area of your business needs attention first.
- You need to pick a problem first and then develop a content strategy to solve that problem.
- The biggest challenge for most people that get into content marketing is that it is not aligned with the strategic direction within the company. That’s why people say it’s undervalued and then that’s why they ultimately don’t spend money on it.
Content creation – Is it better to do the SEO and tech side first or do the creative side first?
- It’s probably a bit of both at the same time.
- Right now there is a lot of content out there. You are going to have to find something that makes your content stand out from the rest.
- The technical aspects have to go without saying. You need to make sure that what you create has the best chance of getting results.
A book that you would recommend…
Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
What is your top success habit?
I journal every day.
Who do you look up to?
Marcus Sheridan.
What are your favourite apps right now?
We just switched over to Basecamp and it's totally changed the way we work.
Here’s the big one… who do you like more, Rob or Kennedy?
I've got to go with Rob for the creativity of the game!
Finally, where can folks go to find out more about you?
Go find me on Twitter @chrismarr101 and from there you can jump over to the website or tweet me!
Leave a Comment