Content marketing has received a lot of attention over the past few years as a particularly effective method for reaching prospects, generating leads and retaining customers.

Content marketing relies on providing information that solves problems and builds trust with prospects and existing customers alike. It’s being used by some of the largest marketing organizations in the world, including P&G, Microsoft and Cisco Systems. It’s also being used (or considered) by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe.

Why? Because a well executed content marketing program can improve lead generation, revenue growth, and customer retention.

But is content marketing right for you? These four questions can help you decide if content marketing might be a good fit:

1. Do you need to educate prospects and clients? Everyone knows how to use a paperclip or a stapler. But few prospects are aware of how to develop a strategy for and execute an effective social media promotion. Content marketing is an outstanding tool for educating prospects on why they need your product or service, understanding what they have to gain, and what they have to lose if they don’t get it right.
2. How long and complex is the buying cycle? If you’re selling custom products or services that solve specific problems with a buying cycle that’s typically 3 to 6 months or longer, content marketing is probably a very good fit for you. However, if your sales cycle is short and transactional, content marketing would hold little value for you because prospects conduct little to no research other than comparing prices, credit and shipping terms.
3. How many people are involved in making the buying decision? If your prospects usually need to move up or across the organization to get buy-in before making a purchase, content marketing is probably a good fit for you. By providing valuable, trustworthy content that’s easily shared with others, you make it easy for prospects to cut through the red tape and move forward easily to close the deal once they’re ready.
4. What is the cost of completing a transaction? The cost of completing a transaction ties in with questions 1 through 3. The lower the cost per transaction, the less likely you’ll need to educate your prospects, the more likely your buying cycle will be short, and the more likely buying decisions won’t be made by committee.

Content marketing is just one tool available to help you succeed. To learn more about it, download our free special report titled, How to Generate Leads and Attract Today’s Prospects. Whenever you’re ready to take the plunge, contact us to find out how we can help with the right marketing tools for your business or non-profit.

Want to show prospects you’re the real deal? Use a bait piece. A bait piece is a giveaway that entices prospects to share their information with you because, in turn, they receive something of value.

A bait piece can help you make an excellent first impression—but only if you do it right.

In a recent post, I talked about why you need a bait piece, and shared some examples of good ones. Today, I’m giving you the dos and don’ts:

1. Give something away for free. When I talk about value, I’m talking about something you might otherwise charge for. This is the real way to show value.
2. Look at clients’ needs, top concerns, and pain points. Nobody can benefit from a generic bait piece. Make sure it’s created directly for your audience.
3. Put effort/time/money into it. First impressions are everything. If your bait piece is the first window you’re providing into your business, don’t you think it’s worth the investment to do it right?
4. Be innovative. Go one step further than your competitors. Give your audience something more. Provide something different—that’s needed—but often overlooked or ignored.
5. Make it visible. Once you’ve created this bait piece, promote it where people can see it. Add it to your blog, social networking profiles and other outlets, including your email signature. Spread the word.
6. Make it easy. If it takes 10 steps to get this valuable bait piece, people will lose interest. Have a simple sign up process, and just give it to them.
7. Don’t make your bait piece an advertisement. This means no sales pitches, one-sheets or promotional language. Don’t try to pass off your marketing materials as bait pieces. It’s just going to annoy people.
8. Don’t use outdated material. Update your bait piece to keep it relevant. Otherwise, your audience might view all of your company’s offerings as outdated.
9. Don’t call it a bait piece. The term is for marketing purposes only.  Please don’t offer a “bait piece” on your website—instead, call it the specific, value-packed tool that it is.

People hesitate to sign up for newsletters. They’re afraid you’re going to send them nonsense (a lot of companies do). By offering something up-front with real value, it will show your merit. Follow the rules above, and you’ll have a bait piece that gets, and keeps, your prospects interested.

Any other rules to add? Please leave a comment.

In content marketing, a bait piece is a free, useful resource that gives prospects a taste of your expertise, and brings them into your business loop. One great use for a bait piece is to build your newsletter subscriber list. Offering your prospects something of value will make sharing their information more worthwhile.

Too many newsletters are actually thinly disguised—and sometimes blatant—advertisements. A newsletter should provide real value and help the reader solve problems and find answers. A bait piece can show you will deliver. In addition to sharing previous newsletters (so prospects can see what they’ll be getting), offering a valuable, immediate goodie can further encourage people to sign up.

Creating an effective bait piece means answering the following questions:

Why should somebody share contact information with you? How will a relationship with you and your organization improve their lives?

The right bait piece does just that by demonstrating value up front, for free, no strings attached.

Consider the following examples:

1. Free email series. What are your clients interested in? For a weight-loss surgery practice, a leading concern among prospects is insurance coverage. An educational series on how to qualify for insurance coverage addresses this concern.
2. White papers. Once found mainly in the technology industry, these authoritative reports now help readers in almost every sector solve real-world problems. For example, one white paper for a fulfillment house shows prospective clients how a new packaging solution delivered annual postage savings of more than $430,000 for one company.
3. Webinars. What keeps your prospects awake at night? What changes have them scouring the Internet for more information? Create an information-packed webinar that delivers information and solutions to their desktops.
4. Free consultation/session: Give prospects a free taste of your services. This allows them to see the value that you offer—and gives you an opportunity to leave them wanting more. (No sales pitches.)
5. Free tools. Give prospects a tool that will make their lives easier. For instance, the contract security sector frequently uses RFP (Request for Proposal) documents to screen vendors. By publishing a free RFP template, a security guard firm can build a positive rapport with prospects that need guidance in creating an RFP document.

Don’t worry about giving too much away. If you make this bait piece available on your website, and somebody uses it, they will learn about, and hopefully lean towards, your services because of it. By showing expertise, you will become their go-to expert and stand apart from the competition.

Which bait pieces have you used? What’s worked the best?

What if running one mile could give you the health benefits of running 10? Without the pain, time or hard work? Sadly, you can’t do this with running, but you can achieve similar results with your marketing content.

When you write a useful, insightful marketing piece like a newsletter or a blog post, give it the exposure it deserves. Put all of your marketing tools to work to showcase your content. Here’s how, step-by-step:

1. Write one smart, savvy newsletter. Send it to your subscribers. Good start, but don’t stop here. Many people do, and these people spend a lot more effort for fewer eyes.
2. Blog it. Now, take an excerpt from the newsletter and publish it on your blog. Link to the newsletter to “read more,” and include a link where blog readers can sign up to receive your newsletter, too.
3. Share it. Tweet an interesting idea from the newsletter on Twitter; share it on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can set up automatic updates, but we recommend highlighting a particularly compelling segment.
4. Give it voice and video. Record your newsletter as an audio file for your podcast stream, and then as a video to promote on YouTube or Vimeo. What starts with written words can turn into verbal ones.
5. Expand your outlets. Use the newsletter as a guest post on another high-traffic blog or as an article for a magazine. For these outlets, the content likely won’t be the same as your newsletter, but you can use the original idea as a foundation.
6. Link back to your website. Now that you have these effective marketing tools floating around in cyberspace, promote them on your website. Link to your latest newsletter, your social media profiles, blogs, videos and podcasts. Display your guest posts, and link to the articles you’ve written. This way, a new prospect has ready access to all your methods of communication. You might have a complete library of compelling content, but if it’s scattered and people can’t find it, it’s being under-utilized.

Do you want your words to reach 100 or 1,000? Just because we put something “out there” doesn’t mean everyone sees it. Our audience only sees tidbits, snippets and certain channels. That’s why re-purposing our content isn’t being lazy, it’s being smart. It simply reinforces our message and makes the benefits go further.

Do you have any favorite tips on getting more mileage from your content? Please start by sharing with us here. (And if you need help developing that content, let’s talk.)

A white paper is an effective marketing tool most often used for B2B communication, especially in the IT industry, although their use has spread to nearly all business sectors. How effective are they? According to TechTarget 2009 Media Consumption Report, 90% of survey respondents stated that white papers were effective tools in buyers’ decision-making processes.

A white paper provides detailed analysis of a complex topic, such as a new technology or process, market trends, industry news, regional information, anything that requires space shorter than a book but longer than a letter, typically 5-15 pages.

Businesses use white papers when they want to:

• Establish expertise, authority, and credibility in their business field or marketplace.
• Educate potential customers or raise awareness about complex topics.

White papers are usually multi-sectional reports written in straightforward, factual prose. They are not sales letters or brochures. A news-oriented style is far more effective.

The aim is to convey the key messages to the prospect as easily as possible, so a white paper needs an executive summary and possibly a table of contents outlining the interior sections. The executive summary is critical, as many of your prospect’s top decision makers will read only that. The executive summary should outline the paper’s topic, state your business’s understanding of the topic, and recommend a solution or approach.

The rest of the paper should then go into the details, section by section, in a thorough, informative way. White papers should not be coy with information. Their aim is to build trust and credibility; vague language and pie-in-the-sky solutions impede that aim. The strength of white papers is that by being informative, your prospects will use them as part of their research and decision-making process, thus building the trust you want your prospect to feel.

Keep in mind that a white paper is only one step among many in what can be complicated sales processes, but it is an effective step.

When people think of keyword research, they usually think of search marketing – either organic search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click (PPC) search advertising. However, keyword research also plays a vital role in a content marketing program.

Content marketing involves providing the information your targeted prospects crave – usually for free. By providing expertise, you build trust over time. When your prospects reach the point where they are ready to do business, they come to you and not to your competitors. Content marketing is all about pulling your prospects in and building trust.

It stands to reason that your prospects need to find the content you provide. One effective way to help  prospects find your content is through an organic SEO campaign. But content marketing isn’t just about driving traffic to your website. It’s about drawing highly targeted prospects to your content and then delivering the information they seek. And professional keyword research can help you do just that.

Keywords, Your Prospects and Your Content

Developing an understanding of your ideal prospects means you need to know everything you can about them, including, but not limited to, which keyword phrases they use when conducting a search. Armed with this information, you’ll have a better understanding of the types of problems they face and hope to solve.

In a content marketing program, you’re not just looking for keywords with the most volume and least competition (or lowest cost-per-click rate for paid advertising) as you might in a search marketing program.

While that information is useful, you also need to know which specific keyword phrases coincide with the information assets you can provide now or develop in the near future. Once you identify those keyword phrases and integrate them into your program, you will attract the right prospects. Even better, once they arrive, they will better relate to – and value – your message because it “speaks their language.”

Keywords, Locations and Trends

If you operate within one or more specific regional areas, data developed from keyword research needs to be refined further to discover the exact phrases and variations that prospects in your geographic area(s) of operation are most likely to use. Professional keyword research can provide you with that information. In some cases, down to the city level.

Another aspect of keyword research considers trends.

Because content marketing programs take time to pay off, include related keyword phrases trending upward in popularity – even though those phrases may be less popular at the moment than an alternate phrase that’s in decline.

This strategy helps assure that, while developing your content assets, you will continue to attract prospects and extend the longevity of your content marketing efforts.

The Keyword Research Process – And Its Value

The keyword research process is one of discovery. It’s a filtering, drill-down approach, much like an inverted pyramid that progresses from the obvious to the “Aha! I hadn’t considered that, but it makes perfect sense.”

Professional keyword research offers high value returns for any type of online marketing campaign. In fact, the results can often suggest new product lines or service offerings.

In content marketing, keyword research can help uncover problems for which your prospects are desperately seeking solutions: problems you may not have considered. Addressing those problems and offering solutions then becomes the basis for developing your content. Your content takes on a sharper focus, provides greater value (or, at the very least, the perception of providing greater value), builds a stronger degree of trust over time and, as a result, improves the overall effectiveness of your program and its return on investment.

Do you use keyword research to drive your online marketing strategy? If so, what results have you seen?