Content Marketing – Revenue Zone

Content marketing is a way to build an audience who will buy or refer people to buy your product.

People buy from people (and companies) they trust. People trust people (and companies) they know. Content marketing helps people get to know you, your company, your product, and how your product will help them meet their needs. This builds awareness (that you exist), trust, and eventually sales. Sometimes this process happens within the span of minutes, and sometimes it might take days, weeks, or months of continuous contact before someone becomes a customer. The beautiful thing about content marketing is that it lets the customer build their relationship with you at their own pace. There are things you can do to push it along but it’s ultimately up to them.

Another amazing advantage of content marketing is that you can start doing it to build an audience before you have a product. When you build an audience, you can get to know them and what their needs are, and then you’ll know what product to create for them.

If you already have a product, you can test it with your audience to know if you have “product-market fit”. Your audience is your market, it’s who you’re able to reach and sell to. If they’re not interested in your product, or not interested enough to make it into a successful business, you can achieve product-market fit in one of two ways: either your marketing has reached the wrong audience and you have to adjust it to attract the right audience for your product, or you’ve built the wrong product for the audience you have and you need to change your product to something they want to buy.

One of the great advantages of content marketing is that there are so many ways you can do it. You can start with content marketing with very little time and no money, or you can spend more time and money to create more and better content.

Whether you’re starting a side hustle or working on your startup full time, whether you’re still brainstorming your product ideas or already have something built, content marketing is a great way to launch and expand your business.

How to get started with applying content marketing to your business:

Make sure you have a business purpose already in mind.
Think about your target audience and your ideal customer profile.
Make a work schedule of how much time you’ll spend doing this every week.
Make a production schedule of how often you’ll post new content.
Decide on your format (you can have more than one, see the list below).
Create a channel (you can have more than one, see the list below).
Make a list of ideas for what you want to create.
Start creating and posting content, one piece at a time!

Advanced content marketing strategies:

When you have a product to sell, incorporate the sales route into your content marketing
If you’re posting content in multiple channels, advertise your other channels so people can see and engage with more of your content; promote the most interactive channels that can lead to sales
Create some items that are designed for sharing, to help your audience refer people to you

Make a work schedule

The work schedule can be very simple. Here are some examples:

30 minutes a day, 4 days a week, Mon-Thu, during lunch. 2 hrs total.
1 hour a day, 3 days a week, after work. 3 hrs total.
4 hours a day, 1 day a week, on Saturday morning. 4 hrs total.
1 hour a day, 5 days a week, before work. 5 hrs total.

Do whatever works for you. Content marketing is a creative activity so you want to create the best conditions for that kind of work. Many people who are creative say that a schedule helps a lot. It might help you eliminate distractions and focus for that limited time because you know you’ll get back to the rest of your life after 30 minutes, or an hour, or half a day, or whatever.

Read “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp for a more in-depth look at how to unleash your creativity.

Make a production schedule

How much you work and how much or how often you publish something are two separate things.

The production schedule keeps you focused on the tasks you need to accomplish each time you work on your content. Here are some examples for a work schedule of 1 hour a day, 3 days a week:

Write and publish one blog post each day. Total output is 3 blog posts per week.
Spend one hour brainstorming and scripting, one hour filming, and one hour editing and publishing. Total output is 1 video per week, between 15 and 30 minutes long.
Write and publish one blog post on Monday. Write and publish one social media post on Wednesday. Record, edit, and publish one video on Friday. Total output is 1 blog post, 1 social media post, 1 video 5 to 10 minutes long, per week.

You can also extend the production schedule to a month so you can vary what you do each week. For example:

Week 1. Write and publish one blog post each day. Total output is 3 blog posts per week.
Week 2. Spend one hour brainstorming and scripting, one hour filming, and one hour editing and publishing. Total output is 1 video per week, between 15 and 30 minutes long.
Week 3. Write and publish one blog post on Monday. Write and publish one social media post on Wednesday. Record, edit, and publish one video on Friday. Total output is 1 blog post, 1 social media post, 1 video 5 to 10 minutes long, per week.
Week 4. No content marketing, work on the product this week.

You can then extend the production schedule to a 3-month period:

Month 1. Try new topics to see if they generate interest.
Month 2. More in-depth content on topics that generated interest.
Month 3. Content that ties successful topics with your product.

That’s all you need. The 3-month plan gives you context, the 1-month plan gives you variety, and the 1-week plan gives you focus.

Content format

Content marketing is about communicating with your audience, and there’s a variety of ways you can do that. Here are some examples:

Bite-size writing. These are 1-sentence or 2-sentence “tweets” or very brief Facebook posts.
Short-form writing. These are short or medium-length Facebook or blog posts, and letters to the editor.
Long-form writing. These are longer Facebook or blog posts, or articles.
Book writing. These are short books, and can also be a compilation of related articles.
Novel. The average length of an adult novel is 90,000 words. This will be a big undertaking.
Quick video. These are very short videos, under 1 minute long. You can post them on TikTok, Instagram (up to 1 minute long), and also most places that will accept longer videos too.
Short-form video. These are short videos, under 15 minutes long. You can post them on TikTok (up to 30 minutes long), YouTube, LinkedIn (up to 15 minutes), Facebook (up to 2 hours long), etc. Some of these platform have even shorter limits like it can only be up to 1 minute long.
Long-form video. These are longer videos, under 1 hour long. You can post them in YouTube, Facebook, or other video hosting sites.
Feature video. These are movie-length videos, typically 90 minutes. This could be a long webinar that is recorded. You can post them in YouTube, Facebook, or other video hosting sites.
Documentary video. These can be shorter or longer than movies, typically 75 to 120 minutes long. You can post them in YouTube, Facebook (up to 2 hours long), or other video hosting sites.

In addition to the writing vs video format, there’s also audio-only like podcasts and audio books. You can also choose between using your own voice or an AI-generated voice, and your own image or an animation.

Create a channel

You need a place to post your content, and it needs to work for the kind of content you want to publish.

For writing, you can use a blog or a social media account. For blogs, you can host your own WordPress site or subscribe to a cloud-hosted site, or you can post on other people’s sites like Medium. For social media, you can create an account on Facebook or LinkedIn and post there.

For videos, you can use a video sharing site like YouTube and TikTok, or any social media site that also allows videos like LinkedIn and Instagram, or some blog sites that also allow videos like WordPress.

You can create multiple channels and post your content on the appropriate one depending on what you made. Then, for the channels where you can’t or don’t want to post it directly, you can prepare “teaser” posts that talk about what you did and have a link to the original post on another site.

For example, if you record and publish a 45-minute how-to video on YouTube, you can write a brief post to share on Facebook and LinkedIn that talk about what’s in the video, and maybe even post a 30-second or 1-minute video with some excerpts, and link to the original video on YouTube so people can watch the whole thing.

Make a list of ideas

Write down the topics you want to use as inspiration for writing or recording. You can create multiple items about the same topic or different aspects of the same topic, so having the list doesn’t mean you only do something once. But we need to be efficient with our time, so when our brain is in idea mode let’s write down as many ideas as possible. Then we can do the work anytime after that.

Here are some ideas for coming up with ideas:

Teaching topics for your audience. Talk about the problem, the solution, or what are the characteristics of an effective solution.
Stories. They can be your stories or other people’s stories that you share. People with a problem, people who found a solution, origin stories of people who “made it” in whatever sense is important to your audience, funny stories, and tragic stories.
News. Industry news, trends, product announcements, new laws or regulations, disasters, good news, and alerts or “watch out for” news.
Reactions. Your reaction to articles or videos created by others, to recent events, to customer emails you received (good or bad — if it’s good, go team! if it’s bad, sorry we’ll try to do better).
Polls. Talk about a problem or issue and ask “is this also a problem for you?”, or talk about something interesting and ask “what do you think?” with some options, or talk about something controversial and ask if people agree or disagree.
Try something and report. Install and try software or any other tool — is it easy to use? does it solve the problem? what are its limitations? what do you love about it? Try a new food or drink, attending an event, enjoying a park or hotel, and share your experience.
Play the “what if” game. Ask a question and talk through one or more possible answers. What if this or that thing in the world could be different? What if this or that thing in the world could be improved?

Get to work!

Content marketing is a long-term investment in your business.

Compass

Return to revenue activities, market research, or steps to start a new business.