Discover why you need to create your own unique content strategy using the three critical elements of content marketing.
IN THE WAY that I look at it, there are three key elements to running a successful content marketing program: consistency, persistence, and patience.
No. 1 – Be Consistent & Keep Your Promises
Consistency is about making a promise to your audience and then coming through on that promise over and over again. You can’t have a one and done mentality: you can’t say, I’m going to write six blog posts and that’s going to be it. That might be once a week, that might be twice a month, it might be way more frequent that than that, or there might be more space in between that. It’s up to you and your audience but you have to be consistent about it. If you’re going to build trust, you’ve got to show up consistently.
No. 2 – Persistence is Key to Building your Business
Let’s talk about persistence. I call this the engine of consistency. If you feel like no one is listening, remember the goal is not to get the word out. Remember, if you go into every single piece thinking that you’re producing a cornerstone piece of content, that’s how I tend to refer to this, something that is a great statement of what you do in your business, you’re creating durable assets. And content is a business asset, so keep creating those. It may be crickets today, and that’s okay because think about this, you’re going to use that piece of content four weeks from now, four months from now, and if you construct it right maybe even four years from now.
No. 3 – Patience Helps with Persistence
The last thing is patience. Obviously, I’ve said that this is going to take a long time, might take nine months to get this off the ground. For me, and this is not to be discouraging, but it took me 200 blog posts before I started to see some sort of return on this. It doesn’t have to take you as long, but all I’m trying to say is listen, be patient about it.
You’re going to have to be consistent, show up, be very persistent about it, and keep going. When you publish your first post, if you get one person to react to it, one person say that helped me out quite a bit, that’s a victory. And celebrate that victory right, because that’s one small step. Now all you’ve got do is iterate do that again.
Understanding Various Types of Content
So with all of this content that you’re creating, it’s probably going to fall into two classes. There’s company-centric content, the stuff that’s’s about you, and then there’s customer-centric content, and both are valuable.
I’ve been talking a lot about providing value to your audience and all, but of course you do have to have the company centric content as well. You have to tell people, in clear terms, what your business is about, what do you do, what problems do you solve. I need to know when I get there is your business the right thing for me at this moment. That’s the rubric that I use for this, I find that it helps me, I find it’s a really good way for me to help my clients as well, and I hope that it will work for you as well.
Forming Your Own Unique Content Strategy
Now you’ve got to find your own methods. The thing that’s really fun about content marketing, at least to me, working with a wide variety of businesses, is that every single instance of it looks different.
Start now, start building your content, have it all be part of a cohesive content strategy, and you’ll get results. And I would argue that this organic growth that you’ll see will be way more valuable than that sort of “awareness-only” mentality. Because you’re going to have real relationships with your customers, with your clients, and you’re going to be able to see repeatable business, repeatable revenue. It’s really amazingly powerful, and I encourage you to take advantage of it.
