Show notes
Episode 009: What is Content Marketing? Episode Summary: Is content marketing a buzz word or is it really something we as ecommerce website owners need to be spending time on? In this episode Julie talks about what content marketing is and is not as well as give an overview of developing a content marketing strategy. Episode Links: https://savvybusinessmethod.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert Hello and welcome to episode nine of the Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Now before we get started today, talking about content marketing, I have a few housekeeping things for you. First, I want to remind you that you can find links to resources I talk about in any of these podcasts in the show notes along with a transcript of the show. I realize that most of you are probably multi-tasking right now, right. You're either driving or you're picking up your kids or you're making dinner, or you're trying to organize all of your receipts for your accounting program. And you may need to go back later and find a piece of information so the transcript can really help with that. Next up I wanted to let you know that I have about 30 mini videos right now up on YouTube and I have more coming soon. There all about two to three minutes long and they're just quick tips for running e-commerce websites. They encompass everything from customer service to marketing to running a warehouse and shipping orders so lots of different things up there and if you have any ideas or things you'd like me to talk about in a video going forward, be sure to reach out to me at savvybusinessmethod.com I am also up on Facebook. So I'm posting there a couple of times a day now at Savvy Business Method on Facebook and I'm putting up videos, links to these podcasts, as well as just interesting resources from around the internet too. Be sure to come on over and "like" the page and check that out so that we can connect there as well. All right enough with the announcements let's move on to today's topic, which is content marketing. Now content marketing seems sort of like a buzz word, right? Especially if you're new to the e-commerce sphere. It can sound like something that maybe we talk about at marketing conferences to make ourselves sound cool and customer-focused but I really want to get in today to the nitty gritty of what content marketing looks like and what are the things you need to be thinking about if you decide to use content marketing for your e-commerce website. All right. So there's a lot of confusion about what content marketing is and isn't so I wanna start out with two quick stories of what content marketing looks like in action. Now this first story I don't have a name for this company because this is a story that's been around the internet for a while but I'm going to tell it to you because it is such a good example. There was a swimming pool company that of course didn't have a lot of work during the off season, right. Not very many people putting in pools in January in most of the country. And so they spent their off season writing up answers to every customer question they could imagine and then putting those short articles up on their website. This ended up generating loads of traffic from all over the world. It gave them plenty of customers for that next season and really established their business and with a steady stream of customers in the long run. So it was really important for them in terms of their growth to have all of that content up on their website. All right my next example is personal. I had a health food company for about nine years and we sold ingredients, food ingredients. In the beginning I decided pretty early to start putting up articles, like how to articles and recipes for using these products. Then we expanded to videos eventually which were made in the upstairs of my house. But I gotta tell you that content ended up being really valuable. In the end we ended up with about 2,000 pieces of content on the website which is a ridiculous amount and I'll talk in a little bit later in today's podcast about why you probably don't wanna go that overboard. But that content allowed my website to become well known as the place to go for those products because we had all that information in addition to having the high quality products. So content marketing can be really valuable for establishing your authority in a market. So let's talk about what this looks like from a customer's perspective. Content marketing is about providing valuable information that isn't selling anything. All right. So because you're offering such great information without a direct sales pitch, people tend to become loyal to your brand. They know your name. They see you as being helpful, and an expert in this area. Content marketing from your customer's perspective is also about having an information eco-system around your product. So this can be things like articles or recipes, if you're working in food like I was. It can also be things like polls or quizzes, or videos. In-person events. Apps, e-books, webinars, infographics, there's so many options, right. So many things that you can do to create content that would support your customer's use of your product and make your brand more valuable to them. Because at it's core content marketing is about education and engagement. It's not about direct promotion. Now all that being said, from our perspective as business owners who are selling products online, we actually do need to sell our products, right. This is how we stay in business, this is how we pay our bills. So what does content marketing provide from our perspective as business owners? Well first it elevates the perceived value of our brand. This is good for building that long term value and customer loyalty. Right. It also can set up apart from our competition unless you're lucky enough to be in a market where you have no competition. First off, that's probably a temporary situation, right. So you gotta bulletproof your situation. But you need to be able to show value to your customer that is different from what your competitors are doing and content marketing is a great way to do that. Now I wanna be clear here though that you want to be helpful and even though we as business owners are trying to sell things, we really do need to go into our content strategy with this idea that we wanna be helpful, that we wanna be educational. That we're building a long term relationship with our customers. This is not the time to be sneaky. And be trying constantly sneak in sales pitches. Customers are smart and I gotta tell you especially this younger generation, the millennials that are coming up behind us Gen-X'ers. They are extremely savvy and the generation behind them even more so in terms of identifying when they are being played or their perception of they're being played. If they're reading an educational article and it's clear that you're just trying to sell them something, they're gonna pick up on that really quickly. So get in that mindset if you gonna do content marketing, you gotta get in this mindset that you are being helpful and educational. Okay? Okay. Let's start talking about some guidelines for getting started with a content marketing strategy. The first thing I wanna talk with you about is that content marketing is not a quick fix. Now I know that those two stories I told at the beginning of this episode sound like a quick fix, right. We talked about the pool company that over their off season it ended up building up their business with content marketing. I told you about my health food company where we had the 2,000 articles. This sounds very quick. A lot of the success stories that you will hear about content marketing on the internet, on the wiles of the internet. The fabulous stories are gonna sound like they were a quick fix. And I just wanna be clear about this upfront. A lot of the stories that you're going to hear are going to be from several years ago and by several I mean, 5, 10, 12 years ago. Back when the internet was a great deal less crowded. There were less websites, there were less articles, videos, content in general and so the competition to rank on Google was a lot less stringent. Okay. And so because of that it was easier back in the good ole days, back when I had my first e-commerce website, I'm gonna tell you it was easier to rank on Google for a piece of content. But even with that easier situation that we no longer have, darn it. When I first started putting up content in 2009 there was no magic bullet there. Like truly. It helped people decide to buy from my company but it wasn't sending me a ton traffic. So about four or five years later I have this really clear memory, so that would be what, 2013, 2014. I had come to work. I was sitting at my desk in the corner of our warehouse. E-commerce management is a really glamorous situation, I had no walls but that was my desk. I was looking at Google Analytics which I did pretty much every day and it suddenly hit me. For the first time that Google liked us. Google was actually sending a significant amount of organic traffic to my website via this now, it was probably 1,000 pages, articles at the time. So we were actually starting to get decent traffic numbers. And don't get me wrong, it wasn't like it was an overnight thing, it had been building for the last four or five years but it had finally happened. I just remember being shocked because I had just been putting up that information to be helpful, I knew you were supposed to put information up. After four or five years you kind of start losing hope that is really gonna do something for you. So this is just an example of even you know back in what were the good ole days of e-commerce, it was still a thing. Right. It was not an instant success. You might have some limited success when you do a content marketing strategy. Maybe you'll have a piece of content or two that will get shared out by a number of social media influencers. Or you might have a piece of content that does really well in a newsletter. I remember one night we had this one strange recipe that for some reason everybody opened, it felt like. We suddenly had great traffic to the website. So you just never know but this a long term strategy. It's not something that you should plan on being successful overnight or even in a season or quarter, or even in the next year. This is about building that long term loyalty. All right so now that I burst everyone's bubble that this is not gonna be a quick fix, let's talk more about how you do this. Now the first thing you're gonna wanna do with a content marketing strategy is to look at what your competition is doing and not doing. This is not the time to copy what your competition is doing. You wanna figure out what they're doing in this area and then figure out how you're going to do it better. And on brand. Right. Because this is about building brand loyalty and value. So you wanna look at what they're doing as a guide but you also will need to come up with your own spin on the situation. Along with that is this idea of having a clear idea of what your customer needs. So who is your target customer? What are their different points in the sales funnel? What does it look like when they're first finding out about your product or your company. What does it look like when they're making their sales decision? What does it look like when they purchase, what do they need to make that last push to purchase and then what sort of support do they need of the product they purchased. So that you can engender that loyalty and you can have that repeat purchase behavior that we need for e-commerce. Each piece of content you write really does need to have a clearly defined purpose. You should know who you're targeting. You should know where in the sales cycle they are at. You should know whether this is a piece of content to help someone see the value of your product to help support the product once they've bought it. To help them get other ideas for how to use the product, I mean there's so many options out there. But you don't want to use a shot gun approach here, right. Honestly you don't wanna do what I did. Where we wrote 2,000 pieces of content over the course of about eight years. Then suddenly you have 2,000 pages that don't necessarily have a clearly defined purpose but a couple hundred of them are getting really good traffic. And now that you have so much content you have to hire somebody to manage it all and believe me, you do not want to do that. I am very grateful for the people who managed the content for my health food website, they were amazing, they did a great job but that is another person to employ and a lot of content to manage. And so, I'm just encouraging you to be more strategic than I was about that. You also when you're writing content, you wanna make sure that you're not trying to use any SEO tricks okay. So this is things like thinking you're gonna stuff a bunch of key words or meta tags or something like that. And I think this is less of an issue now than it used to be. People used to do this stuff all the time because frankly at one point it worked okay. But the search engine algorithms are very smart. Smarter than all of us, and you are not going to trick them. The goal here needs to be to produce the most user friendly, highest quality piece of content you can. Do not skimp on quality. Those search engine algorithms are looking for the best piece of content for what the user is looking for when they type a search into the search engine. Okay. So now that you have a clear idea of what your customer wants, that all of your content has a clear purpose, you've written amazing, high quality content. The next step is to make sure that you have a plan for promoting each piece of content. Now a general rule of thumb you'll see often floating around with bloggers, now remember 'cause bloggers are selling their content essentially, right. By selling advertising for their site. So these are great people to follow and to pay attention to the techniques that they use because they are [inaudible 00:14:37] tend to be content masters. One of the rules you'll see in blogging circles is that you should plan to spend at least 2x as much time promoting your content as you did developing and writing it. Now that sounds weird, right? Like wait, wasn't writing that high quality content good enough. But no one's going to beat a path to your door with content that you just throw up on your website. The search engines don't see that as being valuable, people are not going to magically find it. You're gonna need to do some promotion. And so here's what this looks like. You yourself when you put an article up on your website, you need to be interlinking your content together. Like articles get linked together, they all link maybe to the product that they go to, that sort of thing. You're also going to need to spread your content around social media. You might even look at boosting a Facebook post for example. You'll want to use your content in a newsletter. Get that out to your subscribers. You want to get that content out to influencers, social media influencers if you can. And let me tell you that will be a way easier process if you have written amazing content that is truly helpful. You can also take your content and later expand on it. You can create a video, a webinar, a white paper, a podcast, an e-book, something. Right. You can always take your content and continue to expand on it and link to it, which will really help the popularity. All right so even once you have this high quality content and you promote it and it's generating traffic, it's really important to remember that this is not a permanent fix. Even if you have a great bank of quality content and you're generating a ton of traffic and it's bringing you a bunch of sales, it is entirely possible to slide backwards. I have seen this happen and it's tragic when it does. Search engines expect a regular stream of quality content and that your content is staying relevant to real people. Okay. So it's also pretty easy for someone else to come along and do this better. And take your spot as an expert. Again, I've seen it happen and it's just terrible when it does. Think of your content management strategy, or your content marketing strategy like a peri annual garden. Okay. So when we put in annual plants they die at the end of the season, right, we pull them out and put in new annuals at the beginning of the next season. With the peri annual garden these are the plants that come back year after year, right. So when we're planting these pieces of content, we're nurturing them. We're promoting them so that they can produce traffic and sales for our website. And then regularly checking in to tend to them so that they stay healthy long term. Content marketing is not a free thing, right, you're gonna put a lot of time and energy. Blood, sweat, and tears, right, into your content. So make sure that you are nurturing it long term so that it can be a long term source of traffic and revenue for you. All right well hopefully I've taken some of the mystery out of content marketing for you. In the end most e-commerce businesses will benefit from content marketing and this is really about being savvy and making it work best for you and your customers. I would imagine that we will deep dive in future episodes into some of these areas we've talked about and if there are areas that you would like me to talk about either on the podcast or on a YouTube video, reach out to me at savvybusinessmethod.com, I would love to hear from you and hear the ideas that you have and I will try to make as many of them as possible happen. But otherwise that's it for today. I will be back in your feed in a few days. In the meantime thanks so much for joining me today. I really do hope the information in this podcast helps you make excellent decisions for your own business. Be sure to check me out again on Facebook and YouTube and I would really appreciate it if you could rate and review this podcast. I love reading the reviews. They help me make tweaks and find better ways to bring this information to you. So I'll see you next time. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode please leave a review and subscribe and for more great content and to stay up-to-date visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time. Episode 009: What is Content Marketing?