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By creating and sharing valuable and relevant content with the goal of attracting and retaining a clearly defined audience, the process of content marketing can be compared to building up a savings account one deposit at a time.
Each piece represents a valuable piece of content, such as a blog post, social media post, or video. Over time, as more and more pieces are added, the full picture of the brand and its offerings becomes clearer to the audience. With consistent effort and high-quality content, content marketing can lead to increased brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately, sales.
Why “Compound Interest?”
Because it never goes away. Once it’s published, it lives online until it is taken down and it is constantly acting as a way to bring people through your marketing funnel. Just as a fisherman uses bait to lure fish to their fishing line, a business can use content to attract potential customers to their brand- the only difference is that you never have to re-bait or re-cast your line.
Know Thy Customer
When I work with new clients, I always ask for examples of their primary and secondary customers. In my experience, not understanding this clearly enough is why some businesses fail while their direct competitors succeed.
The key to using content as bait is to make sure that it is relevant and valuable to the target audience. This means understanding their pain points, interests, and preferences and creating content that addresses these needs. The content should also be easily discoverable, shareable, and engaging to encourage potential customers to interact with it and share it with others.
Where do I Cast my Line?
This is oversimplified, but here’s something to keep in mind. Once someone joins a social network, and builds most of their connections, they are hard-pressed to leave.
- Boomers and Gen-Xers (the current consumer generations) built their first social graphs on Facebook, and never left.
- Millenians and Zoomers built their social graphs on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
- Everyone uses YouTube.
- WhatApp is the Internet for anyone outside of the United States, or who has family outside of the US
My advice is always to start with quick, informative videos and graphics. Be helpful. Make sure the information you put out is useful and links back to your website or something with your contact info. When it comes to content marketing, you always give away the good stuff to build social proof, and sell them the product or service when they don’t want to do it themselves.
