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The goal of content marketing is to acquire customers by creating and sharing media and publishing information. The focus is not selling, but simply communicating with customers and prospects. Information can be presented as news, video, white paper, e-book, infographic, case study, photos, etc. Overall, the concept is to inspire both business and loyalty from customers by delivering valuable information, consistently.

An early example of successful content marketing can be seen by the John Deere magazine, The Furrow, which shared information to farmers to make a better profit. This magazine, which reaches 1.5 million readers in 40 countries in 12 languages, is considered the first custom publication having launched in 1895. So much has changed since then, but the intent is still the same. Both enterprise level and small businesses face the same struggles: creating engaging, frequent, and a varied assortment of content. On an average marketing budget, 25% of the budget is spent on content development, delivery and promotion.

The key to posting interesting content marketing: good content! Here are 3 tips to make your content worth reading.

1. Become a solver

Identify your ideal customer, and then figure out what problems you can solve for them. Your content could be answering your customer questions, explaining things that cause them confusion, or offering product research and suggestions. This information by itself may not increase your sales, but as these customers are using and sharing your information, it will reach someone that is interested in your product or service. So if you can solve a common problem for your customers, you can increase revenue from your content marketing efforts.

2. Stay relevant

A common distraction with content marketing is to achieve maximum link-backs. However, if the content that is drawing your audience does not relate to your site, there will be no change in revenue. Come up with content that is pertinent to your business product or service, so that it can help your ideal customer.

3. Be educational

Successful content is more about getting laughs or sharing emotionally appealing pictures; it has educational and useful content. Build data-rich statistics in an infographic, collect and share data, and post lists and how to guides on a blog.

Topics for content marketing can be found by paying attention to your industry and customers. Follow other discussion on social media and traditional media, such as news outlets. Review the questions or issues that are most frequently sent to your support team. Look at your web analytics to find out what pages on your site are most popular, and expand these topics into multiple posts. Once you are writing good content, you can begin to market the content.

Image credit:  Rosaura Ochoa

Used with permission from Article Aggregator