Content marketing turns your customer acquisition strategy around 180 degrees

By Mark Helfen

NOTE NEW MEETING LOCATION-
We are now meeting at:
Silicon Valley Innovation Center
3200 Coronado Drive. Santa Clara, CA 95051
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/qE7Xl


Content marketing turns your customer acquisition strategy around 180 degrees. Instead of using advertising to find customers, create valuable content so customers will find you.

Or so says Barry Feldman, speaker at Monday’s SVForum MarketingSIG, February 11. Feldman “creates compelling content by telling stories” at his eponymous business, Feldman Creative. The idea is that by creating content of value to your future customers, they will start down the path of being current customers.

The dynamics of marketing communication have changed, putting customers in control, making an advertising strategy much harder. People don’t like being sold to.

“We all have our media filters on,” said Feldman. “We consume as little advertising as possible.”  In creating web contents, you need to “ditch the pitch,” treat the reader as a friend, and create content that is valuable. He recommends a “journalistic approach.”

Some people have described content marketing as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. By having “real” content using lots of the right words, search engines (meaning Google) will consider your page as valuable to their search customers, and it will appear higher in Google’s results.

But Feldman recommends against this, saying is compromises the quality of your content. Don’t write for a robot - create value for your customers. You need to be aware of how Google ranks pages, but it can’t be the driver. Besides, as Google’s engineers keep improving their ranking it’s getting harder and harder to fool their search algorithms.

So, are you ready to create invaluable content? The presentation will include a 7-step list for getting started, including a number of potential topics to cover in your writing.

Feldman practices what he preaches, and is clearly a prolific writer. You can see examples of his work here:

Your Site is the Mousetrap, Your Content is the Cheese

Why You Shouldn’t Do Content Marketing

Do You Have the Skills to Cut It in Content Marketing?

And most recently:

Only Birdbrains Bet $4,000,000 on the Super Bowl

And for some more help in getting started, Feldman recently published an ebook:

The Plan to Grow Your Business with Effective Online Marketing available here.

But maybe you don’t think you’re a writer at all. Some people are “writer phobic,” caused in some cases by “perfection paralysis.”

Well, you don’t need to be a great writer, as long as you’re knowledgeable on your subject and understand what your customers want. But if you can’t write, speak (or as Feldman puts it, “yakk”.) Talk into a camera, telling a compelling story using your knowledge and enthusiasm, and use the resulting words as a basis for you or someone else to write content based on what you say.

So come by Monday, and get started with getting your customers to come to you.




Please sign up on our meetup page:

=============


Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

=============