Is There ROI on Showcasing Your Expertise Online?

Still on the fence about content marketing for your company or business? There are certainly some considerations before you take the plunge. Let’s have a look at a few of these.

Total cost: is it really cheaper? Yes! Traditional advertising is expensive and nearly impossible to measure the return. Social and digital publishing technologies – on which content marketing efforts reside – are all about ROI and visibility. Companies and business owners alike can instantly view followers, likes, retweets, comments, page views, and other data. Such feedback is critical to understanding what’s working and what’s not, so decisions can be made. And often the content delivers interest on the part of a potential buyer – a sales lead – furthering the case for content marketing.

The joys of feedback
Instant gratification is at the heart of content marketing. Knowing which content is performing helps us decide which to continue producing – and which to let go. But it’s not just the metrics and measurement of the content that should encourage you to jumpstart a content marketing program. It’s also the feedback from customers, partners, suppliers, and the industry or community in which you do business. Tweets, comments, shares, and other content behaviors will tell you what outsiders – or even insiders, your employees – think of your company. In this manner, content marketing becomes your ad hoc feedback form or survey, constantly providing you the insights into your business that are often difficult to obtain.

The need for processes in place
While content marketing ultimately proves to be less expensive – but so much more valuable – than traditional paid advertising, the costs will diminish in time. It takes time to understand the content marketing process, as well as to train a team of employees and even customers to deliver valuable content. When companies learn about content marketing and the ability to get employees and customers to blog, tweet, and post to social networks on behalf of the company, executives and business owners get excited. Why have marketing and communications be carried out by a select few in a department, when the entire operation or enterprise can be engaged?

Here are the essential first steps to creating a full-on content marketing process:
• Designate the desired content developers – internally or externally – and create some How-To’s or guidebook (Hint: do NOT call it Content Marketing Policy, as this will be sure to turn people away).
• Create a broad list of ideas, keywords, story angles, messages, and other creative assets that will help your content marketers generate quality content.
• Invest in (some are actually free) a publishing platform that makes it easy for content to be drafted, published, and measured.

Being authentic has its risks
Content marketing is not without its risks. When others are sharing their messages about your company or brand, there are bound to be differences in opinion or expression. Some of these may be acceptable to you, but others may not. Content marketing ventures require you to have an appetite for risk in the content that’s created in support of your brand – from a typo in a tweet to a negative review of your business on a consumer ratings blog.

The context surrounding this requires you to:
• Ensure that you have content guidelines and even suggested content.
• Anticipate content with quality or opinion issues.
• Devise a strategy to deal with content that does not meet your standards.

Final Thoughts
While daunting at first, the decision to take the plunge into content marketing will have innumerable benefits. Start small, and scale your content marketing operation over time.


ChangeU: For your independent study….
 

What is Content Marketing, Really? http://bit.ly/1uNSedk
Blog from HootSuite, one of the largest social publishing and monitoring providers.

How To Rapidly Grow Your Business with Content Marketing http://bit.ly/1BUksrq
A webinar on demand from HubSpot, one of the largest content automation providers.

The Rise of Smart Content Marketing http://slidesha.re/1vw2Z58
A SlideShare presentation on the art and science of content marketing.