Content management system and content marketing imperative
Old-fashioned press-release-only public relations are done. The days of episodic interruption advertising as the primary tactic of a small businesses marketing are gone. What’s replacing Yellow Pages, printed newspapers, television and radio advertising? It’s content marketing.
Content marketing explained
Content marketing is the ability to self-publish both information and original content that attracts, meets and satisfies your potential customers at every point in their pathway to purchase. While good advertising is still integral to mass marketed products, for small businesses, the most cost affordable and successful tactic is content marketing. Good content provides exactly the right resources to help your customers narrow their options. Content marketing well done funnels customers to your firm.
Engaging, distributed content key to marketing strategy
The strategic tactics of content marketing rely on insight into your customer’s needs and the ability to distribute your content, be that blog posts, infographics, images of your products, podcasts, vlogs, testimonials, or reviews across the Internet. Your content is distributed across the web, and anchored on your website. Different types of content may be used in varying ways to develop a relationship with your customer.
Chart courtesy of Pelin Thorogood and Erik Bratt
Dynamic CMS required
Content marketing is nearly impossible to implement on an outdated Flash-only website or on static HTML pages. The home-base of your content marketing strategy must be a dynamic, website built on a content management system (CMS). We recommend and use WordPress in a self-hosted installation as the best option for most small business websites.
Moving to a content management framework will allow you to:
- Author blog posts within your own domain to demonstrate expertise, share insight, and solve customer’s problems
- Publish white papers and offer them to site visitors with a simple download and registration process.
- At will, easily add new pages or to modify content as needed, without having to go back to your web developer or graphic designer.
- Engage with your website’s visitors by offering live content from your social media networks
- Host your own video blog posts
- Host your own product related videos, or customer testimonials or interviews
- Serve podcasts to your customers and website visitors
- Provide commenting opportunities on your content
- Offer interactive sharing tools for your site’s visitors, including Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (as well has many, many more social web options.)
- Capture leads/registrations to your website.
- Easily provide RSS feeds of your site’s content.
- Automatically, deliver your new content to your subscription list by e-mail.
- Integrate your site with your e-mail marketing platform collecting both new subscriptions and displaying your prior newsletters.
- Host surveys and collect potential customer’s responses to help direct your company’s growth and direction.
- Easily provide up-to-date product and data sheets for customers
- Include dynamic search and capture data about what people are searching for as they visit your website.
- Offer seasonal specials, sales and flash-sales.
- Offer support forums with customer service staff.
- Increase your business’s inclusion in search engine results pages
- Share your latest earned media articles or press materials with journalists.
Of course not every one of these components will be used by every business, but many of them will be exactly what your business needs to be competitive.
Move your website to a CMS
This year, make it your goal to move your website to a CMS so you can create customer centered interactive, sharable, actionable, content that is compelling and helps distinguish your company from your competitors. Doing so will the the single most important spend of your marketing budget. Because if you’re not doing this, your competitors are and most likely they are going to leave you in their dust. And is that what you want?
To get started planning your new website, we offer this website survey for in-depth planning.
Photo credit: flickr creative commons user oskay
