Content Marketing Strategy for 2019
2019 promises to be a busy season for golf commerce. There’s no doubt the golfer’s senses will quickly be numbed by the oncoming barrage of promotional offers hitting their inbox, TV and social profiles. As a marketer, I already have my hands on dozens of promotional campaigns for 2019, but as I approach this season I am consciously and diligently pushing my clients towards a commitment to content.
As professionals, we are always watching the sales metric. It’s satisfying to see the instant impact that a promotional campaign has on the bottom line. When I say promotional, I mean the unabashed, BUY NOW, ORDER TODAY, LIMITED TIME OFFER, ADD TO CART… messaging that most advertisers and business owners like to sink our marketing teeth into.
However, it’s easy to induce marketing fatigue on a consumer who’s exposed to hundreds of promotional offers throughout a given day. Authentic, intentional and insightful content can have a dramatic impact on marketing fatigue and can change the way you look at customers as well as your business.
A Healthy Dose of Content:
I liken ‘content commitment’ to the often-dreaded but most certainly necessary diet — and for some, this could feel more like a cleanse. It’s convenient to indulge in a steady diet of promotional advertising, but we know how fast and easy can have long term effects. The pre-packaged, highly processed messaging is easy to serve up, but it’s nurturing/natural content that can bring healthy and sustainable traffic to your website.
Let’s look at a few way product companies can pivot into content marketing to win over the hearts of their consumers.
Blogs: Remember when blogs were all the rage, when SEO was a top consideration? Well it turns out, their intended purpose was to share insightful commentary on topics closely related to your brand ; ). Time to shake that writer’s block and tune up your blog for this season.
Video: Long form content can be tedious. Lucky for you, your phone has become as sophisticated as most consumer-grade video cameras. Focus on quality of content and focus less on production quality [still be mindful you’re a professional running a business] and commit to capturing and publishing regularly.
Podcast: For those that fear the lens or have a product that fits a more academic platform, podcasting can be a great way to get your content into the hands of interested consumers.
Email: This is probably one you could work on today! Most of us are used to promoting our business through email, but rarely take the time to develop a content plan that encourages more than a purchase from our prospective audience. Educational email campaigns can have a profound impact on marketing, if you give them time to work their magic. Explore Email Marketing
How to Serve It:
The strategies above are just a few ways you can integrate content into your overall marketing plan. How you do it should be based on astute perception of your market and your consumer. It’s always best to create a plan based on intel, spend a little time understanding what type of information is beneficial to your audience. This may require looking outside of our industry to find examples of how relatable products are winning with the content game.
Here are a few ways to commit to a content strategy:
Know your customer - In order to connect consumers with content they will consume you need to know what tempts their palate.
Key in on highly searched pages or products on your website
Use Google search queries to identify what keywords golfers are using to reach your site
Test content through established social pages to see what type of content generates the best [legitimate] response from your customer [no kitten videos!!!]
Create a plan - Your plan should have goal and action items that help you achieve that goal. Don’t go about creating content just to fill the page. Determine the best way for content to reach your audience, this can be platform and or substance of content. Make sure you have a plan to tie your content into your overall branding and product sales goals.
Make content creation a part of your schedule - Develop a simple posting calendar and stick to it.
Deliver with consistency - The biggest failure in content marketing are lapse blogs or social sites. Once you have made the commitment to purge the promotional and focus on content - stick with it! Content marketing takes time to develop leads, but if you make it part of your company culture it will be as natural as pitching your product.
The Goal of Community - The goal of content is to unify an audience around particular topics. Keep this in mind as you develop your plan. You can create a community by becoming the source of original, authoritative, and knowledgeable content in your domain. Earn their trust and you will not only grow a community, but sales in the process.
It’s hard to break bad habits, especially when they satisfy your most immediate needs, but keep the health of your marketing and business in mind and resolve to implement a regiment of customer awareness and appreciation in the way of consumer conscious content.
We all established a business because we felt we could solve a problem - focus on that and let that become the core of how your feed your marketing machine.
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