Sell your content & not your product

That can make all the difference in the way you are perceived online and how people respond. All the most successful online marketers have been able to build a loyal following because their content is perceived as useful and not because they have been selling to people directly online. What is important understand to get your content marketing strategy right is to be able to separate intent from your social marketing strategy. Let’s take a look into my thought process while writing this blog post to distinguish intent and strategy.

Confessions

As a content marketer I have a small range of five solutions that I offer to businesses and my intent is to sell those through my website. I plan to use content marketing and leverage social sites to promote my solutions and my intention is to drive as many interested customers as possible towards my website and spread awareness about what BuzzFactory.net does to as many people online as possible. The most obvious thing to do would be to write blog posts about each of the solutions and post them to various social sites and keep Tweeting links to each solution everyday but that is not how the online world works. There is no value in this approach, no relationship building, no conversation. It’s just direct selling and as a social marketing strategy, that isn’t effective.

My strategy is to use this blog and create a resource that would appeal to marketers. Instead of selling my products directly, I write content like this post here which could be perceived as valuable among marketers who are seeking information on content marketing and social media marketing strategy hoping it will drive some of them to the website and attract them towards the solutions. My strategy is to sell and promote this content using social sites as much as possible to build more traffic towards the site and since this is interesting content and not just a sales pitch or product page in the form of a blog post (alright this particular post might be but lets assume the other content on this blog) it is not intrusive push based advertising and still has the potential to draw more relevant traffic and create awareness about the business. If you have come to this post through a link I’ve created trying to promote this post and read this far, half my objective of ensuring you’re aware about BuzzFactory has been achieved. If you go on to the site to explore our solutions, then that was my intent and it goes to show the strategy works.

My intent is to get customers but my strategy is to give users interesting and useful content, build a resource, create relationships, be a contributor to content in the vertical and  start conversations. The “getting customers” will happen naturally  as result of this activity.

So if you find your business blogging isn’t going anywhere despite efforts, people on Twitter don’t seem to want to follow you and social marketing is just not working for your business, try this simple tweak in approach. Create content that will appeal to your target audience and then sell the content not your product.

Content plays an important role in social marketing and is often to keeping the conversation and buzz going around your business.  You need to have content that you can share with the online community. The real challenge is how you generate that daily content and keep it interesting for your customers.  One great way to tackle this is starting with a very active blog. By very active, we mean one that has engaging posts, insights, reviews, articles or observations as often as possible. Useful articles and posts around your business can be very versatile and need not be restricted to the blog. Once posted, the same post or article can be Tweeted, shared on groups like Linkedin, MySpace and Facebook, posted to discussion forums or communities, converted to a down-loadable document for the website and even sent out in an email newsletter. Discussions naturally follow around these posts whether in the form of comments people leave on the blog or social sites like Mixx & Reddit, re-tweets and replies on Twitter, passed around on social networking sites and really fuel the wider online conversation around your business and help it gather momentum.

We recently developed an niche vertical based online magazine for a customer of ours to provide not just their customers but virtually the industry with fresh articles published daily with interesting content within the space. Other than the stand alone community of readers within the industry which quickly developed around the online publication the company saw this as a great opportunity to tie the blog / online magazine content to jump start their other online marketing initiatives. This included posting regularly on a large community site for the industry, posting articles and starting conversations around them on their Facebook community, Myspace and drawing more followers on Twitter. On all these groups and communities they have people who enjoy reading through, sharing and commenting on the articles which are interesting or offer some valuable insights to them. As a result, the members on all these communities have increased activity and helps the business build stronger communities and better relationships with their customers.

The common ground for all social media marketing channels and social marketing is your content. Invest in regular content and the process of having a constant conversation with your customers online will just become a whole lot easier.