4 Reasons Content Marketing Isn’t as Frightening as You Think

4 Reasons Content Marketing Isn’t as Frightening as You Think:

Chances are you’ve heard of content marketing and might know what it is. But you may not have an idea of how to get started. It’s not as difficult as you think! The key to content marketing is having a strong content ecosystem that’s interrelated and connected to everything else you do.

Here are four reasons you shouldn’t be scared of content marketing:

1.) You’re probably already doing it. If you’ve got already got a company blog, an existing podcast (woo hoo!), a newsletter, sales training materials, even customer support FAQs, these are all the starting points of a great content marketing program. Take your podcasts, and turn them into transcripts to release on your site (or vice versa). Modify those slightly, and they become white papers. Put those white papers behind a registration screen, and you’ve got another lead gen funnel. Do you answer questions on your Facebook page or through Twitter? Use these to create blog posts. The possibilities are nearly limitless and will eventually tie into everything else you’re doing from a content standpoint.

2.) You’re using what you have. If you aren’t quite ready to reimagine your content, start with recycling your existing content to use in other channels. If you’ve got a company blog, take some of your most interesting comments, and use them as newsletter topics. If you’ve got a sales staff that does product demos, work with them to create demo videos. Talk to your customer support staff, and take the top 10 most popular inquiries and turn these into helpful videos or a blog series.

3.) Videos aren’t as spooky as they seem. You don’t always need to have a predetermined script for your (though it certainly helps). Find the people who do the doing, who know their stuff, and just have them talk to you (and the camera). Let your sales guys tell you about the product; let your customer support rep talk about how to troubleshoot a problem; have an engineer talk about the next iteration of your product or one that will be released soon. A decent camera (or phone) and some free editing software will have you making decent quality videos in no time. People almost always like to see things rather than read things.

4.) Everything is interrelated. As you can see, all these areas are interrelated and overlap. You don’t need to have a huge budget or elaborate plans for content marketing. All you need to do is do one thing and, from that one thing, you’ll be able to generate several pieces of usable and interesting content. Each piece of created content can be used in a variety of channels with different goals in mind.

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