Content Marketing Is About Developing An Educational Tool, Not Advertising Your Product

Content Marketing Is About Developing An Educational Tool, Not Advertising Your Product:from Business 2 Community by Sam Zastrow

Use your blog to educate readers and show off your company’s expertise.
One of the biggest gaps in understanding we see here at CloudTactix is the very different ways we, as inbound marketers, think about website content and the way some other folks think about it.
The ultimate business goal of content marketing is to create fresh, relevant content that helps Google and other search engines’ web crawlers “understand” your website is a valuable source of information on whatever it is you’re trying to sell. Most people understand this, or they at least understand it’s important to update their site’s content frequently.
But where the disparity lies is not in their knowledge of what fresh content can accomplish for their site, but what value it holds for, you know, the humans who actually read it.
It’s easy to get excited about blogging and go off publishing a 2,000-word manifesto on all the great things about your product or service, but before you do so, ask yourself if anyone will want to read it. Or even better, leave all those details on the product page and reassess the way you think about content.
Instead of focusing on your energy on writing about your product, educate your readers on what makes a good product or service in your industry. Give them checklists and tip sheets to demonstrate your expertise or use your blog to share industry news to show your business is in-the-know when it comes to current events and trends in its field. Stretch this type of content as much as you can.
Put yourself in a potential customer’s shoes and ask yourself what questions they would have about what it is you’re trying to sell them. Why do I need a product or service from your company? What qualities does it have that make it better than the competition? What problems will it solve? One could write 10 different blog posts to answer each of those three questions.
And great content does answer those questions—it serves as an easy-to-use educational tool for learning more about something without burying its readers in jargon and technical details. It helps your search engine rankings too, but that shouldn’t be its only purpose.
What type of questions do your blog posts answer? What other ways do you use fresh website content?