Check any marketing blog or conference agenda today, and you’re going to see a lot about content marketing — the idea that your firm produces valuable information that enhances your sales process by highlighting your expertise and helping you develop or reinforce relationships.
Content marketing has long been used by professional services firms, where it has more commonly known as thought leadership. While some marketing pros debate minute differences between content marketing and thought leadership, the basic idea’s the same — producing content about your industry, emerging trends, customer needs or other information that prospects and customers will find interesting and valuable.
Quality content offers a number of potential advantages to firms that produce it consistently, including:
- Demonstrating expertise
- Reinforcing your credibility
- Highlighting your experience and reassuring customers you’ve seen their problems before
- Spreading your ideas and intellectual property to an interested audience
- Generating leads by providing a reason for customers to contact you
Updating a site consistently with quality content can also provide valuable search engine optimization benefits. Google has long given preferences to sites offering a steady stream of new material, and recent updates to their search algorithms that emphasize quality content are increasing the importance (and SEO) value of maintaining a consistent publishing schedule.
By producing content, you also help demonstrate to prospects and customers that you’re active in their industry, understand their situation, and can share advice about addressing their concerns.
Production Concerns
All of which sounds good on screen, but quickly raises a number of practical challenges about what it takes to produce quality content consistently. Some common questions services firms and their marketing teams often raise include:
- What are the most effective formats for sharing my intellectual property?
- Where will I find the time time to produce content?
- What do we say?
- Where do we find new ideas?
- How to we measure whether any of this is working?
None of these challenges are insignificant, but none are insurmountable either. Over the coming weeks, we’ll look at different forms of content and share ideas about producing quality content consistently.
We’ll also look at examples of effective content marketing from professional services firms, and explore strategies for developing a powerful approach to content marketing that overcomes the obstacles and opens the door to lead generation, relationships and, ultimately, enhanced revenue.
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