Our previous post looked at diversifying an SMB marketing plan through both behaviorally-driven and demographically-driven campaigns. Let’s look at two other types of campaigns: organically-driven campaigns and content-driven campaigns.
Diversifying your marketing plan with an organic campaign
An organically driven campaign is a campaign that uses existing clients or customers to generate new ones.
An excellent example of this is a referral system. Consider the salon, retail store, or restaurant that offered existing clients a $100 gift card or a free appointment for bringing in six friends to sign up for your services. You can do the ROI calculation in your head.
An organically driven campaign can be very inexpensive since your clients are doing all the heavy lifting for you. Some organizational planning is all you need to launch and maintain the campaign.
And, an organically driven campaign also helps increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by having them engage more with your business.
The main drawback to an organically driven campaign is that it may fail without the right conditions. The reward for bringing in new sign-ups must be sufficiently great that your clients remain interested. And your tracking process must be simple to manage.
You also need to communicate the campaign effectively to your customers. They need to be sold on the campaign as much as on your product. A good copywriter will convincingly word the proposal and entice customers to participate.
Diversifying your marketing plan with a content-driven campaign
A content-driven campaign uses various types of content for marketing a product or service. The content could take the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, pictures, or just about any media.
There are many reasons to pursue a content-driven campaign. The most basic logic is having a lot of fresh content on your website signals to visitors that your company is active, knowledgeable, and trustworthy. Content can act as a kind of social proof. It creates validation.
Another reason to pursue a content-driven campaign is to have something to share on social media. Leveraging the power of social platforms will expand brand awareness and, if your content is good, will be shared and spread around without your having to pay for it. Hence the success of viral marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing Provides SEO Benefits
Specifically for blog posts and other text-based media, having lots of high-quality content can help improve your search rankings. Google ranks based on how much quality content you have relevant to search criteria and how well aligned (and linked) it is to other similar content. Other factors, such as density of relevant keywords, increased visitors to your website, and outbound links, also contribute to organic search success. A good blog writer will know how to write posts that increase your chances of moving up to the top spot in a Google search in your industry.
Content, unlike milk, does not expire. Writing projects you commission today can still add value to your website years from now. But the flip side to this is that you might not see success from a content-driven campaign immediately.
It is common for our agency to field comments or inquiries on an article we posted four or five years ago.
A campaign weighted for content marketing accumulates power over time as you build up your collection of content and share it on the internet. How long? We tell clients in industries appropriate for content marketing to allow nine months to one year to reach a critical mass. Sometimes the magic happens sooner, but we prefer to set realistic expectations.
Appropriate Companies for Content Marketing?
Content-driven campaigns work exceptionally well for businesses whose models are niche, novel, or require explanation. By sharing content about your business or industry, potential clients can learn more about your offering. For this reason, content campaigns work well for business models like PEOs (Professional Employer Organizations), which is a novel sort of employee outsourcing business. Not many people are familiar with the concept and benefits of working with a PEO. Content marketing helps educate and inform future clients about that type of business.
Content marketing is also excellent in high-cost industries or services and products that require a long selling cycle.
Increasing your sales by generating leads from within your satisfied customers’ circles of influence is a better way to spend marketing dollars.
Writing is essential to any diversified marketing plan
If 80% of communication is body language, but you can’t sell everything in person, most of your marketing outreach should be through content.
- It would be best if you wrote to create great and informative content.
- It would help if you wrote to improve your search rankings.
- It would be more effective if you wrote to advertise based on demographics or behavior.
- It would motivate if you wrote to entice your existing customers to bring in new customers.
And the more you can say about what makes your business unique and a compelling call to action, the more new customers you will be able to bring in.
Some image-dominated industries like fashion will need less writing than others, but writing is still vital to fashion marketing. And of course, text-dominated sectors like finance, legal, and product distribution almost exclusively run marketing campaigns based on the written word.
Avoid inconsistency when a marketing plan gets executed in a piecemeal manner. Smarten your campaign by working with a single agency that understands your business (or is sufficiently fearless and will invest the time to research) that can also deliver the art and science to make the content ideal for organic search.
That way, you can ensure consistency of message across all channels.
Get a free article from Zen Marketing!
Are you ready to bring the power of content marketing to your business? We’d love to get you started by offering one free article when you subscribe to a twelve-article subscription. We’ll even provide a discount on the entire subscription, giving you thirteen pieces for around the usual cost of ten.
Every article is optimized for search and will include two royalty-free stock images. We’ll work with your photography, if you provide it. Heck, we’ll also post them to your three favorite social platforms.
The total investment, ordinarily $2,600, is just $2,100, nearly twenty percent in savings.
Take The First Step
Complete the form. We’ll schedule a videoconference or phone interview and subject to mutual acceptance discuss the direction for the articles. Our writer will want to learn more about the audience you want to attract or engage, as well as learn about your company.
Following the interview, your initial article will arrive in your inbox in about two weeks, then every two to four weeks following that, depending on the frequency ideal for your business and audience.
