Content marketing isn’t about gaining eyeballs to your website. Ideally, the content is a means to an end: the sale of products or services. While search engine popularity may help, it really shouldn’t be the end game in content strategy.
Instead, content strategy should focus on building trust with your prospects and customers. I can’t emphasize how important it is to publish white papers, case studies, and thought-provoking blog posts that hit on your customers’ and prospects’ problems and offer solutions that handily align with your product and service offerings.
But content should not be limited to your website. As I wrote last week, case studies should do more than just sit on a website, waiting for page views. To fully flesh out a content strategy, marketers need to plan for their content to appear elsewhere: in trade publications, as glossy takeaways for the sales team and at trade shows to give to prospects, and even completely off the website as something for customers only, like a physical book. For example, technology company Laserfiche repurposed the content from its user forums into a book that they’ve handed out at their yearly Empower conference and sold on Amazon.com.
So what can you do with existing content? Or do you need fresh content to jump start your strategy?