Content is everywhere and has become a marketing sword for businesses of all shapes and sizes. As traditional advertising effectiveness declined, the popularity of writing articles and publishing articles went wild. It was for a while a fairly easy SEO trick and tool to help Move the Google Needle for more traffic to your web site.

Content Marketing still is one of the better tools in your bag of tricks, however getting folks to read your stuff gets harder every day as more and more things garnish our customers and prospects attention.

The Content Marketing Umbrella

Content marketing is a term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.

The idea of sharing content as a means of persuading decision-making has driven content marketers to make their once-proprietary informational assets available to selected audiences. Marketers may use content marketing as a means of achieving a variety of business goals.

Connect Your Digital Marketing with Your Customers

As we marketers started creating more and more content, we relied heavily on crafting great articles. Today the digital highway is pretty congested and we need to be much more diverse.

We recently experienced a significant surge in web traffic, over 35% by “Entertaining the Prospect.” A local festival was coming to our town for the Labor Day Holiday. We reached out on behalf of one of the online magazines we publish to support leads to our apartment rental business and were selected as a Media Partner. The festival, known as, “Arts, Beats and Eats,” drew over a half a million people and featured over (250) bands.

We put a writer on interviewing as many of those bands as we could, and we added a music player to feature songs from each band we interviewed along with a rudimentary voting mechanism. Our site became a “go-to resource” for the scoop on local bands and music for the festival. The overall cost was pretty small and we connected to a whole new group of prospects that we never knew before. The net result: A significant surge in web traffic, and, yes, a corresponding surge in physical traffic, in the door leasing prospects!

The Marketing Takeaway for us included a couple of things. First, don’t be afraid to hitch onto someone else’s wagon. Second, content is not created equal.

Content Comes in All Shapes and Sizes 

The folks over at the Content Marketing Institute crafted a great article titled 5 Steps to Creating Great Content Mix;

Finding the best content mix is all about proportions. Although the foundation of your content marketing efforts may be based on educating your audience through informative articles, you may also want to entertain them through infographics and cartoons so that they have something fun to share. Remember, all content should fall within your area of expertise and reinforce your brand.

Once you’ve identified your ideal content mix, include it with your editorial calendar and present it in a way that’s easy to communicate.

 Content Purposes

CMI also has a great visual to help you think through mixing up your content, even suggesting some frequency for that content:

So, what type of content are you producing? Are you providing relevant information and not just “me-me-me” marketing swill? How about teaching your audience to do something? Starting a conversation? Inspiring? Entertaining?
Tell us what you’re doing in the comments and perhaps what you might be inspired to do now. The comments are yours.
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By Eric Brown

Eric Brown's background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience. He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested.

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