“It’s Too Expensive!” – 4 Objections Bosses Have About Content Marketing And How To Change Their Minds

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  It’s a new year, which means a new budget. So it’s time once again to renew your pleas to your boss, to let you have some money for a quality content marketing strategy. And once again, it’s time for your boss to ignore your requests and tell you that it’s too expensive. There simply isn’t the money for such nonsense! But you can’t just let it go at that. You know that content marketing is the most effective way to promote your brand. You just need to be able to convince your boss of it. So here are 4 common objections that CEOs and other executives have to content marketing, and what you can say in response. “It’s not worth the money!” Content marketing is new, which tends to mean more money spent. Your boss isn’t about to pour company resources into some hair-brained scheme. How do you even tell if it’s working, anyway? “So we’ve got a blog. Can you really measure its success in terms of sales?” Yes. Not only does content marketing produce better, more accurate statistics for measuring ROI than traditional forms of marketing, but content also produces better overall results, for considerably less money. “It’s just a fad!” Creating a brand new marketing strategy for your brand is a big commitment of time and resources. Every other week, some new approach is touted as the greatest marketing tactic since sliced bread. Your company isn’t going to overhaul its entire strategy to implement some technique that everyone will forget about soon afterwards. But content marketing isn’t just some passing fad. It’s here to stay. It’s been building up momentum for years, and is rapidly becoming a mainstream marketing method. So if your company doesn’t get onboard soon, it’ll be left behind by those who do. “This content is irrelevant to our brand!” So you start a blog. You give people advice about how to do certain things. You keep them informed about the latest news and events in your industry. It’s a nice thing to do for people, but what good is it to your company? Where’s the part where you say, “This is our company! This is our product! You should buy it!”? And how will people know to buy from you if you don’t say that? In fact, that sort of blatant, in-your-face advertising is exactly what people don’t want. It turns people off and drives them away from your brand. But content marketing targets the people who are already looking to buy your type of product. It engages them and steers them towards your company without hitting them over the head with branding. By providing them with the content they need, it creates a face the customer can trust, and will thus be more willing to buy from in the long run. “The marketing strategy we’ve got works just fine!” So content can help you make sales. But you’ve already got a traditional marketing strategy in place. It’s served you well for years. It brings in new customers perfectly well. Why change things? Because “perfectly well” isn’t really good enough. Your company is under constant pressure from its investors to improve sales. Content marketing can increase your company’s growth much more effectively than traditional marketing tactics. Read More

Using the Buying Cycle To Create Effective Targeted Content

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  Here’s a pop quiz: What’s the purpose of creating content for your brand? Is it to drive people to your site? To generate leads? To increase sales? Or to stay on customers’ radars after they’ve made their purchases, so that they’ll buy from you again next time? The answer is, of course, all of the above. There are all different things you can use your content for. And each of those uses requires you to have a different type of content. So how can you plan your content for maximum effect at all levels? Our friends at HubSpot suggest that you link your content to the five stages of the buying cycle, in order to stay connected with customers throughout the entire process.  Read More

How To Have a More Exciting Inbound Marketing Plan In 2014

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  A few years ago, inbound marketing was on the cutting edge of brand promotion. It was the new and innovative tactic. Now, with a new year right around the corner, inbound strategies stand poised to enter the mainstream and become more popular and widespread than ever before. Which, in many ways, is a good thing. It means that the old, ineffective marketing tactics are finally going the way of the dodo. The future is content. Read More

Spreading the Word – 3 Tips For Promoting Your Content

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  The marketing cycle used to be as follows: Buy an ad. Use that ad to reach your audience. Sell them your product. Use the profits to buy more ads. Ad infinitum. From TV commercials to magazine ads, marketing was… Read More

5 Mistakes Your Blog Is Making

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  Regular blogging is one of the most important factors in your content marketing strategy. The more you blog, the more you’ll be able to increase web traffic and ultimately drive sales. But only if the content you generate is… Read More

B2B vs. B2C – Inbound Marketing Approaches

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There’s a lot of content out there geared toward marketers. How to increase your web traffic, how to increase your sales, etc. If you look at it, you’ll notice that some of… Read More

Content Marketing On a Budget

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In a recent survey, 90 percent of marketers said they considered content marketing to be at least a medium, if not a high priority in their… Read More