Traditional advertising will always have a place in the way that we perceive products and companies. The tide is changing, though, and a lot of it has to do with generation changes. Millennials are growing in spending power and numbers, and in time, they will be the primary customers in the world, period. In addition, their interests as far as ads go are beginning to change. They’ve grown up immersed in sales copy and advertising. This means that they know more about how these work and also resent them a bit as well. A bad ad doesn’t necessarily mean being forgotten; it may lead to animosity toward your brand. Make no mistake, immigration advertising and other conventional types of advertising are far from dead. However, many of the top advertisers around are supplementing their efforts in these areas with other formats, like content marketing.
Many people start with the basics of content marketing. Generally, this comes in the form of a site blog with a set of articles. This is useful for putting a little added value on your site and getting SEO together. However, there are many different things you can do to enhance your content marketing efforts.
For starters, rather than your basic posts, you may want to go into deeper detail, even if this means slowing up your content rollout or bringing on a writer/freelancer to help you put the content detail. Publishing a longer, more detailed post on your site proves your expertise to your audience. On top of technical SEO, becoming an authority is one of the biggest goals from content marketing. Combine larger posts with guest sites relevant to your industry.
An e-book takes this to a next level, but you need to invest time and energy in order to make it work. The best e-books are less blog post compilations and more standalone pieces of work that will draw interest and potentially create future leads. As a rule of thumb, with e-books you want to stay in your wheelhouse. It’s tempting to try and leap on a popular trend, but a generic e-book based on the info you googled won’t give you much return on your investment.
Another thing to consider is using online courses. These aren’t as hard to make as you may think. Online tools make creating a course easier, and this may be a more meaningful way for you to repurpose topics and ideas from your blog. Of course, you need proper comprehensive content in the first place to do that. However, many people want to learn at the feet of an expert, and courses are a great way to get that association going for yourself.
