What is essential in your morning routine? A piping hot cup of coffee is likely involved, but what else? And I mean further than just a piece of toasted bread. What are you doing while you are drinking that coffee or eating that piece of toast?
A lot of marketing professionals are waking up and refreshing their favorite websites – researching for anything to gain an edge on their competitors. Consequently, consistent content about your company is always in demand. Consistent content doesn’t need to be delivered every morning, but let’s face it, that certainly wouldn’t hurt.
The result of creating content on a regular basis is demand generation. If you create the right content related to your business, expect much more organic engagement and interest. If carefully executed, you could see the popularity of your business’s pages on Google (“Page Rank”) rising above that of the competition. More importantly, your content will be valued as reliable and relevant to a larger audience.
So what do you need to do? Show people what your company can offer! Reveal what sets you apart from your competitors with new technologies you’ve integrated, virtual office tours, company values, and much more. Try to create consistent content that will make people want to pick it up, like a cup of coffee in the morning.
But what does consistent content look like? It can come in many forms. Some of the most popular and successful forms of consistent content include blogs, newsletters, and podcasts. Below you’ll find tips and tricks on how to create consistent content through these three mediums to create demand generation. Let’s take a look!
First, let’s talk about blogs. They can be posted on your social media accounts or your website to generate engagement, update current clients, and ultimately help reach new audiences. They’re relatively low-committal for a company to produce. You could have an individual dedicated to creating consistent blog posts, but you could also have an employee write one as a one-off.
Overall, Oxford Languages defines “content marketing” as, “a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.” Let’s focus in on the keywords “stimulate interest” within blogs for a second.
Clients and prospects alike want insights into your company, tips, advice, and more to help them gain the larger picture. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re losing interest in your posts, change it up! Showcase a conversation with a client or industry leader, or maybe highlight rising technologies. This is a way to connect with a larger audience to generate interest and demand.
Another way of generating demand would be to utilize a newsletter. Publishing them on a regular basis will prove insightful for not just clients, but also your employees as well.
There are multiple ways that a newsletter can be used as a demand generator. Here are a few to get you started:
If your newsletter is full of relevant, inspiring ideas and content pieces, demand generation won’t fall far behind. As long as the content you put out proves to educate your reader, it will be a crucial reference point on how they conduct business throughout their next work week.
Podcasts have been an emerging way of connecting with customers and the rest of the industry at large for quite some time and continue to be so. According to Convince & Convert, “In 2017, 40% of Americans 12 or older had listened to a podcast, compared to 55% in 2020.” That’s a growth of 37.5% in just 3 years.
Requiring more initial investment than other methods of content marketing, the potential scale of the podcasts makes them attractive to pursue. You could invite anyone from industry leaders, suppliers, or employees to chat about their thoughts and what strikes them as important. Your business could find a new, more “casual” way to showcase what it has to offer.
For instance, rather than providing lengthy KPIs and trend analysis results from a groundbreaking campaign in the form of a mass email or newsletter, hosting conversations over the results would prove insightful for a larger audience. By bridging the formalities of business with the demeanor of a podcast, you can expect organic discussion over impressions on an array of topics.
Overall, podcasts show that your company is willing to drive ideas to the forefront of public perception. Seeing how viewers react to these ideas can prove to only be beneficial. By tuning in, they are showing that they view you as relevant and as a leader in the industry. Demand and interest in your company is thus generated. If the podcast is consistent and successful, you can even search for sponsors to reach new audiences.
Even if your company stays well-tuned with clients and prospects, creating consistent content is, dare I say, necessary to have. By not partaking in it, you risk competitors showcasing areas that you may in fact excel in. But how would anybody know if you have no content exhibiting just that? Consequently, even entirely new product lines or service offerings could be missing out on a lot of generated exposure.
At the end of the day, content marketing proves to be a great way of showcasing how you are different from the rest of the competition. If consistently executed, it generates demand. And if your content proves to stay relevant like a cup of morning coffee, you just may have yourself a winning strategy.
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This blog is a guest blog written by Alexander Raphaelian and has been edited and adapted for 1 Bold Step.