How simple life would be if we could publish content and then readers – our prospective clients – would magically find it. Alas, it’s a pay-to-play world where social media giants offer a vanishingly small free window for firms to reach potential customers by their own efforts.
To make sure your content isn’t falling into the abyss, follow these five golden rules for distributing and promoting what you’ve created.
Know what your audience cares about
The most effective marketing campaigns obsess about their audience’s key pain points. These real-world frustrations can be identified with research, including in-depth interviews, market mapping and competitor analysis (not just the first page of results from Google).
Without knowing these issues, you run a higher risk of contributing to the mass of theoretical and generalist slideware that some firms splurge onto the market, which is a waste of your time and resources.
There tends to be a gulf between what clients actually care about and what marketers wish clients cared about. Just because it’s interesting to you doesn’t automatically mean it’s interesting to them.
If, however, you can offer prospects valuable insights about the things they really care about, they are more likely to read that content when it appears in their inboxes or social media feeds, or they may even find it themselves via a search engine.
Don’t get hung up on hyper-targeting
In recent years there has been an increasing shift towards tighter and tighter targeting of customers. It has gone hand in hand with an explosion in marketing technology that promises it can identify our audiences and tell us all sorts of things about them.
That might work well in consumer markets if, for example, you want to sell manure to a gardener or spices to a cook. But those who target limited audiences in financial services tend to come unstuck for a few good reasons.
First, when a business switches accountancy firms, it’s not just one person who’s involved in the decision-making. Multiple people in leadership roles, finance, IT and admin influence the sale and need convincing.
Just because it’s interesting to you doesn’t automatically mean it’s interesting to clients
Further information
Find tips on using social media in this video.
Second, most targeting data available cannot be trusted; it is often very poor quality and rapidly goes out of date.
Third, you can’t really ever know who’s in the market for your services at any particular point in time.
All this means you need to reach the widest range of potential buyers in your market. This approach is backed up by research from renowned marketing effectiveness experts Les Binet and Peter Field, which shows that a broad reach considerably outperforms tight targeting.
They partly attribute this to the ‘herd effect’: the perceived familiarity and popularity of a brand among the many enhances its appeal to the one. This is very useful when your goal is to win over many people in one business.
Be prepared to invest more than you expected
Of course, a broader reach means you will need to invest more (much more) in distribution than you think you should. The inherent danger with a lot of marketing activity is the gradual but relentless expansion of costs. The good news is that you can achieve broad distribution at a reasonable cost.
The goal here is to ensure a return on your investment that makes those costs tenable. If you are rigorous with your planning and have consensus on how your firm will measure success (and over what timescale), your marketing spend won’t be frittered away or campaigns cancelled before they have had time to demonstrate results.
Those who target limited audiences in financial services tend to come unstuck
Adopt a fully integrated approach
It’s not a case of whether to use LinkedIn or Facebook, direct marketing or PR; it’s a case of using all of them, plus syndication and media advertising – and so on. The goal is to create multiple touchpoints, because if prospects are to become customers, they need to see or interact with your brand many times before they make contact with you.
Optimise your content for search
Give content hosted on your company website the best possible chance of being found organically. If you don’t maximise its visibility through search engine optimisation (SEO), you’re missing a trick, as SEO is an incredibly low-cost way to get your content seen by more of the right people who are turning to Google and the like to solve their problems.
Craft the headline and introductory paragraphs carefully so that search engine algorithms can easily recognise what the content is about. Add meta tags to the page and keywords to images, and make sure the website itself is also optimised.
Most of all, write for people, not computers. Optimisation should never mean creating something that no real-life client would ever want to read.
If your content has been linked to by reputable sources – perhaps you’ve done some PR and some authoritative editorial publications have linked to a report you’ve written – that will also bump it up the search engine rankings.
