It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting immediate gratification from marketing programs. But if that’s your goal, you’re missing out on the real value of an ongoing content marketing campaign. The most powerful results we have seen come from clients who execute a content marketing strategy consistently over time. There is a direct correlation between marketing consistency and overall small business revenue predictability. Michael Brenner, CEO of marketing insider group, has said that “the buyer journey is nothing more than a series of questions that must be answered.”
Your content marketing campaign needs to be an ongoing series of informative articles, images, and videos provided by you that answer meaningful questions for your audience and future customers. (Not focused on selling/promoting yourself) This week’s article from NewsCred Insights does a great job of explaining the steps to reaching content marketing predictability. Please enjoy the article and let us know your thoughts.
Jim Anthony | So-Mark Founder
Source: insights.newscred.com | Re-Post So-Mark 3/30/2017 –
Every business strives to reach a state of predictability. When a business becomes predictable, it can drive sustainable growth from knowing exactly how much money to invest to generate a precise amount of new revenue.
Predictability is what allows small business owners to march into ABC’s “Shark Tank” and capture six-figure investments from investors like Mark Cuban. Predictability is also how the world’s largest brands continuously delight Wall Street investors and increase stock prices.
Within many businesses, CMOs are under particular scrutiny to transform marketing from a cost center to a predictable profit center.
In order to do so, CMOs must figure out exactly how much to invest to generate the amount of quality leads the sales team requires to hit revenue goals each month, quarter, and year.
However, today, there’s an over-reliance on marketing methods that provide immediate gratification but impede CMOs’ abilities to accomplish that feat.
Every B2C marketer has been in a situation where sales weren’t where they needed to be as the end of the month approached. The knee-jerk reaction is usually to pour money into advertising and paid social. This allows the marketer to quickly reach revenue goals at the expense of inflated customer acquisition costs.
On the B2B side, many marketers have purchased email lists to quickly drive leads. Months later, when they need even more leads due to an expanding sales force and rising revenue targets, those marketers have to spend incrementally more to buy lead lists large enough to appease the always-hungry sales organization. This practice greatly impacts a marketer’s ability to create a budget-friendly solution that effectively scales for demand generation.
There’s nothing wrong with a one-off execution of the above scenarios. But the truth is, these practices are expensive and unscalable because marketers don’t actually own the properties from which leads are coming.