Content Marketing

What is content marketing:

We’ve found that successful new business marketing boils down to having a thought or perspective on a topic, and then sharing that thought or perspective on social media.  For example:

• Write something and publish: This is a great technique.  Identify a topic that people in your community care about and write a one or two-page piece about it, then post it on LinkedIn and send it to the people on your email list.
• Podcast: Basically this is the same as writing something, but record yourself and a guest talking about the topic rather than writing something
• Conduct some research or run a survey and publish the results: Do some research or publish a survey and share the findings.
• Newsletter: Whatever you publish on social media send it to your mailing list

Why we like content marketing

• Builds your credibility: If you have interesting and insightful things to say about your product or service it’s strong evidence that you know what you’re talking about and that you’re credible.
• Makes you seem bigger than your are: Most small businesses don’t write or publish.  So if you are writing every week customers and partners will assume you’re bigger than you really are.
• Builds your proposals content: A lot of the content your write for your content strategy feeds your proposals. For example you can write and publish a case study on a project you recently did, and use that case study in your proposal
• Get you into a meeting with customers/and partners: Every time you write something send it to potential customers and partners who care about that topic, and if they like what you’ve said, they might invite you in for a longer discussion.
• Gives you a “megaphone” that you can use to engage partners and test ideas: As a new vendor you need to tell people what you are looking for (e.g. you want to join a team that’s going after a certain contract, or that you need to hire someone, or you need an introduction at a certain government agency). The chances of you getting an answer are a function of the number of people you can reach and if you have 5,000 followers on LinkedIn you’re more likely to get a response than if you have 50.
• Act as a substitute for past performance: Writing about a topic is not the same as having done the work, but we have listed our writing and other thought leadership as examples of past performance and the government has accepted it.