Book Review: Content Marketing Strategies to Attract an Engaged Audience

 I read Content Marketing: Proven Strategies to Attract an Engaged Audience Online with Great Content by Gavin Turner while hosting the Digest 30 Books in 30 Days event. Participating in such an event is not as difficult as you think, if you practice strategic reading. The book offers some great tips and strategies.

Book Bite: Your target audience has needs, requirements, or desires that you can help to fulfill. Use hashtags when targeting and tagging people. Your content should align with your buyer’s journey. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they need from you? Keep content aligned with your business’ motives and customer’s needs.

 Content Marketing Digest 30 Books in 30 Days Contagious 10x Marketing Formula

What is Content Marketing by Gavin Turner About?

Definition of Content Marketing 

“Information to market your business. It helps you to develop relationships with your customers. You publish content with the purpose to make sales.”

To effectively use content marketing you need a proper content strategy. You also have to learn which things to share with customers and how to use content effectively. Any information you share must have a purpose. You can engage deeply with customers through your content. And your content must reflect your brand. 

Your target audience has needs, requirements, or desires that you can help to fulfill. Use hashtags when targeting and tagging people. Additionally create shareable content. What exactly does that mean? It’s any post that has a positive impact, creates a sense of excitement, and has visual appeal. Pay attention to quality over quantity. And of course use headings, subheadings, bullet points, and small fonts.

I’m struggling with what Gavin Turner says about shareable content. How do you know if it will have a positive impact or create a sense of excitement? The book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger should help. This is a reminder to me to read what I wrote a few years ago.

Have you read?

How to Write Viral Content: A Look at Contagious by Jonah Berger

7 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Important 

• Your business is unique.
• Generates goodwill because you're providing great content for free.
• Great content is the best way to market an amazing product.
• Helps to lower resistance to buying your product.
• Google values great content.
• Great content marketing is evergreen.

How to Produce Content That Sells and Persuades

• Identify the content topic.
• Research and gather information on the topic.
• Decide where you're going to post content.
• Talk to your team if you have one. Solicit their feedback on each part of the content.
• Create the content.
• Promote the content.

How Content Can Drive Sales

• Give customers quality information.
• Create an Infographic that shows how many companies use your solution. This won’t work for everyone.
• Produce an industry white paper.

Different Methods to Monetize Content Marketing 

• Email marketing: Create an email campaign. 
• Search engine optimization: Optimize your website.
• Pay per click: Use sponsored ads that appear on Google. 
• Affiliate marketing: Have affiliate links in your blog content.
• Paid posts: Write paid posts. Get quick traffic.
• Videos: Create informational videos.

Have a call to action at the bottom of the post. Include content upgrades or opt-in offers. Start marketing topics that you’re interested in blogging about. This creates a sense of urgency. Use keywords and make changes to your content. Align content with your brand. Here's how to do that.

1. It should reflect your business.
2. Content creation is a part of your brand identity.
3. Create good content to draw the buyer in.

Your ideal brand strategy should focus on buyer personas. Your mission, values, and vision must be directly proportional to the idea that solves your customer’s problems. Speak the language of your business. Your tagline must spark your customer’s enthusiasm.  Content must be valuable and you must come across as knowledgeable. 

What are your business goals? Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they need from you? Keep content aligned with your business’ motives and customer’s needs. How is the content relevant to the business? What does it do for them? That’s your content development bridge. If built correctly it works for you.

How to Align Content With Your Brand

1. Know your customers. Prioritize your customer’s needs.
2. Improve your value as a business. Know how to serve your customers and why you’re serving them. Then you’ll be able to create valuable content.
3. Every time someone visits your website, your content should empower them to move to the next stage of the buyer's journey.
4. Ask your readers for feedback, you want to know about the user’s experience.

Gavin Turner offers the following advice to get more eyeballs on your content.

• Create content on major blogs and media websites.
• Offer a compelling lead magnet.
  Have a high conversion lead capture web page.
• Use an automated follow-up campaign.

Steps to Engage Customers by Providing the Ultimate Experience

1. Research your audience and the competition. You need to know what’s out there and you must understand your audience to develop an effective content marketing strategy.
2. Create the format for your content – videos, webinars, podcasts, e-books, case studies, white papers, podcasts, and so on.
3. Your content should align with your buyer’s journey.
4. Manage your content. Create content according to topics on your website.
5. Optimize your website. Customers need to be able to navigate it.

10 Content Marketing Activities to Perform

1. Share high quality content. Spend time researching the topic so your content is well-researched and thought out. If possible, add some stats to your posts.
2. Create useful and valuable content.
3. Choose the right platform – your website, media sites like Forbes, publishing platforms like LinkedIn and Medium.
4. Build trust and authority with your readers. Your content is a reflection of you.
5. Content marketing is a two-way conversation between you and your customers.
6. Solicit and share user-generated content.
7. Use scheduling tools like Meet Edgar, Buffer, Hootsuite.
8. Have a call to action (CTA). Tell your readers what action you’d like them to take after they consume your content.
9. Vary the format of your content – blog posts, videos, podcasts…
10. Refine the process as you go along.

I’ve added information based on my experience to make the information more useful to you.

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Final Thoughts: Content Marketing: Proven Strategies to Attract an Engaged Audience Online

This book is filled with a lot of good information that you can start to use immediately. There are some nuggets that I really appreciated and will start using right away. For instance, I loved the advice to create content that aligns with your buyer’s journey. I’d never considered that before. I spent time creating my buyer’s journey map, so this is useful information for me.

If you’re new to content marketing, it’s a good book for you. I don’t agree with some of what he says based on my experience and that’s okay. This is not unusual for me though. I’m an independent thinker,so I’ll never agree with everything that I read.

I must say that I prefer the 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating ‘Competition-Free Content' That Stands Out and Gets Results by Garrett Moon. However, I’ll incorporate information from both books.

How will content marketing help you to grow your business?

The most accomplished people use books as problem solving tools. They carve out the time in their schedule to find solutions in the pages of a book. Let me help you to solve your own problems. Additionally, this program helps you to learn valuable career skills. Click the link MoreReads Individual Leadership Development Program to buy.

Update: First Published in May 2020. If someone clicks on a link and buys something from Amazon, the company will pay me a very small commission.