I was trolling through Facebook the other day and found some inspirational quotes (I love them) by Bob Marley. There was a particular one that made me think about content marketing and anything else that we kind of need to know about but cannot always motivate ourselves to learn. It goes like this: ‘Some people feel the rain and others just get wet’
I know that content marketing has by now become such a cliché that it is almost redundant. Only it is one of these things that will always be key to your sales and marketing strategy. When people talk about content marketing they often talk about it as a new trend that was developed as part of social selling. Whilst I agree that content marketing is essential these days I actually think it was always important to make sure that your content is engaging and helpful to your clients.
Important or not, content marketing can be difficult to get your head around whether you are in sales and marketing or a business owner. It does not help that most marketing and sales strategy agencies out there talk about content marketing and offer it as a key strategy. By definition it then covers lots of disciplines from b2b content creation through digital content creation to content engagement tools. This in itself is enough for anyone to switch off, let alone people who may not be that interested in the first place.
I am not a content marketing expert and I certainly need to learn more about the gazillion tools that are out there to help you get the best strategy, measure it and improve it. If you are looking for modern digital content strategies I recommend reading this quick guide by Presentation Geeks. That said, I am in business development, which by definition sits between sales and marketing. In other words I concentrate on the key opportunities and the best way to develop them. With content marketing being such a key tactic these days I end up using it so often that I have to become better at it. So, I thought I will do my bit and let you know what tools I use and find useful:
- Hootsuite: One of the many Social Media Management platforms out there. Personally I find it most straight forward and easy to use. They offer great online training and save me lots of time. What can you do with it? Manage multiple social media accounts, analyse social media traffic, track brand mentions and schedule messages and tweets and more
- Grammarly: If like me you can create relatively engaging content, but struggle to translate that into something well written, use Grammarly to check your grammar and syntax, ensuring your words match what you mean to say.
- Twitter Counter’s Top 100 Page: This page identifies the top 100 tweeters. Most are celebrities and popular on the merit of their reputation and fans. However, many companies also made the list. Check out their tweets to see what they write about and get ideas for your own content plan
- Soovle:This really looks the part. If you type a keyword into Soovle, it automatically searches for the most popular terms across many different search engines. It helps identifying key words and phrases but also with finding related content across many platforms in one go.
I hope you found this useful, share if you did. As I said, these are just a few, there are lots out there so it will be great if you could share good tools you have found and use.