What is content marketing?

Originally posted at physicaltherapy.marketing/getting-started-with-content-marketing

You may have heard the term content marketing. Your business may even be trying to do content marketing. But what is it? And how can you use it?

It’s different than traditional marketing. The goal is to align your business and customer information needs with relevant content. You want to be seen as an expert in your field. You can use a variety of tactics including blogging, social media, downloadable white papers, and emails. Each of these will be able to help you reach a wide audience without a huge cost or effort. 

Both small businesses and large corporations use and can benefit content marketing. 

But how do I start?

Rather than jumping right in, its better to create a plan or strategy to help you figure out your goals and methods you want to use. 

Start by answering these questions:

1. Who are your users?
2. Who are are your competitors?
3. How will you distribute your content?
4. What’s your destination – core strategy?

Your content marketing must begin with one thing in mind; your customer. One way to help you figure this out is to create a customer avatar. The avatar can help you narrow down your customers based on demographics, income, interests and other metrics. 

So maybe your main customers are the elderly with hip and back pain, mothers with pelvic pain after childbirth, or high school athletes who are suffering from a concussion. 

Each of these customers will have a different interest in your content and a different way they should be approached. Maybe the seniors like printed newsletters and the mother spends her freetime on Facebook. 

This category can be a bit daunting. If you’re a physical therapy clinic your competitors can be other PT offices, chiropractors, medical doctors, and even pain medicine. 

Your goal is to help your customers get out of pain, feel better and move better. But so does the chiropractor down the street. Find out what the competitors are doing and do something different or better. Sometimes doing something completing different can mean that it doesn’t work. So be careful, but try different techniques.

You can offer all your customers a welcome package when they start seeing you, with your plan for their health, a graduation certificate or t-shirt when they reached their goals. Often times you need to do just a little more than your competitors to get ahead.

Imagine you’ve spent hours creating compelling and engaging content. Writing, creating inforgraphics, short videos but you leave all that on your desktop never to be seen again.

That won’t help your content marketing efforts at all. Your stuff needs to be read, watched or heard. Think of ways to distribute content to your customers and potential customers. Are they on Facebook? What about spending time on YouTube? Linkedin is a hub for businesses. 

Start small and use platforms you’re comfortable with, like to use and know how to use.

Answering this question is probably the toughest, but its important. Think about what you need to accomplish with your content. Determining the type of content to produce will help you reach this goal. Consider these guidelines, aspirational, flexible or meaningful. How does your content feel to the end user?

Getting down to the bottom of these may feel a little daunting. Feel free to reach out to Nufire Marketing for help in your content marketing strategy.

Written by Avery Nubson
Avery can be reached at avery@nufiremarketing.com