Before you get started with your marketing strategy, you need to decide one thing: is your goal to inform prospective customers or to sell to them?
Your decision may have a bigger impact than you'd think. The trend now is to create informative content for your target audience, and many marketers are struggling to pass up the opportunity to promote their products.
Then again, your content shouldn't be 100% informative. If it were, prospective customers might not even know that you have products to offer. Instead, you should try to find a balance between information and promotion.
According to this Entrepreneur article, your content should be 80% informative and 20% promotional:
"Using the 80-20 rule helps. Ideally, just 20 percent of information should center on your brand, the remaining 80 percent should add value to the lives of your target audience at some level. Think of marketing in terms of customer engagement rather than selling. This will not only help you acquire customers but also retain them over a period of time."
These numbers aren't set in stone and probably weren't scientifically calculated, but they give you a good idea of how you should approach marketing today. With all of the content there is on the Internet, consumers are getting fed up with promotional articles and want to read something of value.
But writing informative content isn't always a drag. In fact, it can serve several of the following purposes:
- Identifying a problem of your target market
- Suggesting a solution for that problem
- Creating a brand identity
- Establishing a reliable brand in front of a large audience
Then, after you've done all these things, you can write something about your brand at the very end. You've already positioned yourself perfectly and now just have to state that your company is ready to help prospective customers. They don't feel like they're getting sold to, and your content generates leads. It's a win-win.
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