What is content marketing? Content marketing is attracting interest in your professional service by providing a consistent stream of informative and educational material to your markets. This material differs from promotional or sales material, which focuses on you and your firm. Both have their place, but as you’ve no doubt heard, content is king. To effectively market today, you need to position yourself and your firm as experts in your field by providing interesting and substantive material that enlightens your target audience.
Content marketing is a new name for an old practice. More than a decade ago, I attended a seminar series taught by a direct mail expert. The main point he made about professional services marketing, whether legal, financial or real estate, is that professionals market by educating their prospect markets. And, indeed, professionals have always used this technique to market their services, educating their audiences by giving talks and publishing articles – in other words, creating content.
Content marketing is “new” today because the rest of the world has recognized the power in this kind of marketing. Also, with the proliferation of distribution channels for content, the social media monster has a voracious appetite for worthwhile material, while companies in every industry require a regular stream of fresh content for their websites.
Fortunately, as a lawyer, CPA, real estate or other professional, you likely have plenty of information readily available that you can repurpose for content. Repurposing means taking the same material and “repackaging” it in a different form than what was published before, so that you do not have to reinvent the content wheel. Material that can be used in this way includes notes and PowerPoints from presentations you’ve given, articles you’ve published, webinars you’ve given, and studies you may have conducted or reported on. Taking it a step further, the material you repurpose can itself be repurposed again and again, because different media channels need material of varying length and emphasis. This allows you to pull from past blog posts, tweets, revised articles, infographics and white papers.
Now is the time to open those file drawers full of inspiration, dust the old resources off and get your content creation material revved up and in marketing motion.
