When it comes to marketing in the digital era, content is king. You need content for your website, inbound landing pages, social channels, advertising campaigns, email outreach campaigns, shows and events, and much more. What’s great is a lot of the content you create can be repurposed across multiple channels and campaigns, often with little or no modification.
If neither you nor a member of your team are content creation or content marketing experts, you’ll need to find some to help you. These can be freelancers or fractional marketing employees in the very early days before you can fully afford full time marketers on the payroll. If you’re good at messaging and positioning, that’s great. It means you’ll mostly engage the professionals for their creative work and possibly for running your marketing campaigns.
I’ve written about how prospects take themselves through 60% of the sales journey (see related article titled “Prospects Take Themselves Through 60% of the Sales Journey“) and have challenged readers to make sure their website is enabling sales (see related article titled “Is Your Website Enabling Sales?”). For either of these concepts to be successful, the quality of your marketing content is key. Violating one or more fundamental quality rules could easily cause the prospect to disqualify you from their consideration list without you ever knowing why or having a chance to talk to them.
I also love this blog post from HubSpot with 8 ways to improve the quality of your marketing content. You can find the post here. Their list includes the following actions:
- Fact check
- Include data that backs up your points
- Find examples that illustrate your points
- Use visuals to illustrate points
- Get quotes from thoughts leaders and subject matter experts
- Remove any jargon
- Do some formatting and incorporate high-quality visuals
- Have someone edit and proof
Very basic principles, most of which don’t require an on-staff marketing veteran. And if you’re using a marketing agency for most/all of your work and not getting the results you were hoping for, check their work against these principles.