I often get asked to attend internal brand and marketing meetings for clients I work with regularly. At the same time, I also get asked to come in for one off consulting sessions for businesses that may want to shake things up. Once such one-off meeting took a direction I didn’t expect – it almost turned into me giving a lecture to senior marketers and managers of an E-commerce business – and I think it was as much a shock to me as it was to them.
Sounds a bit strange right?
The main aim of the meeting was to build a content calendar for the digital team to keep pushing branding and SEO content out and to try and generate natural links. However, it all came to head when the digital marketing manager said:
“I think that content marketing just doesn’t make sense for our business – there really aren’t enough content angles that we can use. I mean how often can you write about your products?”
That got me going – I said that they had a very narrow vision of what “content” really was. And as someone was busy making notes – I started reeling off the different types of content that they should consider. In the end – the list was so large, I decided to put together this simple guide that categorises and outlines these ideas.
These ideas aren’t new – nor are they things I just started advising clients on. In essence this guide is almost a summary of my content and marketing strategies to an extent.
I have to emphasise – content marketing is a subset of marketing – which means a number of these ideas, tactics and strategies could easily form part of MORE than just content marketing – they can form part of your core marketing principles if you really learn from them. You need to really understand your audience, and your brand and finally – what you wish to really achieve out of your content (or simply marketing) plan.
Reading this guide is fairly simple, we have built in navigation, direct links to key sections and a breadcrumb. Feel free to read it in order or piecemeal! There are (currently) 19 categories, each broken down into a series of related ideas and concepts.