Communication | West Hall Media

Content marketing is one of the things we love to help clients with. Three of the biggest challenges they face are time concerns, fear, and doubt. They don’t believe they have enough time to spend creating enough good content. They are scared because they will give away too much and clients won’t need them or competitors will steal it. And they doubt if there efforts will produce a measurable ROI.

Let’s tackle these concerns shall we?

Time:

We hear this one a lot. You are already have too far to go with too few and this is one more thing on the plate. Have you written a white paper, case study, or other long form content? Have you given a presentation at an industry trade show? If so, you have a lot of the hard work done already. It doesn’t take too much time to edit and convert them to a series of sharable and SEO friendly blog posts or email marketing messages. You can even interview the authors and customers for a series of videos to post to Youtube. Not to mention, you can rip the audio from the video and use it for a podcast. These are just a few ideas. Ask yourself, what resources do you already have that can be used to create valuable content?

Fear:

One thing conventional wisdom and old school thinking will tell you is to keep things black box. Don’t let anything you do become public because someone might steal your idea and secrets. This strategy doesn’t work well these days. The climate has changed and your audience wants to trust you before they commit. Trust is earned by sharing informative and relevant information. There is a direct relationship between the level of trust and where someone is in the marketing/sales funnel. I’m not advocating you give away proprietary information, but I am saying you should let people see how you think and what you do.

Doubt:

Doubt usually comes from not knowing what you want. You need to define what success is for you. Are you looking to build credibility and awareness, convert readers and visitors into leads , or increase retention? Begin with the end in mind and produce content that focuses on reaching your goals.

Now what?

Ok, now that you have dispelled fear, doubt, and time concerns it’s time to start. Create content as often as possible but always follow the first rule of content marketing, create awesome content. Test long and short firm content as well as video and audio. See what type of things resonate with your audience and get the desired results to meet your goals. Start today. You are closer than you think.

photo credit: aeneastudio

Tags | b2b, b2b companies, b2b content, content, content marketing, doubt, epistemology, executing, fear, getting started, marketing, overcome, overcoming