As marketers we spend a huge amount of our time creating compelling content for our clients, as does every marketing consultant or agency for their clients.  So, with all this marketing activity going on all around us, how to we ensure the messages we’re sending out are actually being seen?

I read recently that there are only two ways for companies to break through in an environment that is literally swamped with marketing messages: Be either ‘amazing’ or be useful.   In my mind amazing is subjective: what is amazing to one person certainly isn’t to the next.  Useful, on the other hand cannot be misconstrued, if you’ve got your target market right.  And that’s the second part of getting your marketing heard: are you actually telling your target market about your products / services?

Effective marketing is only effective if these factors have been considered.  Make the objective of your messaging to be useful and interesting; not to just make information for the sake of it. The objective is to make information that customers and prospective customers will use.  The way to do this is to research your market.  Who are they and what information will be useful to them?  Keyword research is a really useful tool to find out what your audience is looking for online.  Look at your website analytics – what search terms did they use to find your site, and did they stay on the site or did they not find what they were looking for.  What are your customers talking about on the various social media sites?  This is where you can gleam vital information to focus your content on.

Once you understand what information your audience desires you can create that content accordingly.  Plan your newsletter and blog topics around those subjects that people are using for search.  Now you’ve got your content, you need to market it cleverly.

Social media is one of the most effective medium marketers have ever had in their armoury.  It allows you to share your message directly and regularly to an audience as targeted as you want it to be.  Use it to post your information, making it obvious to your audience that the information will be of value to them.  If you use a variety of social media platforms you’ll increase your chance of it being seen.  So tweet about your blog, send a LinkedIn update (via your company page) and include a link to your website with every post.

If your information is interesting and of value your prospects and customers will also market your marketing for you – by sharing your posts among their audience – this is the real power of social media.

Just remember this pearl of wisdom – use social media to promote your information, not your company.  Any blatant self-promotion is a complete no-no.  I’ll share with you one of my favourite marketing quotes “give away your knowledge…sell your expertise.”  Apply this to your marketing focus and over time your audience is more likely to become paying customers.