The Concept of Content Marketing
What is content marketing? It is not pushing a lot of content out onto social media, spending your whole day posting to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok. Content marketing in its simplest form is actually one of the most powerful things you can do in your business.
When you understand the concept and the principle behind it and how they work, you can see how content marketing can be so powerful in such a simple, yet profound way. There are some concepts at play, strategies behind how marketing communications work. It is important to understand these strategies because they make all of the difference in how things work or not.
Advertising is not Marketing
When you think of marketing, you think of advertising. Advertising is not marketing. Advertising is a part of the marketing puzzle, but it is not marketing in and of itself. In marketing, there are two important concepts to understand. The first is the concept of push and the second is the concept of pull.
Now, if you think about it, when it comes to your clients and customers, you either try and push them towards your purchase, your products, your service, or they pull your products and services to them. Which do you think is the most powerful? Think about it for a second.
Push vs Pull
We are still behind the client, pushing them in the back, trying to guide them along to get them to where we want them to go or the client's in the driving seat, they are pulling your products towards them because they want to go there. With one of them, we are forcing the issue. The other one, they are forcing the issue. This is push versus pull. Content marketing is the most powerful because it is driven by the client. It is not pushed, it is not forced on the client.
Advertising, paid media, all of these hard-edge approaches to drive in sales are push, push, push. Content marketing is pull, pull, pull. The client is in control every step of the way with content marketing. That is why it is so powerful. They have the intent, they have the desire. They pull themselves towards the product when they have got the desire.
There's a wonderful saying,
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
So by using all of these push tactics and just blitzing social media with all kinds of content is still pushing your content out into the world. It is not what content marketing is. If you are doing that, please do stop.
If you are considering doing that, or you think you need to do that to be successful, stop because you do not. When you understand what content marketing actually is and how it truly works, then you can make a huge difference with what you do without spending endless hours on social media.
The Concept of Pull in Content Marketing
So rather than us pushing our products out into the world, is it not much better if that horse that will not drink, unless it wants to, if that horse wants to drink, if your customers want your product, how much easier is the sales conversation?
In the concept of pull, the clients pull themselves towards the product, they are in control and they are in charge. That is what content marketing is. It is creating content that puts your potential clients in charge. To do this, you truly need to understand what emotions are driving them to want to get to your product or service matters to them.
What is keeping them lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling in a cold sweat? These questions that you answer in the form of content, act as those mechanisms for potential clients to pull their way through your world to buy your products or services.
Content Marketing is Content with Intent
This is the most powerful way to create content because what you are doing then is creating content with intent. You are creating content that actually solved somebody's problem that meets a need in a prospective client. And when you meet that need, you become as Jay Abraham calls it the fiduciary advisor, right? The trusted advisor, the person who may see. As having the solution to that problem.
So what is content marketing? Content with intent. Content that encourages your potential clients to pull their way towards buying your products or services because it is their choice, it is their decision.
Drive Potential Customers to Your Product
You really have to switch things around and create content with the intent that drives that person towards making that decision reinforced with email marketing sequences that guide people along. That is what content marketing is. If you can focus on that, you do not need a plethora of content. You do not need a model. You can create very succinct, dedicated pieces of content. I call it pillar content that drives potential customers towards making a purchase.
It is subtle. It is profound and it truly will make a world of difference to your marketing efforts. So that is what content marketing is. And that is how you approach content marketing in a way that works and does not waste your time. So you can focus on doing more of what you love and changing people's lives.
