Are you already posting case studies and white papers on your website? Are you sending a newsletter (via email or print) or blogging?
If so, congratulations, you’re a content publisher!
Content marketing, sometimes called educational marketing, is not new for most professional services firms. You may not call it that; maybe you call it thought leadership or your publishing platform.
In any case, it’s old hat to many professionals in consulting, accounting, financial services, and other fields. You deal with the challenge of selling an untangible—your services. And publishing content that demonstrates your expertise and communicates your business approach is an effective way to begin to build the trust required for a client to retain you.
If you’re a services professional producing this content, you know how challenging it can be. You have client work to deliver and business development responsibilities. And now you have content to create?
With the proper planning and a strategic approach, however, it can be done effectively and relatively painlessly, as you’ll learn by listening in on my interview with Joe Pulizzi, author of Get Content Get Customers and founder of the content matching website Junta42.
Here’s the takeaway for creating or enhancing your professional services firm’s content strategy:
- Do a simple content audit: what are you doing right now? a newsletter? white papers? Write a list. What are these content pieces doing for you?
- Identify your objectives and your target audience’s information needs.
- Next, match your audience’s information needs with what you’re currently doing. Keep what’s working and take this content to the next level. Step away from content that’s not working.
- Now, do you have any gaps to fill in?
- Pick the content that is not only compelling to your clients, but that you do and do well. What can you be the best at with the resources you can allocate?
- Don’t try to do everything. Pick three types of content for your primary platform, adding secondary types of content to feed your primary platform.
