Content Marketing Advice From Industry Insiders

Looking for content marketing advice? Did you know only 35 percent of business-to-business (B2B) marketers and 37 percent business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers have a documented content strategy? Surprised? That’s a really small percent. If you want to get ahead in business, start with building your own content marketing plan.

But content marketing can seem daunting, especially for a small business. I asked some of the top content marketers in the world for their content marketing advice, and the responses were interesting, to say the least.

I asked some of the best content marketing minds to chime in on what small and medium-sized business can do when starting out with content marketing. Here’s their content marketing advice:

Content Marketing Advice: Write What You Love

Dutch content marketing guru and speaker Cor Hospes said that “love is the basis of content marketing.” Elaborating a bit further, he said that without love, content is useless, meaning it’s important to put your full heart into the content you’re creating. Your customers will know the difference.

> 2 ‘Love is the basis for content marketing. Without love everything is worthless.’ https://t.co/kkYwiIefRF

— cor hospes (@corhospes) October 20, 2017

When you write about what you know and especially what you love, your passion will shine through your work and you’ll have an easier time building trust with your audience. And that brings us to our next piece of advice: audience building

Build an Audience

Author, speaker and Chief Strategy Officer for the Content Marketing Institute Robert Rose says audience building is the most important aspect of content marketing. “Build an audience,” he says. “Build a platform that attracts an audience rather than random acts of content.”

Build an audience. So, build a platform that attracts an audience rather than random acts of content

— Robert Rose (@Robert_Rose) October 20, 2017

Without an audience, your content marketing efforts will fall flat. Everyone is competing for a piece of the consumer’s ever-shrinking attention spans. Why should your customers and prospective customers pay attention to you? Good storytelling is the key to audience building. A recent survey found that 9 out of 10 companies that say they’re succeeding at content marketing are focusing on building their audience.

Don’t Believe the Experts

Content marketing, at least as we know it today, is a relatively new concept. People are still learning the basics of what works and what doesn’t work. Content marketing methods that work for one company might fail miserably for another. Speaker and writer Jay Acunzo offers this piece of content marketing advice: Think for yourself.

Ok. I’m game: “Think for yourself. Question everything experts tweet.”

— Jay Acunzo (@jayacunzo) October 19, 2017

“Question everything experts tweet,” he says. Jay is fighting to change the way people look at content marketing best practices. He says we need a break from conventional thinking in order to achieve the goals we desire. In other words, Jay wants content marketers to “think inside the box.”

Tell a Bloody Good Story

Content marketing ultimately comes down to storytelling. The best piece of content marketing advice I have seen today is from blogger Daniela Cavalletti, the founder of cavacom.biz. She says the key to content marketing is to “tell a bloody good story.”

“In an environment where we are surrounded by hollow click-bait, misleading pretentious headlines and cookie-cutter writing, telling a damn fine story is your way of leaving your competition behind at the starting post while you are roaring ahead in the race for a finite pool of clients,” she says in her blog post titled Here’s To No More Crap Content.

So to recap, the expert content marketing advice is to:

• Write what you love
• Build an audience
• Don’t believe the experts
• Tell a bloody good story

Now that you have some basic content marketing advice, it’s time to get busy creating your own content that will educate, inspire and wow your customers.