Having a content strategy in place for how and where you market your business is essential. This will enable you to accurately monitor whether you're engaging with your desired audience in the right way.
An easy mistake that many companies make is just talking about the products and services they offer. You may think, Well, surely that's the point? Actually, no. Last week I listened to an interesting webinar hosted by "the marketer" magazine, entitled "Content Marketing: How to build a sustainable strategy," which gave some great examples of companies that have portrayed their products effectively by not directly talking about them.
The first example of an effective content strategy was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod, which you can watch below. Steve Jobs's intelligent approach to launching an entirely new product was to focus not on the features of the product, but on people's love of music: how it makes you feel, the importance of music, and how with this new product you could take it anywhere with you. This is something that almost everyone could connect with, and they did.
Steve Jobs - The first iPod introduction:
The second example was Kellogg's Special K - their "Drop a jean size" campaign. What the brand could have done is talk about how much fibre the cereal contained and how good for you this is. However, they instead focused on the benefits for their female audience, implying they could look and feel better by eating Special K - and so succeeded in grabbing their audience's attention. The campaign spoke to women across the UK who, particularly after Christmas, wanted to feel better about themselves after over-indulging during the festive period.
Kellogg's Special K - Drop a jean size campaign:
Both of these brands recognised that rather than just taking the hard sell approach with their content, it was important to talk about the problems their products or services would solve. This approach makes your content relevant to your audience and gets your audience's attention. Simply talking about your product's features without giving it relevance and context is far less powerful, and really isn't that interesting to your readers or viewers.