Marketing Content Is Like Marketing Products, by Brian Newmark

There is a connection between marketing your product and marketing your content.

When you market your product, you do a self promotional activity.

It is difficult, brings fewer benefits and adds more to the costs.

In short, self promotion and marketing products directly isn’t cool.

What works smoothly is marketing content.

That is where content marketing starts.

Here, in this article, we will discuss ways to market your content which will bring in-direct benefits to your products.

1) Marketing content with a Manifesto:

Manifesto works particularly well when you launch something new. Rather than doing a general launch, make an ebook manifesto and make it available for free download.

Put all your marketing efforts into the manifesto so that it gets maximum download.

If the manifesto contains something that touches the heart, connects with your audience, it can really go viral thus getting a lot of downloads and spreading further.

Put an optional email subscription form, get some related links of the products in the manifesto and your products will get the benefits of in-direct marketing.

2) Marketing content with a blog:

Having a marketing blog on a website can help a lot. A blog is always helpful when it comes to connecting to an audience.

Once the blog is established and an audience base is setup, some hints or links to the products can be easily added. If the blog has high quality content, marketing the blog becomes easy. One just needs to market the blog and its content, and the benefits of that marketing will be in-directly received by the products.

3) Marketing content on the Social Media:

In the social media it is always difficult to market products directly. If you try to be self-promotional on the social media, it will backfire big time. If you push it further, it will only bring negative response.

One needs to be creative on the social media, and a unique and creative approach to promote the products in-directly by promoting great content can just be the idea you were looking for.

There are many ways to promote content on the social media, like sponsored stories on facebook, twitter ads etc. Just do it in a way that the indirect benefits falls on the product itself.

4) Marketing content in a newsletter:

News letters are still in fashion. They work like a charm and reaches the inbox if your targeted audience. They even wait for your next email newsletter.

But it won’t work if you start sending links to your product pages. They like your newsletter because of the content. They like to consume the valuable ideas and tips that you send via your content.

Design the newsletters in a way that the ideas always end up with a hint to sell your products. It should not be a forceful sell, rather a soft sell.

5) Content marketing from your Social profiles:

Social profiles require time, hard work and consistency to build. It is really difficult to make a social profile active. Updating social profiles is like micro blogging where you need to post updates like eight times a day.

These updates has to be informative, funny, educational and at the same time, nicely presented. Catchy image is always a must have.

With all these requirements at hand, there is very little opportunity to do self promotion and even less of a chance to market products. Thus the content itself has to carry a hint towards the product and make it catchy enough to pass along with the content as an added resource.

6) Marketing content with Infographics:

Any content with a good visual appeal has a far greater response rate compared to the most well presented text content.

Infographics is the finest form of visual content and with so many channels and infographic directories around, marketing an infographic is the easiest thing to do.

An infographic always have the source links included inside the graphic and a credit link below it. This is mostly how the infographic goes viral. Having your product in the source can help, but having it inside the infographic as a part of the graphic helps to market your product further.

The bottom line is that marketing content is easy and brings greater return compared to products which is not easy to market. Everyone likes content as it helps, it entertains and it solves problems. There are a number of benefits with content and you don’t have to sell anything. When you are promoting content, you aren’t selling anything, so you don’t come across as someone trying to push your business. Marketing content is more like giving, instead of selling.

Fuse your content marketing efforts with your products in a way that the content markets the product. This way, you only have to market your content and your product will get sold in the process.