Make no mistake about it, this blog is a marketing platform. While there are times when I write for my (mental) health even that ends up being marketing, of a sort. Best of all the marketing I do here and the marketing you do when you create content can scale exceptionally well. Especially when compared to traditional sales and marketing activities.
Scaling options for marketing (sales) activities
1. Hire more sales and marketing people. It generally works. In normal economic times it might even be the way to go. These are not normal economic times. For a multitude of reasons adding head count is certainly not the way I would choose to go right now. I addressed the other problems with this approach in incremental vs breakthrough change. You can only grow so much by adding one person. When it’s time to grow more you need to add yet another person. So yes, this scales but at basically the same profitability level since you keep adding expenses to gain the incremental sales dollars.
2. Market with your content and have your new customers find you. This blog post will reach several thousand people and be read by several hundred….in the next several days. Then, over the next several years it will be read by several hundred more people (each year). Yes, about one hour of my time will convert to several thousand readers over the next three to five years and beyond.
Why you might read this content marketing blog post
1. You have found my content to be useful. Somewhere along the line over the last five years you have found this blog to provide useful information. At some regualar interval or via some automated method like RSS you return to see what new and useful content I have created. I intentionally create useful content more frequently than I used to. By doing so the current traffic of this blog has grown by about ten times in the last year.
2. You utilized a search engine to find an answer to a question. There are more than a few keyword combinations that will keep this post relevant to search engines like Google for years to come. The more relevant this blog becomes to search engines – a system I don’t fully understand – the higher in the search rankings my posts move. I know this to be true because search traffic here is growing geometrically.
Content marketing is all about intention
I have at least these three things in mind whenever I write a post.
1. Will you find the topic useful?
2. Can I add a perspective to the topic that is uniquely me?
3. While not eff-ing up 1 and 2 above can I edit the content so Google finds the content delicious?
Your turn. How you feel about the scalability of inbound content marketing?
The key to good business is realizing all the tools that are out there – sales people and marketers are tools too. Facebook, Twitter, etc can only grow your business so much as can the people you hire. If you do have the budget for sales people, invest in the search and in them as well. Mike Carroll offers a great Sales search product that tests skills and knowledge.
Encourage Sales people to use social media to COMPLEMENT, not replace, their techniques and you embrace a recipe for success. As long as the ingredients are used correctly you’ll have a blue-ribbon winning prize.
Hi Tiffany,
Good points and thanks for providing the resources. Perhaps I didn’t do a great job making my point that there could be ways to structure companies going forward that utilizes new media as “new selling and marketing.” Probably won’t work for all products and market segments but I’m giving it the old college try in my space. 🙂
Good to see your comment here!
-Jim
Nice post. Just as the world isn’t black or white, but greyscale … I believe sales is much the same way. Sales is also a multi-step process. Content, good content, that is dispersed properly can provide invaluable credibility and information. But can it get your prospect to “sign on the dotted line?”
Depending on your product or service, I believe the solution is somewhere in the middle. And then there’s always the question of repeat business and customer nurture. I don’t know how you can effectively replace the human element in these functions – or would want to.
Hello Clay,
Good to see you here. Couldn’t agree more that it depends on the product or service. In my case what I’m really doing for the company is sales. So, if I can spend less time prospecting and finding the potential clients and business partners then I can spend more time getting signatures on dotted lines and such. I’ve also put in place a system that makes it fairly easy to purchase our off the shelf products (at new lower prices) right on our site without ever speaking to a human. Yes, I’ll take shades of grey for $100 😉
-Jim