I’ve been having a lot of fun lately with the content marketing projects I’m coordinating and it occurred to me that there are still a lot of business people out there who aren’t sure what content marketing is, and what difference it can make to their business. As a content marketing writer and project coordinator I take a look at a business’s online presence and make recommendations for improving it. There are almost always elements that can be developed or fine-tuned so a business can get more leads and generate more revenue and it’s really fun to watch a project take shape. The key task is to build a strategy around the unique aspects of the business’s product, service and ideal customer base. And the company story needs to be told with authenticity and enthusiasm across all channels.

Content marketing is about creating a substantial body of content related to your business and the needs of your ideal clients and sharing it through online platforms such as your website and your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ profiles. You want the content to tell your company story authentically so that it generates trust and calls upon your viewers and visitors to take another step in a growing relationship with you.

If you do it well, human visitors and search engines will reward your efforts and you generate greater revenue as a result.

When a company hires Crossman Communications to develop and execute a program for them, my team and I spend a lot of time initially working quietly behind the scenes to assess their online presence and compare it with existing industry standards and their competitors’ activities online. It takes a substantial amount of time to create the infrastructure of a successful content marketing strategy and we often find surprises: missing passwords, administrators that have long since left the company, databases that need to be built from scratch and the need to educate personnel on how to get the most out of the company’s online real estate.

Results don’t appear overnight and in fact it can take many months before the first sweet taste of success trickles in.

But once we get a program up and running, it’s gratifying to see how much new business can be generated. Our sweet spot tends to be with companies generating more than $1 million in revenue and where either there is no existing marketing department or the marketing department has not yet ventured substantially into the realm of content marketing.

If this sounds like something that might benefit your business, let’s chat – I’d be happy to schedule a conversation to share more about the benefits of content marketing and how it could help your business generate more revenue. Feel free to book yourself into my calendar at www.meetme.so/susancrossman!