Are you on Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter? Instagram? A blog site? If so, you’re a published author. Back in days of yore, to become published you needed to spend grueling hours creating a piece of work worthy of the attention of agents and editors. Then it would have to be thoroughly reviewed and gone through. Finally, it would be laid out, and published either in a book or a magazine. Now, you have a thought and, splat!, you can publish that thought and send it out to the ether for anyone to see.
That’s the good news. Modern social media publishing platforms have made it simple to get your message out to the world. And that’s the bad news. Modern social media publishing platforms have made it simple to get your message out to the world.
But publishing and attracting an audience are two different things. Publishing is easy. Attracting an audience is decidedly difficult.
We hear a lot today about content marketing and its benefits for people in the Business-to-Business (B2B) environment. If you can get the word out about your particular expertise in an area, you can raise the trust levels of potential customers. Higher trust levels will result in shorter sales cycles and increased margins. But just publishing is not enough. As we’ve determined, anybody can publish. It’s what you publish that matters. There’s a new phrase out there: “Content is King.” And it means that what you publish is more important than the platform you publish on. Yes, Facebook and LinkedIn and your blog site are all great platforms. But they are worthless if what you do there is worthless.
So, here are a few tips for contractors and others in the construction industry about the kinds of content you should publish:
- Be an expert. Talk about topics that you know intimately and share your expertise with the world.
- Stop bragging. If all you do is talk about how great your company is, your audience will tune you out.
- Educate. Most people going into content marketing want to talk about the benefits of their product or service. Resist that urge. Help people understand your market, educate them about it, and they will come to trust you more and return to your site for more information.
- Be controversial. I don’t mean for you to be provocative just to provoke, but don’t shy away from expressing an opinion. Adults who are looking for education are comfortable with experts expressing opinions. They may disagree, but that is actually good for audience engagement.
- Build a community. The idea in content marketing is not just to build a one-way flow of information, but to create a community where ideas and expertise are shared frequently. That will attract more people, and if you’re at the center of it, you will have a highly engaged audience.
- Ask opinions. Engage your audience by asking what they think. You can’t have a community if You’re the only one talking.
- Have fun. I never enjoyed school. It was not that I didn’t like learning, it was just that I wanted more excitement. It’s okay every once in a while to share something that is only tangentially related to your area as long as it’s fun.
(This is why kitten movies rule the internet.) - Keep it simple and say it clearly. Most writing for media, including magazines and newspapers, is done at the eighth-grade level. You can still express very sophisticated ideas, but the writing should be clear and simple so there is no confusion.
If you are uncomfortable in executing a content marketing plan, talk to experts in that area and get their advice on how you can achieve your strategic goals. Remember, if you can define the message, then you will be the leader.
