Top tips for using marketing eContent to get your business found

Modern marketing is all about engaging with your target audience and creating some interesting content that they would find enjoyable or interesting to consume. Use your creative juices to develop interesting content and then leverage that content in as many ways as possible to engage with your audience. You will develop leads, convert prospects, increase website traffic, get found in searches and develop a reputation as a thought leader. Here are some top tips for getting found:

• Write a white paper about a new trend in your industry or a common problem facing your end users
   
• Publish a blog. Take your creative eContent and break it up into a series of short pieces covering the topic, seek feedback from your readers, take the opportunity to engage with them.
   
• Create an eBook. This isn't as daunting as it sounds and there are many templates out there for doing this. Perhaps each of your blogs could be written to form a different chapter of your book. Give the eBook away in exchange for contact details.
   
• Create a video. "Isn't that horribly expensive?" I hear you say. Not at all, good quality video cameras can be bought for hundreds of dollars, editing can be done simply on iMovie or Windows Movie maker. Use Audacity or a similar audio tool to produce good quality audio. Post it on You Tube and link it to your website...job done!
   
• Create an eNewsletter. For many companies this is a comfortable transition from the traditional paper company newsletter. The trick here though is to not fall into the trap of talking too much about yourself and your new products or services, talk about how customers are solving their problems with your solutions or your views on a hot topic of the moment in your sector.
   
• Sign up to a speaker bureau and/or volunteer your services to the events companies that run conferences in your sector. Be prepared to talk on thought leadership topics or case studies of firms who have solved your buyer's problems, give out your slides in return for business cards.

Some words of warning. Look to publish regularly so your name and brand becomes associated with high quality interesting ideas. Be sensible, tailor the frequency to the format, a blog really must be published regularly, daily or at least weekly. But you can't and shouldn't plan to send out articles, white papers and eBooks via eDM campaigns, more than every 3-6 weeks. But you can and should host them online and make them available for download. Leverage your one big idea by republishing the concept in many different ways. One white paper might spawn 6 blog articles or two presentations, reformatted for consumption in that format. Think carefully about resources. Who is going to be responsible for creating the original ideas, and then who is responsible for leveraging that idea in as many ways as possible. Perhaps your CTO has written a great technical white paper but who is going t interpret that white paper into 6 easy to access blogs? There is nothing worse than a company eNewsletter that dies after 3 issues due to lack of content or lack of resources.

If these issues overwhelm and discourage you there are many options for outsourcing such tasks. There are firms such as ours (g2m Solutions) and software such as InnoBlogs or Hubspot that can take the pain out of the process and allow you to use your great ideas to generate leads and get your business found online. What have been your experiences producing eContent?