In 1904, the Genesee Pure Food Company created a new gelatin substance called JELL-O. Despite high expectations for the new brand, the gelatin didn’t sell well with the target audience: in home cooks. The company regrouped and decided to send a sales team door to door with recipe books to help those in home cooks understand the value of gelatin and how it could benefit them. The recipe books included 40+ recipes showing customers how to use gelatin in their daily menus. Suddenly JELL-O started to gain traction in the marketplace.
Why?
Because the company “connected the dots” for its target audience by using the recipe book to provide engaging and relevant information to help its customers understand how JELL-O could benefit them. Sales increased. By 1906, JELL-O reached over $1 million in annual sales.
Today we call the recipe book ‘Content marketing.’
Content marketing is a way to reach your online customers by creating, publishing and sharing relevant and useful content. Content marketing gives your customers information that is not only interesting and engaging but is helpful to them. By focusing on the needs of your customers—what problem are they trying to solve; what opportunity are they seeking; and, how you can help them solve the problem or find and seize an opportunity—it positions your business as a trusted partner and helps your customers, and potential customers, understand the benefit of doing business with you instead of your competitors.
There are two keys to successful content marketing.
First, make sure the content you create is relevant and useful to your customers by giving them information that transforms an interest in your business or product into a problem solved or an opportunity seized. Next, make sure that the content you create is optimized with a keyword strategy so that you can be found on the Internet when your customers are searching for information on Google, Yahoo! or Bing.
In the next blog, we will tell you how to create a successful keyword strategy.