How to Employ Marketing Messages

Naturally the question arises, “When can I market?” or “How should I market?” Clearly, you're producing content to build a following. And when you have loyal fans, this opens up the opportunity for you to market and sell your products and services.

Here's the good news: There are plenty of ways to market with content. They're just not obvious at first glance. What follows are some proven ideas that I hope will show you alternative ways to market with content.

Marketing for Leads

Here's a new way to think about your marketing. Create marketing messages that drive people to your content, not your products and services.

Change your focus. When you do this, you can actively market your content with the intent of generating leads. Rather than making the sale a goal of your advertising, your objective becomes getting people to subscribe to some of your nuclear content.

This becomes a friction-free first step. If you make it easy for people to take that step, they'll move closer to becoming customers. Something free can lead to future fees.

Here's a simple analogy. Have you ever wandered by an ice cream shop and the server behind the counter offered, “Would you like to sample a flavor?” You likely tried a few and then ordered a cone. In a similar, yet prolonged way, properly marketed content can move people into a process that results in many eventual sales. That content is your ice cream sample.

Here's how it works. You take some of your nuclear content—like ...

Get Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.