First off what is a content marketer? Well, a content marketer is somebody responsible for the constant creation of visual, video, and written content for your brand. They should be somebody that has a good understanding of your audience and the type of content that they'd like to share with them, show them, inspire them, make them laugh about, stories to tell them, things to educate them about. They have a good understanding of this and a creativeness to create the content that’s going to be most engaging to them.

A good content marketer is somebody that understands how content marketing is also good for SEO so they create content with an SEO focus, but also with a focus of how it's going to be leveraged across other channels like social media and email and ad campaigns and the list goes on. So the key for you is to have this type of a person for your brand and your organization and to have a good strategy behind that that can push you forward. So, let's talk about five reasons why a good content marketer is key to your business and why content marketing in general is something that you must have.

1. Content marketing powers your website content

The content on your landing pages, on your service pages, on your product pages, on your blog, on your whole website. The beauty of content marketing and constantly creating new and fresh content that has an SEO focus on your website is that it's going to be the conversion juice your website needs to convert more of its current traffic into sales and leads, but also to help you generate new traffic because you're going to start ranking organically for a lot of these key words that you're creating content for. So, having a good content marketing strategy and a good content marketer powers your website to constantly create new, fresh, and engaging content to convert more visitors into customers. If you're not constantly creating new content and your website's just static, it becomes stale and it's just not as convertible.

2. It powers your social media

Social media is key. It's a never-ending feed of content which means you always need to be creating new content. So, by having somebody that has this as their singular focus, you always have engaging, enriching, and storytelling type of content on social media. If you have content that's boring or salesy, it's not going to be very effective. You want to build your audience by doing it through trust. And by building good content and having a good strategy here, you're building trust. So the beauty of a good content marketing strategy is it not only fuels your website like we talked about, but it also fuels social media.

3. It fuels your email campaigns

By email campaigns I mean maybe you send a monthly newsletter or maybe you don't cause you don't have content but you should, right? Maybe you're lead email campaign is running out of content. You need more emails in that journey that you're dripping on your leads or your customers (ie dropshipping products). Maybe you need emails that go out for seasonality and things like this. No matter what it is, there's content that's needed, right, video, visual, and written content and somebody has to be a part of that. So if you have a good content marketer, they’re building content for your website, which you can share on social media and then you can interject into your email campaigns. It's basically killing three birds with one stone.

4. It fuels your ad campaigns

Your ad campaigns can become very stale very quickly, right? It's like bananas on the countertop. It's pretty engaging at first. It looks good. But a week later it's starting to look kind of stale and two weeks later nobody wants to even be a part of that, right? Same thing with your ads which means you always need to be updating your ads so that they continue to drive engagement and conversion and you see a strong return on investment. If you don't do that, you're going to start to see your costs increase because your ads aren't as effective. So, how do you update your ads? Well, you need content. You need video, visual, and written content constantly being created that's not salesy. Here, again, salesy doesn't work anymore. You need valuable content that's shareworthy and engaging and tells stories. When you think about big brands like Nike and Under Armour and BMW and Ford and Budweiser, they're constantly creating new campaigns, right, of engaging, funny, inspiring content that's helping you constantly stay engaged, right, and understand and be aware of their brand. If they didn't do that, it would get pretty boring, right? And so that's why you need to constantly be creating content and to do that, you need a good content marketer. And

5. It also fuels your sales team

Your sales team always needs a reason to reach out, right, or reason to call or reason to send an email or reason to reconnect with an old prospect and good content marketing gives them the reason to do that. They have pieces of information to share, right? They have social posts to share. They have emails to forward along (ie dropshipping product research). They have blog posts to send the customer. That's constantly giving them valuable content. It's educating them, maybe making them laugh, inspiring them, right? And as this is happening, they’re gaining trust and they're staying top of mind. So when the customer's thinking about who to do business with, they ultimately think about you first, right, and that's what you want as a sales person. So, you need to arm them with this continual flow of sales collateral and that sales collateral is coming from your content marketing strategy. Bonus tip of the day, make sure that you invest in content marketing. Whether you're doing it or you hire somebody internally to do it or you hire a company, like SaleSource, to do it you need to do it. It cannot be skipped. It must be done. If you don't do it, you're going to start to fall behind. Some people ask, "How much content marketing should I be doing?" I generally recommend at least one content marketing piece per week, right? That's 52 per year, so get started. The beauty of content marketing is it kills five birds with one stone. You build the content and you put it on your website, you share it on social media, you add it to your email campaigns, you update your ad campaigns, and then you provide it to your sales team to use as sales collateral. That's five birds, one stone. Content marketing is the biggest no-brainer in the history of the world!