One of the hot marketing phrases you’ve probably heard recently is Content Marketing. Content Marketing is one of the most powerful ways that you can promote your business, especially with social media platforms such as Facebook. One of the key parts of content Marketing, a part that confuses many business owners, is that you’re not actually promoting your business with each posts – and that’s what makes it so powerful.

With content marketing, what you’re looking to do is to position yourself and your business as an expert in you field, as a place to turn to for ideas, inspirations, tips, tricks, and anything that your audience might find helpful. For example, if you’re a car dealership, you could make posts about what different parts of a typical car loan mean or ways to get the most life out of your car. These aren’t sales oriented posts, they are simply posts to provide your audience with something of value.

After a certain number of these value driven posts, feel free to make a sale pitch oriented post. The thing to keep in mind is that your sales pitch posts shouldn’t outnumber your value driven posts. Content marketing is all about the audience and providing them with great information and useful content. Once you’ve established the relationship through those value posts, you can then come back and make a sales pitch posts. I know the question you’re dying to know… how many value posts do I need to make before I make a sales pitch post? Unfortunately, there is no single answer to that. It changes from industry to industry, and from company to company, and even time of year to time of year. Trial and error is the name of the game. I’ve recommended to clients in the past to start with making about 7 value posts and then a sales posts. Keep track of the success you have and see what combination you need for your business.

Content marketing sounds a little different, especially with the value posts where you aren’t promoting or really even necessarily talking about your business. What you’re doing is building those relationships. We may live in an extremely high tech, social media filled world, but those relationships between a business and their customers is still immeasurably important.