What is Content Marketing (and Why You Should Be a Lighthouse)
You have a book to sell, want to gain foot traffic to your bookstore, have a book festival to promote, want to raise awareness around your literary non-profit, or increase support for your library. But how do you do that in a way that engages and builds your audience, and that’s fun and creative for you?
Content marketing is a great approach to sharing your ideas and what you're working on with the world — especially if you're in the literary community. Here's what you need to know about content marketing and why it’s a great strategy for finding and building your audience.
What is Content Marketing?
Marketing (as I define it) is simply telling the world about what you do or offer, like a product, service, idea, event, or something else you'd like other people to know about.
There's the presumption that marketing has to be salesy or slimy or perform in-your-face tactics. But when you read a newsletter from your favorite bookstore telling you about their upcoming events, or when you listen to an author talk about how they crafted their novel, or when you see a poster for an upcoming book festival on the subway train — that's all marketing. It's not pushy or salesy or slimy, and for the right person, it's informative information you may enjoy reading or hearing about. When done correctly, marketing serves to connect an author or organization with an audience who is interested in what that author or organization makes or is doing: a book to its reader, an MFA program to a writer, a pair of library socks to a librarian.
Content marketing, then, is a subset of marketing that gets the word out to an audience by using content — text, video, or audio — that informs, educates, or entertains. This may look like:
An author sending out a newsletter about writing topics or themes
A bookstore posting behind-the-scenes videos or book reviews to TikTok
A literary non-profit sharing stories of people they've helped to Instagram
A librarian writing a blog about their monthly book recommendations
A publishing company hosting a podcast with author interviews
A literary magazine posting excerpts of recent work on their website
A reading series posting a video of a recent event on YouTube
To the right audience, the above doesn't sound salesy or pushy, right? If you're a literary person, the above may be content that you're very interested in, from authors and organizations you'd be interested in learning more about.
The good thing is that not only is content marketing a great strategy, but the literary community — writers, storytellers, and creatives — has a distinct advantage in creating great content as well.
Inbound v. Outbound and Why Content Marketing is a Better Strategy
When it comes to understanding why taking a content marketing approach is such a great idea? Well, would you rather be a door-to-door salesperson or a lighthouse?
Let's say you're a door-to-door salesperson selling encyclopedias (very bookish — I'm also dating myself). You go to the first house and talk about why they should buy a set of encyclopedias from you. But they pass, as they already have a set. Next house: they also pass, as they can access encyclopedias on the internet. Next house: they also pass because they don't care to have encyclopedias. Next house: they pass because they like to go to the library. You visit everyone on the block hoping you'll get a sale, and maybe you do, but most people are likely not going to buy. Talking to each and every person hoping they'll be your customer is a hard way to do business!
This is called outbound marketing, or going out into the world with your marketing in hopes it’ll find its audience. A great example of outbound marketing is when a business sends everyone a flier in the mail. For example, a running gym opened in my neighborhood a few years ago and sent everyone in the neighborhood a flier. It’s a nice way to raise awareness, but I’m not going to be your customer — and many, many others won’t, either. It's just a blanket effort without any targeting that is wasting time and money — like going door-to-door to sell encyclopedias.
What if you're a lighthouse? You stay in one spot, and you beam out your message describing all the wonderful things your encyclopedias offer, the interesting entries, the amazing illustrations, the informative writing, and how people use the encyclopedias in their everyday lives. Now, those individuals who are interested in learning more about your encyclopedias and who are in the market to buy a set will see your beam and sail toward you. This results in interacting with an audience who is actually interested in your product because they've self-selected themselves based on seeing your lighthouse beam and knowing it was for them.
This is called inbound marketing, which is often used interchangeably with content marketing. By sharing who you are, what you do, and what you're interested in and nerd out about, those who resonate with your content will start to follow and engage with you. Let's take the running gym example above. Instead of spending money on fliers most everyone will throw in the trash, what if they started posting videos from their group workouts online? What if they sent out a newsletter with fitness tips and tricks? What if they started sharing educational content about the benefits of running? Individuals interested in running and in the market to join a new gym will be drawn by the value they find in the content this gym posts.
And that's a key component of content marketing: Value. By creating content that delivers value to your ideal audience, reader, or customer, you attract them to your ideas, products, or actions. This is done through educating, solving problems, offering helpful advice, entertaining, or providing other helpful things (for example, this article is a piece of valuable content, I hope!).
Be the Salesperson or a Lighthouse?
Ultimately, content marketing allows you to share your knowledge, special interests, ideas, and unique products or services with the world in a fun, nerdy, and creative way that offers value. And those who are interested in that will see your lighthouse and come find you.
Interested in learning more about content marketing and how you can use it to tell the world about what you do? Sign up for my weekly Literary Marketing newsletter.
Ready to create a content marketing strategy for your book or your business? Head to my Literary Marketing Services page to get started.
