Social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization…these are all ways in which your business tries to get its voice heard in a crowd. More than that, your marketing efforts need to be intelligently targeted or you risk squandering your marketing dollars by cheerleading a message that ultimately falls on deaf ears.

Are we telling you that you can’t be Gordon Gekko and muscle your way into more brand exposure by sheer force of will? Not necessarily – you will definitely gain some customers by engaging in sprawling email marketing campaigns and indiscriminately blitzing social media with every move your company makes, but…

More Targeted Content Marketing

There’s a smarter, more targeted way to proceed, though, which shows a respect for your customers’ time and gets people paying attention. You know that story about the boy who cried wolf? A similar concept applies with content marketing in that if you take to the bullhorn on social media every time you touch up your blog, then potential customers might stop listening.

Conversely, if you commit to targeted social media marketing campaigns that hit up prospects right before a product launch and in ways that are relevant to their expectations, then you’ll have your customers scrambling to check their accounts.

To be effective, you should expect to spend approximately 40% or more of your marketing dollar on content marketing in 2016, and have tools in place for tracking that content marketing’s ROI effectiveness.

Effective content marketing can increase your exposure, generate fresh interest in your products, and significantly help your lead nurturing efforts.

Content marketing, in short, puts you into closer contact with customers and, especially if you enlist the help of social media managers or community managers, can lead to instant feedback from customers that further informs your targeting and ability to keep everything engaging and topical for your audience.

Employing Insightful Analytics

Using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can ensure that your reaching the right customers – in terms of both demographics like age and psychographics like interests and hobbies.

Google Analytics offers features like demographic reports and content engagement reporting to give you more confidence that you’re pitching germane content to a highly targeted audience while Facebook Insights shows you what’s working in real-time.

A little know-how really goes a long way and it’s important that your marketing efforts keep up with the fact that two-thirds of today’s customers have Smartphones, and 80% of that Smartphone-equipped crowd use their Smartphones to shop online…potentially on your company’s site.

The Heart of Content Marketing

With all of this focus on the technical aspects of content marketing and analytics, it can be easy to forget why we’re doing all of this in the first place – to connect with real-life people. Remember that few companies lost business because they made customers laugh through their blog or took up a memorable hashtag.

Thousands of businesses nationwide can also benefit from more relevant content marketing, more insightful analytics and knowing when to reach out to customers.