Online Marketing Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint
Posted on January 16, 2015 by Sarah Schwab, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Online marketing is a powerful way to grow your business, but it doesn't happen over night. It's about sharing great content over time. Here's how...
I believe strongly that creating compelling content is the best way to get lots of ideal clients to hire you… eventually.
But too many people come to me and they want to do a campaign for a service they are offering in a few weeks. They expect that by sending out a few e-mails, they will be able to fill their program in a short period of time. Even when they haven’t communicated to their list in 3 months!
I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how it works.
Content marketing is not designed to produce quick results. What it is really good at isbuilding relationships that will yield amazing results in the long run.
As you probably know, only a very small percentage of people want to hire you right away when you first meet them, or when they first come to your website, or hear about your business. Usually only about 1-2%. However, many of those people will hire you eventually, if you stay in touch with them.
Here’s a statistic I often share: 60% of sales happen more than one year after the initial contact is made. A whole year! (And sometimes more!) If you aren’t staying in touch with people on a regular basis, you are likely losing a lot of clients who would have loved to have heard from you, and would have hired you… eventually.
Content marketing is all about staying in touch with those people over an extended period of time, and strengthening your relationship with them during that time. This requires creating valuable content consistently.
If you send them two e-mails and then disappear, you will lose them. If you post on your blog once, and then don’t put out anything for a couple of months, you will lose them. In fact, I have come to believe that the impression people get from businesses that don’t put out content consistently is that they don’t have enough value to share.
I’m not saying its true. Of course you have a lot of value to share. But if you aren’t sharing it, it is as though it doesn’t exist.
So I encourage you to start creating content on a consistent basis. It is a powerful tool for the future of your business. But know that you have to be in it for the long haul.
I know that in the beginning it can be daunting, and many people start out on this path but end of giving up after a few months. But here is the silver lining… the longer you stick with content creation, the faster it will start to work!
Once you establish a library of content (25 pieces or more), and demonstrate your reliability and trustworthiness to share things regularly, your reputation grows. People will start referring others to you. New people can take in a lot of content very quickly because it is already there, and the magnitude of your value can be perceived immediately.
That doesn’t mean you get to stop creating content! But it does mean that over time, the results will multiply. And you will see that all the effort you put into was indeed worth it… in the long run!
