I meet with business and marketing lea♓ders 𓃲all the time who ask me the same questions:

168极速赛车官网:Marcus, should we start a blog?

Marcus, should we create a YouTube channel?

168极速赛车官网:Marcus, should we get on TikTok?

168极速赛车官网:Marcus, should we go all-in on AI?

These are not the questions they should be asking.

Quest🏅ions about platforms and tactics should alwaꦿys come AFTER questions about principles. You should first ask yourself: What principles are important to our company — and how do we use these principles to guide our marketing?

At IMPACT, we help companies commit to the principle of buyer education. 

🐈Once they 𒉰have that principle as their guiding light, they can start asking the right questions about their marketing:

We want to answer our customers’ questions. Would a blog be a good tool to do this? 

We want to build trust. Can we use YouTube to do so?

We’re committed to educating our audience. Can we use TikTok to reach them?

We want to reach more people. Can AI help us scale?

See how those questions sound much better?

Content marketing is changing under our feet: More content, more platforms, more noise. But we✃ don’t meet the challenge by chasing trends. 

We meet it by holding f🅘ast to our principles and serving our audience.

The goal of content marketing should always be education

Buyers want information. When they’re getting ready to make a purchase, they want to know that they’re 168极速赛车官网:making the right c🅺hoicꦐe and getting a good deal. 

What they don’t want is a sales pitch.

The beauty of 168极速赛车官网:content marketing is that the internet can seamlessly connect ♚buyers and sellers.

B😼ut we shouldn’t just think of ourselves a🌸s sellers. We should think of ourselves as educators. 

We always need to teach before we sell, helping potential customers understand their ch♒allenges and the raft of solutions available to them. 

…but you need to determine where and how to educate

With that said, there♔ are more avenues for buyer education than ever before. If you’re just publishing blog articles and hoping hordes of qualified traffic will come to you, you’re limiting your potential reach. 

At the same time, customer behavior is getting harder and harder to track, making traditional metrics less reliable.  

Smart marketing teams are taking all of this into account when they plan their upco💯ming strategy.

Content marketing is getting harder to measure

Content marketing has relied on the same metrics for years, but these are get🍸ting harder to track, predict, and measure. 

Measuring traffic ON your website 

It used to be if someone visited your website, you’d get data on the visit. But it’s not as simple as it on🐼ce was. 

Traffic data is less reliable than it once was.

• Cookie tracking is more problematic than in the past. Cookie banners pop up when someone visits a site. If they opt out, you can’t collect their user data. (There are a lot of competing studies about how many people actually do opt out of cookies, but it’s at least some.)
• Searchers are using multiple devices (and, by extension, multiple email addresses) when they go through your site. They might be on your mailing list with one Chrome profile and then check your site the next day with a different browser.
• The rise of Generative search is resulting in fewer top-of-the-funnel clicks to your website. 

All of this means that the revenue attribution models we’ve used for years𓆉 are getting more faulty.  

Measuring engagement OFF of your website

But your website isn’t the only way people are engagi🐭ng with your br💮and. In fact, if you’re like most businesses, your website is playing a smaller role than in years past. 

More and more, buyers are interacting with your brand without ever setting a foot on your website. They might only engage with you on Facebook or LinkedIn, for instan✱ce.

That means no landing page conversions, no cookie tracking, and no lead scoring. And while social platformꦦs do give us data, we don’t always get the nu𓆏mbers we want. 

According to HubSpot’s , s🍸ocial media has topped SEO as the top focus for digital marketers going forward.

Focus on content distribution 

All of this means that content distribution is more important than ever. Again, if you’re publishing a blog post to your website and waiting for it to rack up traffic, y🍌ou’re only fighting half the battle. 

Put as muc🌊h effort into sharing and promoting your content ✱as you do creating it.

Think o🎃f other ways you can use the subject matter from a blog post to reach your audience.

You could:

• Convert that blog topic into a podcast to post on Spotify
• Turn it into an Instagram Story 
• Publish the blog on Medium
• Compress it into a 30-second YouTube Short
• Create a LinkedIn swipe post
• Present it at an industry event
• Talk about it as a guest on another podcast or roundtable
• Build a self-selection tool to help buyers apply the content to their own needs 

You get the idea. 

None of this is new, but it will b💜e more and more important going forward. 

Not every one of these will make sense for your business. You’ll have to figure out where your audience s෴pends its time. But once you do, try to repurpose your content so that you can reach and educate more people.&🍌nbsp;

As I often tell clients: You have to teach the way♛ people want to learn. That means using different mediums and different platforms to reach them.

Beware of building on borrowed land

All that said, remember the old saying: Don’t build on borrowed land.

There’s a risk involved in housing your content on a site you don’t own. As we’ve seen over the past few years, platforms rise and fall — taking💛 fortunes with them.

A few years ago, thওere was all this buzz about advertising on Snapchat. At that point, no one had ever heard of TikTok. Today, Snapchat use has started to decline () and TikTok is exploding. 

But there have been calls for .

A few years from now, what will be the next big thing? Will TikTok still be on top? ꦺMaybe, mayb🐼e not. 

But iꦦf you’ve tied your fortunes to a particular platform, watch out. Things can change qu📖ickly.

Keep your ear to the ground and k🏅eep reevaluating your approach. 

And don’t think that any of these new developments should mean you give up on your blog. In fact, it’s your blog that should be the 🦩basis of any new venture. 

The new meaning of a company blog

So what’s the role of the humble blog in 2024 and beyond? Yes, the landscape is changing, but I have unwavering faith in articles, guidebooks, and pillar pages as a powerful way to educate your audience. As Donald Miller sa🅘ys, it's words that sell thingꦿs.

In 2024, the blog will play some new roles:

• Blogs will still drive traffic. For our clients, their written content draws traffic and serves as a lead magnet, just as it always has. Blog articles, after all, are great for educating and building trust with your audience. But this will decline over time for all the reasons stated above.
• Blogs will help educate buyers in the sales process. Written content will help enable sales through assignment selling. When marketing and sales teams work together, they end up with better content and a smoother buying experience.
• Blogs will become your company's reference library. 

Your blog: your company’s new reference library

Today, your blogs, guꦡidebooks, and other content will serve as the reference library that supports all your efforts on other platforms. 

Think about your blog as standing behind all the other♓ content you’re putting out there onto other platforms. 

Someone watches a YouTube video. If they want to learn more, they come to your blog.

If a LinkedIn post summarizes an idea, your blog covers that idea in depth.

The podcast gets them interested, your blog fully educates them.

At IMPACT, we teach our clients to organize their content into a Learning Center that’s sortable and easy to naꦛvigate, j❀ust like any good reference material.

Your would-be customers will 𒅌find you on other channels, then come to your site, find what they need, and keep developing their relationship with your brand.

Remember: principles come before tactics

168极速赛车官网:2024 is an excitiﷺng time for content marketing. You can reach a bigger audience on more platforms than ever, but don’t let the appeal of something new cജause you to abandon the basics.

Keep building the core content library that will underpin all of your other e🅺fforts. And be sure you stick to your principles. Content marketing is about education. Education is aboꦇut helping customers and building trust.

If you use those principles to guide everything you do, you’ll use any new tools or channels﷽ to amplify your voice and help more and more people.

To learn more about how we’re helping businesses navigate this ever-changing landscape, 168极速赛🌜车官网:join one of our free monthly♏ consulting sessions ✨where we cover topics vital to mode🤡rn sales and marketing.