“Your customers don’t care about you,

your products, or your services.

They care about themselves.”

I read Joe Pulizzi’s book Epic content marketing. It dives in great detail in to how, when and why content marketing can play such a big role in growing your company, even though being heavily overlooked by most.

Fleimi

While reading this book it really got me thinking how I could use this information to better our cooperative Fleimi. Content marketing differs from other ways of marketing by being more of a way of creating a relationship between the company and the customer. By creating content which benefits the customer, you will be giving the customer a reason to stay with YOUR company.

It was found out that most people prefer to hear about a company through articles, rather than ads. This is because articles provide people information which they can see as useful unlike ads, which usually are seen as more of a forced way of marketing. Fleimi could use this asset for growth by creating content which benefits our customers. We have thought about creating something like this on Instagram, but as the timespan in which you must catch the attention of a customer is getting smaller and smaller, this could also be brought to TikTok. TikTok has created an excellent opportunity for businesses. It has created an environment in which you can create huge amounts of traffic with no upfront costs. Using organic marketing through TikTok would be a good way of creating content for our customers and getting coverage.

Of course, I am not the first one to find this out. TikTok is also a very saturated platform, so our content would have to stand out in a significant manner. Joe Pulizzi mentions that people are exposed to over 5000 marketing messages daily. To stand out we would have to do something better than others or find a completely new and interesting way of outputting our content. We must make our customer love our content.

During the release of this book Wall Street Journal informed that 30% of its readers are from mobile devices. Nowadays almost everyone has a supercomputer in their pockets from where they can access anything on the internet. I couldn’t find a precise percentage of how many people nowadays read Wall Street Journal from their phones, but I could bet that it’s doubled from 2013, or even more. This means everything must be mobile phone friendly. When thinking about a point of development for example the tire changing project we might be buying from and older cooperative in our school, you have to take in to consideration mobile phone friendliness. Might not seem like a big thing, but when the customer wants to reserve a time quickly, the interface has a big role in it. If the website is clunky and hard to use, the customer can change businesses in a matter of a few clicks. You have to really think with the customer in mind.

More to hand out equals more traffic

I have heard the term search engine optimization a lot, but never really understood what it means. I found it very useful when the book gave some tips on how to make your website/brand come up more on the web. For example, Fleimi focuses on event organization, so we could answer questions like “How much does planning for a small scale event cost?” or “What would it cost to market a medium sized event?” Answering questions that potential customers might search for can lead them to interact on our website and so potentially also buying services from us. Customers buy our approach to solving their problems.

The information we push out should also be consistent and up to date. I came up with an idea of creating a Youtube channel for example. There we could post some informational clips with tips that our customers could find useful. Making us be approachable on multiple platforms should make us even more easy to find right? Something like a newsletter could also work, prompting the customers to subscribe and interact with our business on a regular basis.

Personal projects

I have been playing around with dropshipping for some time now, and this book brought up some ideas to use in the future if I want to continue dropshipping, and in other situations also. I noticed that for example when advertising products on my ecommerce stores, I have been thinking about the payed ads as more of a marketing tool which allows for certainty in reaching customers. I haven’t really made the ads as pleasing and inviting as I could, because I have always thought that “Of course I will get customers because I am paying for the ad to be up”. I haven’t really thought about how much a little tweaking of the ad can affect the result. The marketing should be customer based, and something that really gathers attention from the wanted group.

I’ve also been working on a clothing brand and this book gave me good insight on how to make it more appealing to customers. Having something that the customer can relate to and feel like they are wearing a statement, instead of a plain old t-shirt. My clothing must tell a story, or something the customer can grasp and hang on to.

Summary

All in all this book really taught me about how to make your company more appealing to customers, and what customers really look for in a company. It gave me a refreshing look in to marketing, besides all the paid and so called “basic” advertising which you see everywhere. I really tried to ponder how can I use this book to aid my entrepreneurship journey, and I do believe I made up some good points.