Content marketers can be inspired by Christmas in several ways. Last year I published an article about the five lessons marketers can learn from Christmas. We can distinguish three stages in our lives: believing in Santa Claus, not believing in Santa Claus, and being Santa Claus.
Content marketers are in the third stage, because they are Santa Claus, or Sinterklaas, because they give valuable content as a gift . My Christmas reflection for Frankwatching this year is largely based on the first lines of a well-known Christmas song about the shepherds that is taken from the Christmas story (pdf) .
The shepherds lay at night
They lay at night in the field.
They kept watch faithfully,
They had counted their sheep.
A content marketer can be compared to a shepherd who tends a flock. There are differences in the development of the animals in the flock. For example, there are suspects, prospects and customers.
Growth in the herd
The shepherd protects all the sheep and makes sure they can feed themselves. This makes growth in the flock possible: visitors become subscribers, subscribers become customers, customers become loyal customers and loyal customers become ambassadors. The content marketer contributes to growth because he always offers his flock valuable content, products and services. The shepherd gets something back from his sheep that he or she can live on: milk and wool. In this way, the content marketer who does his job well receives money and comfort from his flock.
The content marketer a shepherd tending a flock Arend Landman ChristmasThe oman mobile phone number list shepherds lay at night
How can we interpret this verse in the light of content marketing? Developments in the market are moving fast. No one knows exactly what is going on. It is also night for the content marketer, but he does keep an eye on what is happening in the field that he can oversee. If there are ravenous wolves lurking, he warns his sheep and makes it clear to them how they can escape the danger. He does this from a relaxed alertness: he lies in the field at night and faithfully keeps watch. The content marketer signals developments in the market and communicates them to his audience.
The shepherd knows that he cannot rely solely on a general impression of the whole. Numbers are essential in his work. That is why he has counted his sheep. The content marketer measures the traffic on his websites, keeps track of which content scores well, checks how his base of subscribers and followers is developing, and works on increasing conversions.
Those who start with content marketing are usually mainly focused on planning, producing and promoting content to attract visitors to a website. That is fine, but it is limited. There is a good chance that the number of visitors will grow, but that a large majority will look around for a while, leave and never return. This also means that the website hardly contributes to the sale of products or services. That is not how you get a herd. You only have a herd that you can exploit when you have e-mail addresses (or real addresses if you do offline direct marketing, by post) of qualified prospects. For that you need an account with an e-mail marketing provider.