The Best Marketing Advice No One Ever Wants to Hear

You should write. There, I said - er, wrote it. If you want people to visit your website, read your brochure, or drive any sort of inbound marketing, make a habit of writing something your audience will find useful. If you continue to give them content that helps them in some way or they find interesting, they’ll continue to come back.

Oh wait, it gets worse.

You should participate. If you want to leverage Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter or whatever the next chapter of internet marketing will be, you should participate in those channels.

But here’s where these two pieces of advice come together. If you write about things you’re an expert at (and everyone is an expert at something) it’s easier to participate online because you have something to say. You can lead conversations. You improve your website’s SEO. You’re even more prepared to discuss topics in person. And it only costs you your time.

So why doesn’t anyone want to hear about this affordable, simple, yet effective marketing solution? Because writing is hard. Writing is painful. Writing forces you to expose your thinking.

Here are some tips for getting started writing.

• If you’re having trouble determining what to write about, a great way to get started is to make a list of 10 things you know about your industry most people don’t. Use that list as topics to begin writing about.
• If you’re struggling to think of 10, try reading a book (or listening to a podcast) on one of the topics you already know. A lot of times reading about something you already know will spark new ideas and you can see how other topics are related. 

• Write something that helps your audience instead of selling your company.
• When writing, express strong opinions. Don’t be rude, it’s ok to have people disagree. You’re not writing to please everyone. You’re articulating your thought leadership. 

• Creating a content strategy can help guide your topics

The beauty in writing is that nothing builds your expertise faster. If you want to create inbound marketing leads, writing and participating can be the fastest ways to get there.

What’s that? Writing isn’t for you? You can’t see your organization embracing the idea? We should just get back to talking about how we can increase sales leads with your website. Maybe if we make the logo bigger we’ll get more visitors....
 

Mike Spakowski is Principal / Creative Director of Atomicdust and is involved with the day-to-day design strategy, art direction and studio management.