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Yup, this is episode 1,100 and it’s the longest title we’ve ever had for a show.

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Does content marketing happen before, during, or after the customer cycle?

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

This was a question that came to me as I’m putting together an initial training for content marketing. It’s kind of a beginner’s training to kind of get the business owners and people managing businesses to contemplate whether content marketing is right for them.

So what is content marketing, content marketing, and I’ve worked with a bunch of different definitions, I’m trying to craft one made up of all the different ones, because I haven’t found one that really hits it directly.

What I would say just off the top of my head is that content marketing is a form of marketing that has content, no, what it has is it has a very significant amount of information, and or entertainment, that provides value.

So within the marketing itself, you are getting value, or you have a value-oriented thing that has marketing attached to it.

So as far as the company is concerned, it’s marketing. But as far as the person looking at it, taking it in reading it listening to it, they are getting some form of value from it being all the entertainment end information end, or hopefully a little bit of both.

So that’s what I call content marketing.

Now, where does Content Marketing Land, if you took Dean Jackson’s concept, if you look at the lifetime of a customer, and he calls it the before, during and after unit.

The before unit is before they become a customer, so everyone out there who has never been a customer of yours, they’re in the before unit, and you have a certain way of handling people that aren’t a customer yet.

Then you have the during unit and those are all the people that are currently customers, or recently customers, depending on how your how your, your basis that how the customer function is in your business.

But that’s the during unit, and then there’s the after unit. And that’s when they’re no longer a customer, or they haven’t been a customer for a certain period of time. So you got before, during and after.

So where does Content Marketing Land?

Well, initially you think, well, it’s marketing.

So it happens before, this is for the new people coming in, right?

But then it started occurring to me, I’m like, wait a second, really, you need to market to your current customer base very much.

So you have to have pieces in there. That is marketing, even a lot of what you sell, has may have elements of marketing that markets the next thing or the next service. Because you always want people to be able to ascend, right.

And then after, you’re still gonna want to market to people, which is very uncommon.

Nowadays, people, most businesses do not focus much on this. But you still want to market to the people after they’ve already gone to try and bring them back to coax them back in to find out what’s going on with them and to keep in contact.

So content marketing really affects all those areas, it never goes away. And certain elements of content marketing never go away.

So for example, if you know anybody that is heavy into content marketing, maybe they do a regular social media posts, or they do a regular podcast, or regular email blast, or what have you.

Anyone that does that, they tend to make it relatively broad. And what I found in working with a lot of these people is it’s because they are playing to people who are finding them for the first time, or there are people who are that they know them very well. And this is just a way of getting to know them better.

Or it’s people that have known them in the past. And it’s a way for them to keep in touch and bring them back into the fold. So that content marketing never goes away.

And that’s just the most basic stuff that you can see, let alone all the stuff when you’re talking content marketing that’s internal, that is going to you know, lists of former customers or list of recent customers or any type of lead list if you have leads people who have raised their hand and say I’m interested in a topic that you’re you’re discussing, that leads into into a purchase.

All of those conversations you may not see be able to see from the outside. But those companies that are using content marketing to to help take that person to the next step. are the ones that are succeeding out there content marketing, never fully goes away. It gets specific in certain areas, it’ll speak more and more specifically, especially if you have a very competent marketing staff that’s involved within the content marketing.

It gets specific, but it never fully goes away and it speaks to everyone. All the time.

Hopefully you have content that is always out there that is always available with the 24 hour nature of the internet, it’s definitely a good thing to have, let alone all the other offline forms of marketing, your direct mail and everything else.

So something to keep in mind when you’re looking at content marketing is looking at all the different types of people you’re speaking to go check out my book, 9 ways to Amazon-Proof your business.

I go through more broad based ideas on ways that you can beat out your competition, especially in using content marketing, especially when you’re talking personality based marketing and so forth. I go through that a lot in this book nine ways to Amazon prove your business.

Go get yourself a copy wherever books are sold, or go to my website, get download a free copy AmazonProofBook.com.

That’s all I got for tonight. You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.