Knowing How Much to Give Away Through Content Marketing

When it comes to your content marketing campaign, it is important that you don’t give away too much for free. After all, this is what you do for a living and you should absolutely expect to be paid for those efforts.

Knowing how much to give away is critical to your business’s success

In fact, not only is your content your business’s signature but the content marketing strategy is an extension of that signature and it really sets you apart from all of your competitors. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling a product, a service, or both. Your approach through content marketing will be exactly the same. It is important to bear in mind that you will need to think long and hard about what you feel  you want to give away so that you don’t compromise what you have worked so long to achieve.

At this point, it is time to consider the approach to your content marketing that is truly unique to you. That is important because if you don’t have a unique approach, you won’t get the attention that you want to get and if you don’t get noticed by other people, you won’t have the opportunity to develop a relationship with the other person. 

Exactly what is okay to give away

When it comes to deciding exactly what you can give away safely through your content, you can choose to share the simple techniques that you use in your strategy. That includes approach. However, certainly don’t give away all of your content or all of the reasoning behind your content. If you don’t have any sort of confidentiality agreement with the person with whom you are sharing your approach, be careful not to give them complete information.

Because you are not offering up all of your strategy and all of your content, the best that the other person can ever hope for is to take the information that you have supplied and share something that is inferior in quality to what you share online. Ironically, your motivation for offering only partial information is to keep your business secure.

In one sense, you can look at it as a tease. In other words, you are giving your target audience just enough to want more. You are presenting them with enough information to get their mind working and you are implying that if they want you to share more complete information with them, they are going to have to pay for it. Once they get over the shock of it, their reasoning will take over and they will realize that it is only fair that you ask to be paid for your services (or products).

Why should you hold back?

In addition to other practical reasons, an equally sensible reason to hold back and not reveal everything all at once to your target audience is because your online connections will find it very appealing (and fascinating) if you tease them. The mystery makes if very exciting and extremely compelling. This concept applies more when you are discussing services as opposed to products. From the perspective of paid versus free, it is a really good idea to plant the seed in the brains of your target audience that if they love the information that you are giving away for free, their heads will explode with the joy of how amazing the information that they have to pay for is. A lot of your success is based on whether you are able to reach your target audience psychologically.

Conclusion

Content marketing is extremely important for your business and it is an essential element when it comes to your content marketing strategy. However, you need to have a really accurate sense of what it appropriate to reveal and what is not appropriate (or what might hurt your business). Remember, don’t give it all away because there won’t be anything left to sell!

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