101 Marketing Strategies: Strategy #4 Set It and Forget It

For this installment of 101 Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business, lets talk about how to the get the greatest long-term return on both your time and marketing dollars.

Marketing Strategy #4: Set It and Forget It

This is a concept I picked up from Lynn Terry’s Elite MasterMind Group. The idea behind it is to identify activities you only need to perform once in order for them to work for you indefinitely.

Let’s face it, you probably deal with either time or budget constraints when it comes to marketing your business. Therefore, it is really important to focus your energy and resources on those activities that are going to yield the greatest long-term results.

One reason I love Content Marketing is that it represents the ONLY form of marketing/advertising I can think of that will continue to drive potential new customers to you indefinitely. In most cases, the longer your copy is live on the Internet, the better it will perform in the search engines.

Think about that for a second.

If you buy an ad in the local newspaper, the yellow pages or on the radio – you have a limited window of opportunity for that particular marketing message to drive new customers to your business. Once that window closes, the dollars you invested to get it out there are truly “spent.” If you happen to miss the mark with that particular ad or campaign… well, then – what can you do?

However, with Content Marketing, once you invest the time or dollars to have your content or copy created – it will continue to function as a “sales agent” for your business forever. The more content or copy you put out there – the bigger your sales force will be. What’s more, you can always go back and “retrain” those sales agents by better optimizing them for specific keywords, building more backlinks to them, or retooling them all together into another unique piece of content.

Now, back to Marketing Strategy #4: Set It and Forget It

Some forms of Content Marketing are better suited for the Set It and Forget It concept than others. For example, autoresponder series, ebooks and short reports work really well because once in place, each of these items can be used to drive traffic, build your mailing list and generate revenue for your business years after they are completed.

One small caveat with these items is that they do require more effort on the front end to create. However, this one-time trade off is definitely worth it in the end!

Til Next Time,

PS Need help developing and executing an effective Content Marketing strategy for your business? I am available on a limited basis for one-on-one consultations to come up with your 2010 game plan. Contact me for details!