While it may sound unsavory, your waste management business forms an integral part of your city. Without you, the city would become dirty, contaminated, unhealthy, and ripe with diseases.
So how do you sell your recycling, waste disposal, hazardous waste handling, and other services? How do you let people know your business exists? Traditionally, you communicate with a prospect through some form of communication channels such as phone, email, social media, or an actual sales visit. Using that channel, you try to entice your prospects to use your service. Eventually, you gain a satisfied customer. This traditional process of actively looking for and persuading leads is called outbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is fine. But what if you can use a marketing strategy wherein the lead actually comes to you? This is called inbound marketing. It centers on creating experiences that generate interest for your business. By increasing your brand awareness and building your credibility, people come to your business instead of the other way around.
One of the primary keys of successful inbound marketing is to provide your viewers with relevant, interesting, useful, and engaging content that addresses their needs. This can be done through content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a type of marketing strategy that concentrates on creating, publishing, and sharing valuable content for a specific audience. The content you generate can be used:
- Attract leads
- Convert leads to clients
- Boost your base
- Retain brand and customer loyalty
- Increase brand awareness and creativity
- Provide information about waste management, recycling, advocacies, and environmental issues
- Engage with an online community of prospects, customers, and environmentalists
According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is about “consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing the consumer behavior.”
Content Marketing Strategies
Your content strategy mainly revolves around using different types of content. These are some of the types of content and the strategies in using them:
Blogs
Publishing blogs is the most common way to get your content to your audience and boost your organic ranking. Blogs help “humanize” your waste management business; it’s through blogs that you can share personal thoughts, advocacies, social endeavors, and events in your company. On the more practical side, you can share important information such as recent waste generation and recycling statistics, new waste management processes, revolutionary recycling technologies, the discovery of more sustainable materials, and other insights related to the waste management industry. Interesting and engaging blogs help bring leads to your business where they may become loyal clients.
Videos
Videos are “warm” media, appealing to the human senses of sight and hearing. According to William Craig of Web FX, the ability of videos to engage these senses is the reason why videos can easily connect with your target audience. With the popularity of video channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo; video trends; and more advanced mobile technology, experts predict that video consumption will boost 100% each year. Thus, create and post videos of your team in operation, environmental preservation activities, animations, and more.
Infographics
Graphics that present illustrations, graphs, charts, and images, allow viewers to visualize an idea, a description, or a process. Infographics can describe or explain a thought, idea, or process (e.g., your business’s unique process of disposal or your state-of-the-art recycling equipment, for example) more easily and thoroughly than reading the same information using plain text.
Downloadable Content
People love anything “free.” Thus, provide downloadable content that your viewers can acquire without spending a cent. Common downloadable items include e-books, “how-to” documents, posters or e-flyers about your business, or even discount coupons. You can even use this as a data-gathering strategy. To get the downloadable content you’re offering, you can ask readers for their contact information as “payment.” From this information, you can generate a lead list that you can use to promote your services.
White papers
White papers are comprehensive, scientific, and in-depth reports that explain an issue, problem or need that your customers may be experiencing. White papers also offer a solution—your services. White paper content is often informational and technical. They help establish your business’s thought leadership, authority, credibility; educate your audience; create business cases; convince customers, or even attract investors.
Landing page
A landing page is a standalone page in your website that a viewer lands on after he clicks a call-to-action button online. That call-to-action may come from your social media channels, outbound links, blogs, internal pages, or external pages. A landing page is specifically created to persuade viewers to complete a marketing goal. You can use your service page for this purpose.
Podcast
Podcasts are digital audio streams best described as on-demand online radio talks. Your audience can listen to streaming or downloading podcasts whenever and wherever they are.
Podcasts are immensely versatile. They can contain content that can be informative, fun, entertaining, or even alarming. Use podcasts as a marketing tool. Provide information about your waste management services. Explain why your services are warranted. Offer advice on how to lessen or organize waste. Of course, make sure your podcasts are downloadable so viewers can listen to them any time.
An Important Thing About Content Marketing
You may think that the goal of content marketing is to generate sales. While a higher sales figure is a byproduct of effective content marketing, you need to understand that it does not directly involve generating sales.
Rather, content marketing aims to cultivate a rapport, relationship, and trust with your viewers. By having a meaningful relationship with your viewers, you have a bigger chance to convert into loyal customers and brand ambassadors. Your content strategy should focus on identifying, anticipating, and meeting the needs of your audience. It should not be about boosting your bottom line.
Conclusion
Finally, you should consider content marketing as part of an ongoing process like a weekly sales meeting or monthly budget report. It should not be viewed as a one-off. You should add new content regularly to continue meeting your viewer’s demands for fresh content. In addition, by regularly updating your content, Google continues to crawl on your website, which helps increase your SEO ranking.
With a sound content marketing strategy, you can optimize your content to achieve your business goals and send your message across your market.
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