Content marketing is a great way to increase your company’s visibility to your target audience. The strategic marketing approach involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain your audience to ultimately drive your customers to act. By implementing content marketing tactics, you can increase brand awareness, showcase your authority and expertise in the market, and help your organic search traffic and social media engagement. Instead of just pitching your business to prospects, you’re providing them with relevant and useful information that’ll help them and keep you top of mind. It’s a win-win!

Taking the time to build content that is educational and informative about aspects of your industry is a terrific opportunity to establish trust with your audience. Press releases are one option to help open doors to new clients. Topics can include noteworthy business partnerships, case studies or showcasing that your business as a credible solution to a problem.

Another content building opportunity is to seek options for free editorial. Contact a publication within your area of experience for distribution. For example, Group Tour magazine publishes Spotlight, a monthly interview with a group travel professional highlighting their business and industry trends. This is an opportunity for colleagues to learn from one another, and potentially network. Your customers can also benefit from seeing this content — you can share the link in a newsletter to your audience or on social media.

Blogging is another great way to share information with your audience. Choose topics that your customers or prospects care about — whether its travel safety, packing tips, trending travel destinations or even the benefits of group travel. Publish the blogs to your website consistently and be sure to share links to your blogs on social media, too. Alternatively, seek another business you can partner with that has an existing blog and request the opportunity to appear as a guest. This tactic builds great relationships within the industry.

Content marketing introduces you to a larger audience that regular marketing material may miss. Additionally, people reading the material are likely to share articles that are helpful to them allowing you to further expand your audience. Your content will get further attention when distributed via social media and email. Additionally, expanding your editorial content library will increase your search engine ranking, which is important to drive more visitors to your business. (For more information on SEO ranking read our article: Tips to improve your SEO.) Written content lets you demonstrate your knowledge, experience and authority without primarily focusing on selling your good or service. Use content marketing to get your business in the public eye, put you in a position of being an expert in the field, and help grow your business.