Labcast: Content Marketing Insights from Marcus Sheridan
January 3, 2013
In this week’s Labcast, Marcus Sheridan shares his insights on what constitutes good content, the biggest content mistakes he sees companies make, and where he envisions content marketing heading in 2013.
In 2001, Marcus Sheridan opened a swimming pool company in Warsaw, Virginia called River Pools and Spas. The business took off and over time grew into a successful company. That all changed, however, when the global financial crisis hit in 2008. At a time when banks were collapsing and the stock market was plummeting, people began canceling their orders for pools and new orders stopped coming in.
“We were in huge trouble,” says Sheridan. “We didn’t have any leads coming in, we didn’t have any marketing dollars and we were very, very close to going out of business. I thought honestly, we were going to go out of business.”
Sheridan knew that he needed to do something to get more customers and to save his business, so he gathered his employees and asked them to do one thing: Write down every question that a customer had ever asked about buying a pool and the answers to those questions.
Armed with the information that his target audience wanted to know most, Sheridan set up a blog on his website and began to write hundreds of posts that he optimized with a narrow list of keywords. In doing so, he was embracing content marketing and it paid off for his business.
“Today, River Pools and Spas has the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world,” says Sheridan. “Ninety percent of all of our leads are generated from the Internet, and it has completely saved the business. It’s allowed us to grow in a period of time when so many swimming pool companies are closing the doors and become leaders of an industry that we care about.”
In this week’s Labcast, Sheridan, who has become a well-known content marketing consultant with customers all over the country, shares his content marketing insights, including:
· The top content marketing mistakes he sees companies make
· His thoughts on what constitutes great content
· The importance of search engine optimization in any content marketing strategy
· His content marketing predictions for 2013
To listen to the full podcast, click on the player below.
Labcast 94_ Content Marketing According to Marcus Sheridan