Marketing Planning and Strategy

Excerpted from article on SEOmoz:
"One of the really big advantages small business owners have over the titans of industry is that you can get much more personal with your target audience than they can. You have a face and a voice. You can be human with your audience. And, as it turns out, one of the best ways to do that is by talking to your customers.

Here are some of my favorite content marketing tips from experts around the web.

1. Don't build on rented land:
Publish your best content on web properties that you personally own (i.e., your own self-hosted website). Social media has hit the business world like a freight train, and there is great value in spreading your message far and wide via these cheap media channels. The point of all that chatter, though, is to get all those eyeballs back to your own site.

2. Help, not hype, your customer:
The goal of content marketing is to allow the potential customer to develop a trusting relationship with you. One of the best ways to develop that trust is by answering customer questions and offering information in a clear, honest, and transparent way.
Trust is not built by pushing sales. Trust is built by selflessly helping people looking for help.

3. Write what people want to read, not what you want to write:
Repeat after me: It's ALWAYS about them, never about you. This is content marketing. It's not sales, and it's not advertising. If you want to do sales and advertising, that's perfectly fine, but just don't do it in your content marketing. Write for the reader, always.

4. Reference industry influencers:
Even if you are the undisputed thought leader in your specific niche or areas of expertise, it doesn't mean that you are the only person with something valuable to add to the conversation. In fact, you make yourself seem more trustworthy and confident when you reference other players in the marketplace.

5. Create content for all types of readers:
Branch out from your normal niche and target readers in a wider variety of related niche. This doesn't mean that you go way off on a huge tangent from your core demographics, but people do have other interests.

6. There is more to content than links:
A link from a reputable site is valuable because of the number of people that will click on it and come learn more about you and your company. And it just so happens that the search engines will love it for that exact reason too; win-win.

7. Don't forget the "marketing" in content marketing:
n general, if you're being helpful, people don't really care if your writing is a little rough around the edges. If you're getting people the information and answers that they're looking for, they will very easily forgive non-perfect writing. In fact, very often it can make you seem even more human to them.

8. It's all about relationships:
The bottom line with social is this: you have to be an active member of the team. It's not enough to just stop in and share a few things here and there, a day or two before you're going to need those same people to share your stuff for you. You have to be active. You have to be part of the team; a member of the community. It's not a wishy-washy kind of thing. It's a commitment; a commitment to your community. Your network depends on you to be there for them, just like they are there for you.

9. Think like a publisher:
Use your site to engage, entertain, and inform. That's all you really have to do. The hardest part is remembering to do that every time you sit down to write another piece of content. One of the quickest/easiest ways to do that is to write content that answers common customer questions. That sounds simplistic, but it's incredibly useful and engaging for people seeking answers.

10. Use other sites to find out what kind of content people want:
Read other good blogs on your topic and then just write similar articles with your own opinions and insights on the same topic, and try to make it better. I'm not suggesting that you copy anything from them obviously; just that you get inspired from them..."

Each tip is analyzed with more and detailed information. Read full original article here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/content-isnt-king-trust-is-king