Content is still king. Marketing it effectively is queen. Creating content that educates your potential customers and illustrates your expertise is key to bringing a new audience into the fold for you to be able to nurture in the future.

There's nothing like the right piece of content that tells a story, answers a question, or educates a user. Building a rich and valuable store of content can pay dividends for years to come and necessitates a commitment on your part in the creation of it.

GRAYBOX engages with companies in a variety of ways as part of efforts to create and market quality content, which is broadly called content marketing. We start with a defined discovery process that focuses on the audiences you should be going after, which may or may not overlap with the customers you already have or the people you already speak with regularly. Understanding who these folks are, and building audience profiles that gets at the essence of what makes them tick and the kinds of questions they want answered, is important in creating content that is going to ultimately resonate with them.

Once we have an accurate understanding of the "who," we move onto the "what" and begin the process of categorization. This is a two-fold exercise, in both determining the topical areas that are going to best address their areas of interest, as well as the kinds and formats of that content so you can meet them where they're at. Topics should broadly resonate with the intended audience. Formats can be wide-ranging and diverse, from whitepapers and case studies, to webinars and interactive slideshares. GRAYBOX collaborates with our client-partners to find the right fit and produce the content, including copywriting and design, to create assets that will stand the test of time.

The singular goal of content marketing is really to engage. Where and how to engage is the "last mile" problem to solve with how you can use content marketing effectively. Given how important organic search can be for businesses and organizations of all sizes, we recommend leveraging created content to help drive traffic to your website. Don't give it away for free, though. Put together a teaser and snippet on a page and put the full text behind a content gate that requests information from a user before delivering the content to them. It starts a conversation and creates a transactional relationship between you providing something of value and them providing something (their contact information) in return.

Beyond your website, there are additional avenues that GRAYBOX recommends leveraging, including places like LinkedIn or Facebook in which you can get in front of potential targeted folks, either organically or leveraging paid advertising models, which will help drive traffic to your website for conversion or convert them directly on the platform. Whatever the appropriate mechanism, GRAYBOX works with you to determine the right channel for that content and the effective strategy for getting that content out there.