Back in the early 90’s, when I was just starting out as a creative entrepreneur, content marketing strategy required trips to the library to plow through industry directories, jotting down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of potential prospects with pencil and paper. Typing up labels and mailing out printed samples of my work. Followed by phone calls, which occasionally led to in person presentations which required travel. Marketing was laborious, tedious, and time consuming.
Marketing is still hard, but for other reasons. Today’s tools make the process so much easier. LinkedIn Sales Navigator takes the place of deep dives into library stacks. Email replaces paper envelopes. Website portfolios eliminate the need for in person presentations. Besides replacing heavy lifting tasks with vastly simplified options, we now have forms of marketing that work entirely, or almost entirely on their own. Search engines generate leads, social media leads to sharing, prospects sign themselves up for email, and every day new channels open up to promote our work. And now, with the rise of A.I., we’re witnessing an exponential increase of tools and tactics for marketing and content creation. We live in an age of abundance, we enjoy a profound wealth of opportunities for marketing.
Barriers in the Age of Modern Content Marketing Strategy
Despite the amazing tools at our disposal, there are a few barriers that remain—often keeping creative entrepreneurs from effectively marketing their practices.
First and foremost is the initial hard work of establishing PinPoint Positioning—a narrowly defined statement of narrow focus and expertise. And then, once established, there’s the ongoing hard work of producing insightful content that validates your expertise and value. A.I. can and will help accelerate content creation, but the insight part will always have to come from you, and that will require mental energy. HOLTER Strategic can make this easier by guiding you through the positioning process and helping you craft a sustainable content strategy.
The fundamentals of marketing a creative service are relatively straight forward. Once you have your strategic positioning in place, and you’ve put in the effort of creating solid content, the last step is publishing and distribution.
Cutting Through the Noise of Abundant Options
But that introduces a third barrier, and it’s the flip side of our wealth of opportunities. We have so many riches—so many options and opportunities—that simply evaluating, choosing, and learning to use the right tools can become so confusing and time consuming that our marketing efforts may never get off the ground.
That’s why we designed the HOLTER Strategic WordPress framework to provide not just your web presence, but all the essential tools you need to execute your marketing campaigns. Because WordPress is the most popular, and most used CMS on the market, and because it’s on open source platform, there are so many third party tools and plugins available that you can make your website the complete marketing operating system, and cut through the clutter of the scores of other options out there.
Unified and Integrated WordPress Marketing System
For example, instead of having a third party Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) like Salesforce or Hubspot, we install Fluent CRM and now your website is also your CRM. What’s more, Fluent also offers automated email marketing tools. So you can chuck your Constant Contact or Mailchimp account and build your lists and campaigns right in WordPress.
We also install and configure Uncanny Automator which removes the chore of posting to social media by automatically publishing using your WordPress posts.
And once your content marketing strategy is in full swing, it’s always a good idea to take a glance at your website’s analytics. But rather than logging into Google Analytics we create custom WordPress dashboards that give you the essential views of your traffic and visited pages.
With all these tools in place, marketing your creative service becomes so much easier and more valuable.
Coordination and Configuration
But there is one other potential barrier to keeping your content marketing strategy system going. While the systems themselves, once installed and configured are easy to use, sometimes there are pretty low level technical setup procedures that can be complicated and confusing. Setting up an SMTP service for Fluent, configuring DNS for email validation (DKIM, SPF records), making sure your website server itself has SMTP configurations set properly for email form delivery, configuring automations, installing Google Analytics, or Tag manager scripts, and learning the ins and outs of your marketing tools, could easily hamper your efforts.
That’s where HOLTER Strategic support has your back. We don’t just support your website, we support all the marketing tools as well. We’ll configure your DNS, install SMTP services, and make sure all the other acronym rich configurations are set up properly—so you can focus on your core marketing tasks and get back to your primary creative work. And if you need help along the way we’re on call to jump in and help out if you get stuck, or need a review.
There are some aspects of marketing that will never be easy. But in so many other ways it’s easier than ever. And with HOLTER Strategic’s help you have everything you need to launch.
