Hayley Denker is the Founder of Hayley Denker Marketing, a marketing agency based in Belmont, Massachusetts. Hayley’s career in marketing has paralleled the booming growth of social media. From restaurants to hair salons to healthcare and business coaching, she’s helped grow businesses for the past 10 years refocus their goals and put together a plan to establish real results. With an insatiable thirst for learning and a drive to find a solution, she’s found the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing to be exciting and challenging. Here, she answered 5 questions for us about content marketing, ahead of a content marketing workshop she’s offering in-person for business owners local to the Boston area. If you’ve ever had questions about content marketing or how to better use it for your business, read on!
1. What kind of goals should I be setting with my content?
Content marketing is a low-cost way to expand and nurture your audience. If you want to build brand awareness, attract new customers, nurture brand loyalty, improve your SEO, educate your customer base – you can do ALL of that with content marketing! Some specific goals you could set would be growing your social media following or email list, improve your google ranking, drive better qualified traffic to book a call with you, or get more qualified leads.
2. What’s the biggest mistake you see people making surrounding their content marketing?
Mimicking what others are doing and/or not creating content from a place of SERVING your audience. Just mimicking what your competition is doing is not going to get you very far, and leave you in a cycle of “panic posting” (“shoot I need to post to instagram, I’m supposed to “show up”… here’s a pretty picture with a cliche caption.”) and not much to show for your results.
3 Where do you get inspiration from if you’re feeling ‘stuck’ when creating content?
For my company, I have 4-5 “phrases” that mean a lot to me and how I run my business. “The process”, “the ritual”, “the vibe” – those phrases evoke a feeling of inspiration and remind me why I love doing what I do! Another thing I’ll do is call up a friend and just ask if I can start talking about my business – I inevitably get excited sharing with them a recent client win or a new project, and when I feel that excitement, I know THAT subject will make for great content.
4 Do I need to create brand new content all the time?
Don’t assume all of your followers/subscribers see all of your content. REPURPOSE! You can repurpose and reuse ideas and content way more than you think. In fact that’s a great place to grab more content from – look back at your last few months and see what resonated most with your audience, and repurpose that content for the future! (For example, if people love watching you in a sped-up video decorating cookies, don’t think just because you did it once means you can’t do it again. You SHOULD repeat what works!)
5 What are a few inspirational brands who you think are killing it with their content marketing?
Ooooh good question. This one might be random but I love Market Basket’s feed! It’s just so them. I love Lauren from @laurenbradleycoaching and just think she delivers SO much value to her followers. @olivesandgrace always makes me want to come in to their shop. I get inspired whenever @bami.brands posts, and I LOVE how playful @tonicsiteshop is with their opt-ins.
6 What kind of process do you recommend business owners use for starting to create their strategy.
I use 2 different processes for my clients – one is using content pillars. Your content pillars are repeatable categories, prompts or themes that all of your content falls under to keep you organized, consistent and strategic. We do this for our clients every quarter and create all of their content for the next few months!
Hayley Denker Marketing is hosting an in-person workshop on May 18th in Belmont, MA to teach business owners (and anyone really who wants to learn how to sustainably create strategic content month after month) their methods for content marketing. HDM clients see an immediate shift in their online presence when their content is created from a place of inspiration and excitement – and they’re going to make sure all of the attendees know how to tap into that! There are still have a few spots open, and you can sign up HERE. Use code FME2022 for $50 off your registration!