The ultimate goal of the majority of your content marketing efforts should center around driving traffic to your website. Why? Because your website is where you have the most influence in converting viewers of your content into customers. It often takes a customer 3-4 visits to your website before they actually place their first order. This means you need to constantly be giving potential customers a reason to visit your site, reminding them that you exist; so the next time they are in the ordering mindset you will be the first place they think of.
Below I list a few aspects to using your website as your content marketing hub.
Probably the biggest advantage to using your website as your marketing hub is that you only have to write your content once. Then you can spend the rest of your time promoting that content, knowing that all your efforts will result in driving traffic back to your site.
In order for your content to be effective you have to promote it a lot. This means sharing it with as many people as possible. Which can be a time consuming task if you are creating different content for each platform. Don't divide your efforts by trying to make unique content for the newsletter, blog, and social media. Instead, create one piece of content and promote it on all three platforms.
Using different platforms to promote your content also opens the door for increasing your audience's exposure to that content. You could send a newsletter on Sunday, post it on Facebook Monday, Tweet it on Tuesday. It might take your audience seeing it three times before they finally decide to engage. By spreading out your promotional efforts you can increase the chance of your audience seeing your content.
If you have something to post on social media, like Facebook or Twitter, first ask yourself if it would make for an interesting blog post. More often than not, informational content you post on social media would require little effort to first post as a blog entry on your website. Now you can share the blog post instead.
By thinking of content as a blog entry first, you can leverage your social media efforts to drive more traffic to your site.
One common mistake I see often is including all of your content in the newsletter, without giving your readers a reason to visit your website. If you are going to take the time to write paragraphs of great content don't limit it to just a newsletter. Instead, make it a blog post and include a small excerpt for the newsletter, inviting your subscribers to continue reading on your blog. This also gives you the flexibility to promote this content in other ways like on social media.
This advice applies primarily to the original paragraphical content you create. Don't worry about creating a blog post every time you want to post a photo on Facebook.If your ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your website, make sure every effort you put into creating and promoting content will lead consumers of your content back to your website, the only place they can actually make a purchase.