Find out what 'Creating Content to Drive Connections' really means.

Marketing Eye's shift is to create content to drive connections. Our aim is to connect our customers to their customers through content. Now this may seem simple, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. Marketers in consultancy firms believe that they write a strategy and they implement it. That's how to get a pat on the back after the year-long contract with one of our clients. To do what you say you are going to do and to deliver every element of the marketing strategy ontime and within budget.

Well, that's no longer enough. Ultimately clients are looking to connect to their clients in a meaningful way. By understanding that connection underpins marketing results, marketing consultants can refresh the way they work with clients and create more meaningful and sustainable client acquisitions.

Creating a shift with clients and communicating the value in the shift is also a challenge. Clients have the same mindset as marketing consultants. They want a marketing strategy, and then once that has been agreed upon, they want it implemented.

If we go to the client and take them back a few steps and talk about "content driving connections", we are immediately creating a situation where the client says, "I thought that is what we are doing" or "that sounds like marketing  bulls***". Both are true in some ways. Marketers, like their PR and advertising counterparts are renowned for putting a "spin" on everything that they touch, but the truism of "content driving connections" is positioning companies to think about how their content interacts with their target audience.

For instance, Marketing Eye has a twitter account. Actually, we have two. We communicate on that Twitter account any new blogs we have written, positions open at our firm, client achievements, and we retweet interesting stories. We put content out there for the world to see. Our blog, is content. It shares the story of an entrepreneur with a big dream who has ups and downs and sometimes has to move cross-ways. The marketing blog also shares information on marketing and sales, in which the company specializes in. A loyal following ensures that the blog drives Marketing Eye to number one on Google for keywords that are essential to our business without costing money for adwords or sponsored links. Ultimately, by writing a blog daily, we save money that our competitors pay out for advertising on Google and re-invest that money back in technology to ensure that we work harder, faster and smarter for our competitors.

Content is driving the future of Marketing Eye. Full stop.

The issue is convincing the "financial planning firm" or the "logistics company" that they need to re-think their strategy to create more meaningful content, that resonates with their target audience and creates a connection. Not just for today, but also for tomorrow.

While marketing strategies work if they have the right strategy and are executed according to the plan, marketing consultants need to take one step back when developing their marketing strategies in 2012 and say, "how does content drive the connection" between the client and their clients? What content is needed and how often does content need to be populating the minds of the target audience?

Have you changed your marketing strategy for this financial year?