Like a great meal, successful marketing starts with a good recipe.
A recipe is just a ratio of ingredients. As cook and author Michael Ruhlman notes, “When you know a ratio, you have a hundred recipes at hand.”
If you want well-balanced content marketing, you need the right content ratio for your business.
Here at Rainmaker Digital Services, we call our list of ingredients “PII™” — for promotion, information and inspiration.
- Promotion: content that drives action
- Information: content that engages users through education
- Inspiration: content that engages users through feelings
Every piece of content you create needs to fall in one of these three categories.
The ratio of these ingredients to each other forms your content marketing “recipe.” Promotion, information and inspiration can be combined in many different ways for a unique mix of content. Each business has its own distinct ratio.
Here are a couple of guidelines to get you started with your own PII-based recipe.
- An equal mix of all three doesn’t work. Every business has unique message, community, and product offerings that benefit from more of one of these categories. Choose the one that’s most important and lean into it slightly more than the others.
- Test and refine. You’ll get a sense of which content your audience engages with the most as time goes on; all three elements of PII are important, but the ratio may change.
There’s no hard rule to what works, but here are a couple of broad “recipes” that have proven a good starting point in different industries:
- Retail: 40% promotion, 30% information, and 20% inspiration
- B2B: 20% promotion, 50% information, and 30% inspiration
- Consumer Services: 35% promotion, 25% information, and 40% inspiration
- Professional Services: 10% promotion, 60% information, and 30% inspiration
- Online Business: 40% promotion, 30% information, and 30% inspiration
Don’t publish haphazardly. Use the power of PII. Start with one of these ratios and create a content marketing recipe that works for your business.
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Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services