Content marketing – or inbound marketing – is one of the best ways to engage with your prospective and current customers. With this approach, a jewelry brand creates informative and valuable content, and the customer will seek out that content when he or she is in the right mindset to purchase.

According to a study from Impact, “small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without.” Furthermore, “content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing” (see an eye-opening infographic here). Outbound marketing refers to any type of marketing involving the business talking at a consumer – Facebook ads, email spam, TV advertisements, banner ads, PPC, and more.

Content marketing invites the customer to you. When you use content marketing as your primary marketing strategy, you’ll also find yourself with more qualified leads, since the prospects who come to you will already be in the right mindset to buy. Instead of you shouting at them and trying to convince them to buy your jewelry, you’ll be ready for them when they arrive. Doesn’t that sound easy? It is.

The tricky part, however, is generating regular content that’s not only valuable but also interesting – and search-engine friendly. In this blog post, we’ll provide some tips for helping you brainstorm new content topics and updating your content on a regular basis, so your customers can find you and your jewelry.

Consider All Content Types

Most people associate “content” with anything related to the written word. Of course, blog posts, white papers, interviews, case studies, and ebooks all fit into the category of content, and they’re very typical examples of content marketing today. However, content marketing isn’t only limited to writing. In fact, content can include video, audio, images, illustrations, GIFs, data visuals, and more.

Even if you were to only limit your content marketing efforts to written content, you’d still have other options like checklists, worksheets, guides, product reviews, and testimonials. Make a list of all the types of content (Googling “types of content marketing” will yield many, many ideas) and then brainstorm relevant ideas for each one. For example, next to the content category of “video”, you can include ideas like “brand story video”, “video launching our new collection”, and “behind-the-scenes video”.

Make a Marketing Calendar

You likely already have a calendar for your business management processes, so you can easily incorporate your content marketing calendar into whatever system you already use. On this content marketing calendar, you’ll want to list all the relevant dates for your business, like milestones, product and collection launches, trade show/trunk show dates, and any other pertinent events. Then, you’ll also want to add important retail holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day. And remember to list birthstones for every month.

Finally, you’ll want to consider adding social media holidays, which are “holidays” that mostly exist on social media platforms and are promoted through hashtags. To see a very comprehensive list of these holidays, visit the National Day Calendar. Some social media holidays that may apply to jewelry brands include National Piercing Day (May 16th), National Pink Day (for pink gemstones and/or rose gold, June 23rd), and National #OOTD Day (perfect to showcase how jewelry fits into an “outfit of the day”, June 30th).

Let Your Customers Guide Your Content

We’ve already written a post about encouraging your fans to create content for you, but we just want to remind you that your customers are also an excellent source of content inspiration. Not only can your customers create content for you, in the form of video testimonials, written testimonials, photos of themselves wearing jewelry, and more, but they can also give you ideas. For example, if you frequently receive the same question from your customers, you may want to consider adding an FAQ page to your website or even writing a blog post that provides an in-depth answer to that question. Being in tune with your customers’ needs will enable you to produce content that provides value and that will rank highly in search engine results, since your prospective customers are already searching for it.

Many jewelry brands hesitate to embrace content marketing, since it does take a lot of time and effort to produce. In most cases, ROI for content marketing can be difficult to measure, at least in the first few months. However, the long-term benefits are worth the investment.