Content marketing, the venerable Wikipedia counsels us, is "simply communicating with customers and prospects. The idea is to inspire business and loyalty from buyers by delivering 'consistent, ongoing valuable information.'"
Calling Captain Obvious.
Only a content source as live-and-let-sieve as Wikipedia would label that monumental communication task "simple" in an age when reliable data estimate 60,000 new websites, 1.6 million blogs, 140 million Tweets, 1.5 billion Facebook posts, 2 million videos and 5 million images get added to the online noise every day.
Creating the consistent, ongoing valuable information has now become the relatively easy part. It's helping customers to sift and find it that's now killing content marketers. I have been there, done that, long before the Internet turned everybody into an authority and a publisher. What's changed isn't the need. What's changed isn't even, despite everyone's obsession with the most fashionable technological bells and whistles today, the delivery. What's changed is now every hamfisted amateur's ability to jump in and clutter up what you're trying to accomplish with his noise.
So how do you keep your technical content fresh, sharp and meaningful enough to float to the top of today's din where it can even get a breath long enough to inspire business and loyalty?
Tell, don't sell. Because there’s so much content out there, the knife-edge point comes quick at which consumers deem a piece corporate shilling thinly disguised as helpful content. People who open their mail over garbage cans, shunt e-mails into "to read someday" folders of death and watch DVR'ed broadcast with their finger on the FF button aren't about to give an inch of leeway when they smell a prettified infomercial. Today, you trust your content, or it dies.
Listen? Sure. But lead, too. I know, it's all about the social listening these days. And of course that's good, as far as it goes. But farmers and veterinarians have never rewarded marketers for nodding and idly listening, whether it's across a tailgate or across a continent of wi-fi. Listening is only the start, and it only materializes into engagement and then conversion when you find a meaningful, useful, profitable response. That content-valuation leap requires listening to customers and your own people, from field sales to the C-suite. Then it requires understanding the needs of both sides well enough to dig out, polish and present the educational, technological gems that advance everybody. That's the hard work that distinguishes content that counts from more chaff in the wind.
Be bold. That type of leading to sales via education takes a creative mix of communicating to explain and communicating to persuade. But you should find it in the toolkit of any content provider who was trained and experienced as a journalist who earned his chops by creating memorable feature editorial:
- It starts with a specific audience (of one, ideally)
- It identifies a compelling need or lack
- It constructs a logical argument
- It delivers it all with the essence of confidence that's only earned with a narrative that grabs, holds and guides attention through effective use of words and pictures.
Cut the BS. And by "BS," of course, I mean "Buzzword Syndrome." It's no secret the sales and marketing team loves jargon and buzzwords. But the dirty little secret is too many professional content providers who know better simply don't have the ability or confidence of language to wean themselves from the fuzzy generalization of untranslated jargon, too. Sure, you may get lucky and find the occassional customer searching on a buzzword. But customers seldom if ever think in buzzwords. They think in terms of problems. Layering on the jargon doesn't make you look smarter, especially in this market. It only distances you from your audience. Be confident enough to say it like a human; better yet, like a farmer.
Teach. Today's farms and veterinary clinics are marvels of technology and complexity--so much so that even the working practitioners find it tough to keep pace with the updates. That task used to be entrusted to a vibrant working trade press, back in the days when it was ambitious enough to attempt the monumental task. Today, it's now migrated to the marketers. That change doesn't make it any easier, but it does give you vast opportunity to use your pool of expertise to not simply polish up the features-and-benefits pitch, but to teach your customers about the entirity of the processes they're involved in. When they're better educated, they make more informed buying decisions with less prep work from the sales team. The result: Better customer satisfaction, deeper brand equity and higher lifetime customer value.
Let it go. Getting to that level of shopping-by-education requires trust, but not necessarily in the way you might immediately think. Yes, customers have to be able to trust that you are giving them real, valuable technical information. But the real trust works the other direction. Marketers have to be able to trust the customer that education will lead to a buying decision in their favor. You want a measure of that trust? Ask yourself whether your technical education materials would apply equally, no matter whether that customer chooses your product or a competitor's. If the answer is no, you're not yet to the level to set yourself above the din around you.
Find out more about how to beat the noise.