Prospective customers can read your brochures online. That’s not content marketing.
Content marketing is providing useful, interesting, and relevant information on a regular basis that attracts people who might be interested in your product or service.
Here’s the third hard truth about content marketing: If you just talk about your product and your company you will bore your prospects. Bored prospects go away.
Why do people come to your web site to investigate your product? Because they’re searching for a solution. If you wait until someone knows that they have a problem you’re just one of the potential solutions that they’re looking at. Your web site is little better than an advertisement in the Yellow Pages at this point.
Really effective marketing informs prospects BEFORE they know they need what you sell. They are interested in solving their problems. To be successful the bulk of your content marketing should be aimed at industry issues, problems, potential solutions, and other things that exceed your product or service area.
One-note, brochure-ware posts will bore your prospects and simply won’t work. Show them that you are interested in more than just selling.
Too many “marketing gurus” are telling people to maintain a “laser focus” in their content marketing. What a bore and it’s bad advice. It’s not effective and prospects will quickly unfollow one-note marketing. Great content marketing creates a broad funnel that allows prospects to discover your organization and your expertise and then form a strong positive connection that will lead them to eventually consider your products.
This is hard for many marketing organizations to understand. Stop talking about your own products so much. Become an industry resource. Be broad. Entertain. Go way off topic. Show that your organization is made up of real people.
Do that every day and you’ll begin to see content marketing that really pays off.
More on content marketing.
The Content Marketing Hard Truth #3: You’re Boring Your Prospects & Scaring Them Away by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.