
Why you seriously need to adhere to the 80/20 rule of content marketing
“To build great relationships, you need to want more for people than you want from people.” — John Maxwell, bestselling author and business coach
Are you giving more than you’re trying to get from your content?
How much of your content is promotional, versus providing real value to your audience?
The most successful businesses are those which find a need and fill it. In order to do that, it’s necessary to really understand how a product or service will make the lives of your customers better in some way.
That same process should apply to your content.
Too many companies may offer great products or services, but their public presence is all about self-promotion. They don’t understand that engaging content can be as much of an asset to the bottom line as constant sales pitches. Maybe even more so.
The ideal split for your content should be 80 percent devoted to information your customers will find useful and 20 percent allotted to sales or other types of promotional announcements.
New Customers
If 80 percent of your content is interesting enough for your readers to share, the result should be an enormous boost of positive word-of-mouth. As every marketer knows, that is the most valuable type of advertising. The number of new customers that shareable content brings in is one of the primary reasons for providing content in the first place.
The whole point of Inbound Marketing is to guide buyers through a sales funnel that leads to successful transactions with your business. Naturally, you will want content in that funnel to show up when potential customers are looking for what you have to offer.
But what if that content is so engaging that readers will feel compelled to share it with others? It might be with just a few people they know personally, friends and family that they know will find the information interesting. Or they could share it with their entire social media network.
This is how your potential customer base grows exponentially.
Loyal Customers
People are fickle. They may buy from you one day, and from your competitors on other days, depending on a variety of circumstances. From the beginning of commercial enterprise, one of the best ways of creating customer loyalty is providing good service. More recently, customer engagement has become an important factor.
All other things being more or less equal, you can gain an edge over your competitors by being frequently engaged with your customers. Providing useful content on your website is definitely an excellent way to keep them coming back to your universe. Interacting with customers on social media is another.
Neither of those will happen if your content relies too heavily on self-promotion. When that happens, it all just blends together into one big wall of noise. Obviously, that is in no way effective.
Rules of Engagement
If you have not been following the rule of 80/20, you might be thinking that content is not an effective tool, at least for your company. You could not be more wrong.
One of the best things about the Internet is how it has leveled the playing field between large and small enterprises. Any business can now expand their name recognition by word-of-mouth with content that is useful, or even if it is simply entertaining.
Social media is a perfect example of this phenomenon. As long as you remember that users flock to social media to be social, and not to receive constant sales pitches, it is an excellent tool to gain new customers and keep existing ones in the fold.
Many companies are still finding their feet with this relatively new resource, but others have already nailed it. Fast-food underdog Wendy’s is so good at it, the Wall Street Journal sat up and took notice.
Now it’s your turn.
