Content Is All I Do. But Why?
Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz puts it aptly. Content is surely a way you could qualify to make your sales pitch the most interesting part of the conversation with your prospect. It doesn’t sell anything and sells everything in disguise. And the reason being, conversations sell people and buyers buy the salesman more than they buy products. In most cases, of course.
There are more reasons I love it, though. And you should too. Let’s see some.
While it isn’t difficult to confuse Content Marketing as a online version of your Sales Pitch, it is everything other than that. It makes the sales life cycle pretty easy to handle if your content strategy is well planned and used well.
Au contraire, the only reason people will read content is because it’s not a sales pitch. Content is akin to knowledge for most people who consume it.
Marketing is a qualifier to see if the people you are looking at, would really want to talk to you. And content marketing, in this aspect, is no different. If people like your opening line, they will bear you for a bit. If they bear you for more than a bit, then they will listen to you or talk to you about what they like. If they tell you what they like, they probably will talk a little more and accept you voicing your perspectives and maybe your suggestions. If they accept your suggestions, you have sold yourself and they might listen to your sales pitch. So, as Jon Buscall quotes, it’s a process and not a instant gratification trick.
It’s generally not essential that you have the best of sales skills to close every deal. Then again it’s important to tailor what you speak to what you wish to achieve. Be it merely happy readers or impressed prospects, everyone wishes to be addressed personally. And creating content is a way to talk to them. If you keep talking to them, they will respond when they have an opinion. If you respect their opinion, they will interact with you more. It’s that simple. You have no reason not to buy into Gary Vaynerchuk belief here.
Coming back to where I started, it’s makes your consumer seem gullible every time he is targeted to be sold to. And no one, believe me, no one likes to be seen as gullible or someone who can be taken advantage of easily. So, how would they respond? They would block you.
Though not directly relevant, a recent report by PageFair and Adobe pointed out that 1 of every 5 smartphone users block ads today and the situation is only going to get worse for those who bank on thrusting ads in the faces of its audience at every given opportunity.
And that brings me to why this article is titled so. And my foray into Content, Communication Strategy and Marketing dates back years, to be honest. Yes, the kind of content have been different. The way it has been positioned is as per the requirement of the profile I was honoured with and that had to be so, for obvious reasons. However, at the end of the day the medium of the communication changed and not the reason it was created. Brand building, still is an imperative result of communication and the medium of communication has always been content, in whatever form or factor.
And I love content for what it can do to the perspectives of the audience, the consideration of the prospects and the decisions of buyers.
What would you like to see happening to your business just by attracting the right people?
