Your Content Marketing Stinks (part 2)

…but it doesn’t have to.

Remember that time your first grader brought home an awesome Mother/Father’s Day story that they wrote at school just for you? And it was the greatest thing you ever read? Let’s get real. Chances are, it stunk. But not to you. If you are like me, you were probably fighting back tears as you were holding the most precious paper/craft/gift in the world. You give your kids the leeway to create absolutely useless stuff for you and then you fall in love with it. Too bad your customers don’t do that for you.

We've established already that lots of content stinks like a humid landfill. And when your material stinks, that’s exactly where it will end up. So keep these three guidelines in mind:

• It’s about their problems, not yours You just released a new product and the whole world should buy a ton of it right now. Right? Or it’s the end of your fiscal year and your CEO is breathing down your neck you need to sell more units before the analyst meeting. So you print a bunch of collateral, tweet to everyone on the interwebz, create some generic sales material masquerading as ‘educational’ content, throw a giant bash at a trade show, etc. Guess what? Your customers aren’t going to buy from you to solve your problem. They are buying to solve their own problems on their own schedule.
• Right message to the right audience at the right time Are you targeting your messaging to the right audience? Just because your product solves problem A, B and C does not mean your audience actually has all those pains. Or even cares at this particular moment in time. You have to have the right message for the right buying persona at the right time.
  This is where segmentation is so important. If your customer is a corporate buying group, they attack the problem from different perspectives. A message targeted at IT will probably fall flat with the business lead. And don’t get me started on Procurement. Know your customers, understand their specific pains and, especially, know where they are in the buying cycle. Your job is to figure out what to market to whom and when. Generic content is the most commonly used and, unfortunately, the least effective. This stuff should be Marketing 101 but somehow, it’s a lesson that many marketers have missed.
• Short, educational and engaging “In today’s ever changing world, it’s more important than ever that your executives blah blah blah….” Stop! Just stop now PUHLEAZZ. Why are you boring us?? Don’t bother finishing because you’ve already lost your audience. Your material is in the landfill and you customer has moved on. You don’t have to bore us. Say it with me, “You don’t have to bore us.” The best material engages the audience. And starting out with a sentence like that is not going to do it. Good content tells a story, it paints a visual image for the reader.

Just remember this: the best networkers have a 7-second elevator pitch and a slightly longer follow-up pitch in case someone bites. That’s what you need with your material. There are tons of examples out there. What you don’t need is yet another the corporate talking head video with some executives lamely reciting all of your products. Remember when you blew $9K of your marketing budget on it? Notice that it only got 17 YouTube views? (All of which happen to be from your Marketing team.) It would have been more profitable to donate that money to a charitable cause and get the tax credit.

Educate your customer. No, not on your product suite. Educate them on larger issues, on regulations or business challenges. Customers love industry stats that tell them how they stack up with their competition. Or how you solutions will solve their customers’ problems. What you need are tips and tricks that solve real, everyday problems. No one gives a hoot about the history of your company or your full product suite. That is not education, that is sales. And condescension. As I said before, you customers don’t care so knock it off.

So. Next time your CMO asks where all the new leads are, you can look them honestly in the face and say, “Our lead gen effort stinks because our content marketing is garbage. We are inhibited by corporate bureaucracy and processes, preventing us from giving our customers the content they need.” Or maybe you can’t say that. At least not if you value your job. But you can still follow the general outline to serving your customers instead of selling to them.

On that note, did I tell you, your social media channels stink also….

Hi there,

I’m Abdul. My heart belongs to my family, but my opinions are mine alone.

For more uninformed conjecture, follow me on Medium or on Twitter at @CaliAbdul. Or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Cheers!