Due to its sophisticated tracking and targeting, you know who is reading your content. But do you know why they are reading it? And how are you accessing those who could/should buy but are ignoring the items you’re sending them?
The content is written with different reasons in mind: so that buyer personas learn about your solution as early as possible in their decision process; for brand recognition; to gain followers; to make a sale. We write with a narrow focus on reaching our target market and use every means at our disposal to distribute and track it, hoping it will help us make a sale or find more followers.
DATA VS DECISIONS
But how do you know if this content, with these ideas and these words, written in this style, will allow those who are looking for a new solution to recognize that they need it? You’re not just looking for a reader you can’t fully know (Why are they reading the content? No. Seriously. Why? And how many potential buyers turn you away because they’re not ready yet?), you’re waiting, guessing, tracking , point and cross your fingers in the hope that it reaches the right hands at the right time to take action.
But its glorious content, sometimes little more than a thinly veiled advertisement, may not be bringing it all the success it deserves. You have a ceiling of a 5% success rate (less than 1% for content marketing) because you are limiting your readership to those who have already decided on their next actions. By sticking to data embedding, you’re missing out on the opportunity to make your content an interactive, decision-making experience. With a few tweaks, you can create content that can be used to facilitate a sale and expand and recruit your audience.
The problem starts with using content marketing as part of your solution/sales placement toolkit. Certainly, content marketing is great at explaining, presenting, writing, introducing, and presenting data about our solutions. But this usage limits our target audience to those who are ready to buy and who are also looking at competitor data.
When you think about the initial activity within the act of buying: pre-sales, change management, decision questions including 13 steps to consensus/action (9 of which are pre-sales and not related to “needs” or “buying”) “). – there are a lot of potential buyers who aren’t reading your content as-is because they’re not ready, but could easily prepare themselves with content that fits the path of their pre-sales change management decisions. You can develop different types of relevant content to be with them every step of the way, before they even realize they may need it.
You see, before settling on a solution, buyers have to do change work that is systemic in nature and vital to keeping the systems congruent: the rules, the initiatives, the relationships, and the history of their culture and environment. They can’t just wake up one day, look at your content, and mindlessly drop everything and everyone to do what you want them to do. Nobody buys like that.
Thinking that a potential buyer ‘needs’ your content, or will be persuaded or influenced to act before you’re ready, is magical thinking and unnecessarily restricts your audience. Obvious, right? Before someone buys anything, they should do their research, get input and alternative ideas from friends/colleagues, discern the potential consequences, try different possibilities, and ultimately get an agreement to move forward. Your content is only relevant when they have handled all of this. By pushing your message, you are restricting purchases. You can use content marketing to make the process easier.
CASE STUDY
When was the time to start marketing my book? That? Did you really say what I think I heard? I had a problem. Known for my Buying Facilitation® material in the sales industry, I had no obvious audience in communication or listening. I had to attract a new audience: find new readers AND go from being a ‘sales’ expert to a ‘communications’ expert. My goal was to offer corporate teams a one-day training in Listening Without Judgment. To do that, I needed readers to first buy my book.
Realizing that I would need support to run an internal program, I wrote an article that would attract the widest readership because of the universal problems involved: meetings. I wrote a very helpful article on meetings that offered both a clear description of the inherent problems and very creative, hard-nosed, usable solutions to make them creative, collaborative, and results-oriented. I never mentioned anything to do with listening. There was no tampering or commercial overlay on the article, no links to listen/book links only appeared in the footer.
I received dozens of thank you notes from readers I’d never heard of, saying they’d sent/shared my article to hundreds of employees, friends, and colleagues. Many, many people shared the article on social media, bringing me new readers and subscribers outside of my natural market. The article was ranked as one of my best read articles, with thousands of people reading it in the first few days. And my book sales skyrocketed: I had a 51% conversion rate.
So yes, content is vital. But it can be read by more potential buyers, earlier in their decision path. Start by understanding each of the pre-sales issues (i.e., systemic change-based, not “need”-based, or solution-based) your buyers need to address with their colleagues and partners, and then write items that will help them on their normal path to make the internal decisions they would have to make before they could buy. Then you will have proven your worth and you will be familiar to them. By the time they’re ready to buy and have all their inner ducks lined up, they’ll search for your content.