Marketers can be out of step with customers simply because they are not thinking like the buyer. They are thinking like a seller. As a seller you have a large disadvantage based on your own biases. You can be thinking of how a person ought to buy instead of how they actually buy. When a new visitor to your content or site does not know you, they are looking for something specific, especially coming from Google search.
The buyer wants to learn about your industry, not necessarily buy something, at the beginning stages. If your content sounds like a sales pitch then it is not uncommon to see a visitor simply click once, stay for a short period of time and then leave altogether. Compare this with someone who is engaged with your content. They read your content fully because it engages them and helps them think about a problem or how your industry works. As they learn more, they are enticed to click around to the links within the body of an article or the suggested calls to action banners surrounding your article.
Buying Means Your Content Is Highly Engaging
With so much content on the internet today, the game of trying to create breadth is no longer valid. Winning new customers has much more to do with depth of content. The attention, care and time someone experiences from what they read has to draw them further into engagement with your content.
Highly engaging content can take various forms. One is a narrative that tells the stories of how your solution has worked for a real life customer. Other approaches involve specific and practical ways to solve a problem that is common. People use the internet to find solutions by searching or asking their networks of friends. If they land on one of your content pieces, then the next step is to create a deep level of engagement. Otherwise, the click was in vain and you would have been forgotten. Quite frankly, a frequency of this behavior makes your content questionable as far as its value.
Create a Trail Of Knowledge
You may take your knowledge of your industry for granted. This is a mistake. Such familiarity can reduce the value in your own mind, but it is the expertise which newcomers to such information crave. Getting this out of your mind and into a system for people to easily engage with, perhaps on a current and updated blog, is critical to find new customers that value the depth of insight and are seeking such knowledge.
Creating a trail of knowledge means thinking through a process. It is laying out the next steps that would increase engagement and help your readers to grow deeper in their understanding and ask the right questions. Ideally, they want to ask those questions personally with you. The end of the trail could be an easy way to set a meeting or phone call with someone on your team that can continue nurturing a buyer who is ready. They want to have a dialogue. They have been prepared with new knowledge they gained from learning on their own.
Your content has to work together and help a person who has engaged to continue to grow deeper and see your brand as a valuable resource in their quest to grow in their own knowledge.
Developing the trail which leads to a first meeting then becomes the pathway for the selling to become more of a formality. Your buyer knows the questions to ask and feels empowered in the sales conversation.
What would your content strategy look like if you could start in the mind of the buyer and help them get the knowledge they want? Are there tweaks to your process you can make?
