“Content Marketing” is About Value, Not Just Sales

Marketing has gone soft. Once measured by the cold, hard numbers of successful sales, today’s marketing is focused on building brand awareness, which doesn’t always convert neatly to dollars and cents.

Advertising, link building, and other forms of “traditional” marketing are falling by the wayside in favor of the one channel that can actually communicate value to would-be customers: content. But in order to be effective, marketers have to resist the urge to make their content sell, sell, sell.

Of course, marketing efforts still have to align with revenue goals, but the straight path to market share is gone for good. Today’s environment demands “filling the funnel” to move prospects through increasingly targeted and thoughtful content programs that convert leads to clients only after several touch points.

A Combination of Quality, Creation and Amplification

If you want your stakeholders to act, you have to believe in what you’re saying.  Marketers who don’t believe that their content matters are going to have a tough time convincing anyone else that it does.

Quality content starts with understanding your audiences—their habits, their preferences and their deal breakers. Once you understand who buys what you’re selling, and how they make purchasing decisions, you can create content campaigns that touch on numerous facets of your audience’s questions and concerns. The goal is engagement, not one-way communication.

This doesn’t have to be a weeks-long, all-hands-on-deck process. Quality trumps quantity, and revisiting the same topics in fresh ways can help you connect with your target audiences when they need what you offer (rather than just when you’re trying to sell to them). Marketers today don’t have to hope that their pieces go viral; instead, they can amplify their messages across numerous channels—social media, search engines, emails—and build an engaged community that is eager to see, and react to, the next chapter of the campaign.

Crystalize the Message

As Seth Godin asserts in his blog, the keyboard is the most level playing field we have for transmitting ideas and driving action. Crafting words into a unique piece of writing that resonates with your audience is arguably the most important skill behind content marketing. There is simply no substitute for thoughtful, expertly written articles.

Keep your messages simple, clear and recognizable. Weed out extraneous facts and figures. Remember the people on the other side of the screen and what will move them to act. Make your content the first product people seek out, and the sales will follow.