Have you heard of content marketing? If not, you’re probably not taking advantage of the new ways to reach buyers.
Content marketing is based on the premise that buyers, whether they’re consumers or businesses, are just as likely looking for you as you are trying to reach them. Because of search engines and other web-based applications, we are all much more actively taking research into our own hands. We still watch commercials, read brochures and peruse advertisements, but how we act on that information has changed.
Now, we research and through our research we find the companies we want to work with. Content marketing is the method you can use to take advantage of buyers during that research process. You build trust with them so that they select your product or service over your competitors. If you’re not taking advantage of this opportunity, you’re losing customers you don’t even know about.
How do you do it? How do you reach these potential buyers? Blogs. Supplied content for magazines. Webinars. You use the expert resources you have in-house to educate buyers about the construction process, product categories and design trends. There are hundreds of topics you can choose from to showcase your expertise and educate. But there is, in particular, one topic you should dial back.
Promoting your own product or services. In these scenarios-blogs, webinars, etc.-your audience, who are potential buyers, will be turned off by promotional efforts. Have you ever sat in a seminar at a trade show and had a speaker who was supposed to be educating you on how to improve your business spend most of his time promoting his ability to improve your business … for a slight fee, of course? Well, that’s the same issue with content marketing.
Buyers are increasingly cynical about marketing messages. And even though we’re more and more inundated with product placement-type messages (ask yourself why the kid in “E.T.” lured in the alien with Reese’s Pieces and not M&Ms) we are still very wary of self promotion.
That’s the danger, but the upside is huge. If you successfully place your company as the expert on a product category or type of service, those unknown buyers lurking out there (and “lurking” is an official Internet-era term) will see that you’re the one to trust.
And, as any good sales person will tell you, when you have established trust, closing the deal becomes far simpler. Evidence shows that sales based on trust reduce the cost of sale, increase the profit margin and deliver higher customer satisfaction. Content marketing techniques are designed to build trust, and in today’s competitive market environment, the company that can do that is going to gain market share and retain its margins.
