Friday, August 14, 2015

Good content marketing will boost your revenues


By David Ronald

By some estimates each of us is exposed to 5,000 ads each day. It’s not surprising, therefore, that your buyers are becoming increasing immune to traditional marketing techniques. In this post I will explain why content marketing should be a key component of your promotional strategy.

(Click here to read our white paper on content marketing: http://bit.ly/1GHDSxB.)

Consider this: 57% of B2B purchase decisions, and 72% of B2C ones, are made before a buyer contacts a vendor, according to McKinsey & Company.

Content marketing alters the way you sell—it shifts your focus from hyping your products to adding value to prospects’ decision making. Content marketing is about creating relevant, informative and unbiased content that attracts buyers and converts them to loyal customers.

The objective of content marketing is a “lightbulb moment” when a buyer understands how you can help them, and reaches out to you for more information about your product or service.

Although typically associated with B2C selling, content marketing is ready to have an impact in B2B environments.

Your long-term goal should be to create a sustainable content marketing engine that helps build your business. In order to accomplish this, consider mapping content to the different stages in the buying process of your prospects. The key stages in the typical buying journey are shown in the following diagram:

You could, for example, target the awareness stage of the buying process by creating a brief video that describes the most popular applications of your product. You could, for instance, target the comparison stage of the funnel by commissioning a third-party research agency to write about you and the competitors in your market space.

By assigning content to the most appropriate buying stage, you ensure that your content will resonate with your prospects. You will discover gaps that need to be filled, and make the best use of existing content.

Keep in mind that if you fail to embrace the content marketing paradigm you are creating a gap that your competitors will be happy to fill.

I hope you found this information to be helpful.

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