Create Content Your Prospects Need, Want & Use
Marketers are steeped in knowledge about their company's, their products and solutions. This is only natural as it's what you're surrounded by every day. Unfortunately, companies tend to spend more time comparing and contrasting their messaging against their competitors than they do matching it to what their prospects and customers need (and want) to know.
"The gap between marketing planning and buyer preferences is huge. It’s a buyer’s world, baby, and we marketers must embrace it. Trouble is, so much marketing activity is driven by siloed tactic planning and generating one-time inquiries that we lose sight of what prospects and customers need and want over the course of a long-term buying process."
- Megan Heuer, Sirius Decisions Blog Post, 12-28-09
Product information will always play a role in the complex buying process, serving to validate beliefs, requirements and other need-to-know specifics that seal the deal. It provides the most value in the later stages of buying—once your prospect have chosen a course of action.
Contagious content is designed to gain the attention of prospects you know about as well as helping to spread your ideas to others who have yet to raise their hands to identify themselves. It's contagious because it's clearly focused on your prospect's priorities and perspectives to quickly promote recognistion of value. Marketers will capture prospect interest—and keep it—because their content is discussing solutions to prospect problems and offering insights and knowledge they need.
There are three types of contagious content designed to differentiate your company from the competition:
Educational content focuses on what buyers need to know. It helps them think strategically about solving the problem, begins building the business case and helps to make the choice to take action a priority.
Expertise content showcases the value your company provides in addition to your product or solution. This is the "secret sauce" that your prospects can't get anywhere else—even if they can buy a similar product down the street.
Evidence content is the proof that your company walks it's talk. These are your stories of customer successes, media coverage, analyst opinions and, increasingly, word of mouth referrals and social conversational exchanges.
Ultimately, contagious content engages prospects over the long term of a complex buying cycle because it unfolds a storyline over time that helps them visualize working with your company to get the business outcomes they need to achieve.
Because your marketing content has helped them to see, breathe and taste the success, they share your ideas with colleagues and come to rely on your company's ideas as the best solution to their priority issues. And, that's just where you want them to be.
Contagious Content Services include:
Content Audit and Assessment
It's likely that you have marketing content that can be repurposed to gain contagious qualities. Marketing Interactions can help you audit your existing content, map it to buying stages for target markets, identify gaps and make recommendations for additions and revisions that will make your content more compelling during the longer-term complex buying process.
Content Strategy Development
The best way to use contagious content is with a plan that includes storyline development, a style baseline guide, and an editorial calendar mapped to buying stages. Utilizing a content strategy means your company will gain efficiencies in content development, share a consistent story your prospects embrace and encourage them to make faster progress to a purchase decision.
Marketing Content Development
Once you've gotten to know your buyers, completed your content audit and developed your content strategy, you'll need further content development designed to address specific target markets. Marketing Interactions helps you develop the contagious content that delivers on your marketing goals. The job of your content is to help buyers take next steps, building the confidence they need to make a purchase decision in your favor.
Longer sales cycles and buyer's preferences for self-education on the Web mean you need a lot of content. With the right plan, creating all that marketing content doesn't have to become a monumental task. Marketing Interactions specializes in the creation of integrated content marketing programs that help you get the most use and ROI from your investment in content assets.