Close More Business with Authentic Content

Have you been the recipient of a poorly executed, vanilla flavored sale pitch? Have you felt like making up any reason at all to excuse yourself from the meeting? Come on, be honest; we’ve all been there.

It is important for marketers to understand the value of creating innovative, authentic content to highlight your firm’s competitive advantage and expertise of the leaders within your firm.

Glenton Davis, contributing writer for the South Florida Business Journal, describes the importance of enlivening your data or content through videos or Facebook live videos. Click here to read his complete article.

Often times, business professionals repurpose generic boring content and use it to make client presentations, LinkedIn commentary, blog posts, and/or video excerpts; all of which are thrown in the garbage, scrolled over quickly or skipped entirely. In order to produce and disseminate fresh and creative content it is important to understand the concept of demand generation when creating your content marketing strategy, content calendar, audience demographics, topic and platform.  

Demand Generation

Content marketing is a tactical approach of demand generation which can be defined as getting people interested in what you (and your brand) have to say.

Demand generation programs are put in place for people at all stages in the marketing funnel including prospects who have never heard of your brand, product or service all the way to conversions and client retention. There are four aspects of demand generation including: brand awareness, in bound marketing, sales enablement and client retention.

Thought Leadership

Incorporating thought leadership as part of your content marketing strategy will help to elevate your personal brand and that of your company. Seek out opportunities to speak at conferences, client presentations, internal meetings, pod casts and topic-guided videos on LinkedIn.  Thought leadership makes for very unique and meaningful content which can be used as part of your content marketing subject matter.

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) Research Director Lisa Murton Beets, tells The Financial Brand that “connecting” will be a key theme for 2019 — using empathy to better relate to your target audience as individuals. Click here to learn more about ideas to connect to your target audience.

Metrics

The inclusion of a marketing dashboard is advisable as part of your strategy to measure the success of your content marketing efforts. The purpose of a dashboard is to provide transparency, access to information, decision support, facilitate interactive dialogue, and accountability. A few examples of metrics that can be measured as part of your content marketing strategy include: event conversion ratios, new closed business ratios, SEO, key words, pay per click campaigns, google analytics, and social media.

Benefits of Content Marketing

If done well, content marketing will:

  • be shared exponentially by your tribe
  • be truly informative for your audience
  • help to establish your personal brand awareness and position you as an expert in your field
  • position your company’s brand as an industry leader
  • result in closed business

5 Guiding Questions to Content Marketing Creation

Content marketing should be created with the following questions in mind:

  1. Why are you creating content?
    • Content should be built with the intention of building tribes that will follow you.
    • Content should be framed around the interests of your audience and can include educational videos, white papers, client stories and testimonials, event photos/videos, product guides, tips, trivia, and contests to name a few. 
    • Content can include thought leadership from experts within your industry and can be in the form of a video, static blog post, article, white paper, collateral material.
  2. Who is your target audience?
    • Content should be built with the audience in mind. The audience’s demographics and preferences should be considered when making decisions regarding the mode of communication and elements used to communicate the message.
  3. What do you want the content to achieve?
    • Good content should achieve high impressions and high conversion ratios. 
  4. When and how are you going to develop the content?
    • Insight should be used to inspire original content. That insight can come from someone within your company or based on the interests of your existing clients.
    • The content you develop should feature your company’s strengths, unique attributes, relatable to your target audience and should incorporate the use of visual and/or video imagery.
  5. Where are you going to publish the content?
    • It is important to remember to be selective when posting content to a particular platform. A message delivered via one platform will be perceived differently on another platform.

Lastly, it is important to assemble your content marketing strategy with flexibility and agility to react to new information.

Using this framework as a guide should help inspire the creation of innovative, authentic content that is of interest to your target audience. If done correctly, clients will want to work with your company and refer business to you.