We hear it everyday, people saying that they know what we do. But through further investigation, turns out they don’t. It’s not their fault, no one has experienced your brand or your product the way you have. They don’t know about the demands and choices that went into it. They don’t understand the market pressures or the false starts either. So let’s set the record straight.
Your business, like many businesses today, is challenged with creating value for numerous points along a complicated, multi-layered buyer’s journey. Your business operates in an industry where buying cycles often are extended. Anyone serious about the task at hand will require a significant amount of time to develop an in-depth understanding of the products and services your company offers to be able to craft content that’s easy for your audiences to grasp.
Here are my goals in everything I propose to do for my clients:
- Attract new customers and maximize retention rates
- Identify new revenue streams and optimize support
- Collaboration and cooperate
- Create value at every stage of the buyer’s journey
- Enable your business’s value to be discoverable even when your prospects are not looking for you
Our business development process begins with an analysis and understanding of your business promises and pillars. This includes making use of marketing research to understand the key decision drivers, attitudes to reinforce and attitudes to overcome.
The foundation of my approach is ensuring that our efforts are a research-driven creative process. I use existing information/research and conduct additional research when needed.
Before we start, we need to ask ourselves some questions…
What’s your strategy for being found in today’s globally connected world? Is there a plan for building an audience? How do you plan to build up your digital assets by delivering rich customer experiences?
Or are we are creating more and more content, hoping for more and more activity. What do those efforts get us? Web traffic? Likes? Fans? Those lower-level indicators are fine — if they are helping us build an audience. If they aren’t, then they are most likely just meaningless vanity metrics.
What to do? If you don’t have a solid loyalty-building strategy, you need one. I’m not talking about a lead generation strategy where you spam your leads/contacts based on where you think they are in the buying cycle. I’m talking about building something your customers and employees can subscribe to that is consistently delivered, buying stage-agnostic, and targeted to a market niche that you can position yourself as the go-to authority on.
It’s actually not all that complex a strategy, but it does require patience and thinking outside of the next campaign. The companies who accept the challenge of employing these kinds of strategies now will win in the long run.
“You can increase the bottom line while, at the same time, help your customers live better lives or get better jobs. Content marketing is the only kind of marketing that provides ongoing value, whether you purchase the product or not.” ‒ Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute