Written by Riyad Emeran
This is the most common hurdle to overcome when I’m engaging new clients. While it’s undeniable that the point of marketing is to promote a brand along with its products and services, when it comes to content marketing, the strategy needs to be more subtle.
Product managers may feel that any content that doesn’t implicitly promote or reference what they’re selling is a waste of time and money, but it’s my job to convince them otherwise. By not talking about their brand, products or services, they can begin to build a relationship with their audience, and along with that relationship something even more valuable, trust.
A truly successful content marketing strategy will almost invariably be a marathon rather than a sprint, but the long term benefits it delivers can be huge. Building a strong relationship with a highly relevant audience that looks to your brand for insight, advice and education can be invaluable.
When building that relationship with your audience it’s vital to remember that your strategy must focus on them and not you. You need to understand who you’re talking to and what truly matters to them. What are the biggest issues facing your audience right now? What’s keeping those people up at night? What challenges are they facing and how can they overcome those challenges? Put simply, the key to building that relationship and the associated trust, is empathy.
You need to understand who you’re talking to and what truly matters to them.
That empathy and understanding is the first step on the road towards thought leadership, and while there’s an understandable level of fatigue around that term, that’s because its overused and often misunderstood. To truly build thought leadership, you need to dedicate time, effort, resources and focus. When you’re developing a content marketing strategy you must decide where your focus is and stick with it, rather than chasing trends or headlines, and that focus should always matter to your audience – it’s about them, not you, remember?
Building out a library of audience focused content across all relevant avenues of engagement – company blog, LinkedIn, newsletters, eBooks, etc. – will start to position your brand as a thought leader within that area of focus and build trust with your audience. Then, and only then, can it be about you.
With your brand positioned as a thought leader and your audience rightly trusting the independent insight and advice you’ve delivered to them over time, you can now highlight how your products and services can help them overcome their challenges. But even now, that messaging should be subtle and wrapped up in that same insightful and educational blanket.
Potential customers should already know and trust your brand.
Demand generation is often considered – especially in B2B marketing – the preferred avenue of engagement, connecting directly with potential customers and delivering their details as leads. But for this to really work, those potential customers should already know and trust your brand, hence the relationship building above. But even so, any demand generation activity requires an adequate value exchange, which means the content your audience receives in exchange for their details must be high quality and genuinely useful to them. And at this point, highlighting how your brand can help them can also be genuinely useful.
When it comes to content marketing, it’s not never about you, but ideally your audience should want to know more about your brand and what it can offer before you push it to them. Laying that foundation and building an environment of insight and trust through high-quality content and thought leadership encourages your audience to view your brand as an ally and potential partner. And if you get it right, that connection will only grow stronger.
