Many people do use content marketing techniques. However, when asked if they use or believe in content marketing, they often mistakenly say no. Perhaps, the root cause of this confusion is that people do not actually understand what content marketing truly means. Most people have the misconception that content marketing is all about flooding prospects with information about their products. However, this is SO VERY far away from the real meaning of content marketing. In fact, it is quite the opposite meaning and to clearly explain what content marketing means, lets take a look at a diagram from “Optimize Content Marketing by Facilitating the Buyer’s Journey- By Tom Pisello”.
As you can see from the diagram above, there are three main parts of a customer’s buying journey (Discovery, Consideration, Decision) and content marketing ties in very nicely with all of them using a variety of content tools which have been listed in the 3rd row of the diagram.
A customer’s needs, preferences and expectations change from one stage to another in his/her buying journey. The key to effective marketing converting to successful sales is to capture customers when they are at the start of their buying journey and solve their evolving needs in each of the three stages. That way, you can be guaranteed to be able to close the deal with that customer in no time! And your ability to do that is hugely dependent on your effective use of content marketing.
For instance, let us take a look at the first stage (Discovery) which is often touted to be the most critical one in today’s digital age. There are two categories in the first stage that customers would fall under:
- Customer does not know that problem exists or is ignorant/complacent about it.
- Customer knows about the problem but is hesitant to do something about it as staying in status quo is always so tempting.
Hence, the only way to reach out and engage customers in both these scenarios is to first provide them with compelling content which informs/highlights the severity of those problems and secondly why solving those problems would result in huge benefits for them. By doing so, you would be able to meet the exact needs of customers from both these categories, making it much easier for you to transition them onto the second stage (consideration), which is when you begin explaining how your products would be the best fit for them.
Hence, as illustrated above, content marketing equips you with the power of influencing buyers’ states of minds. All you need to do is ensure that you provide the right kind of content to solve the specific needs of customers at their respective buying journey stages. Content marketing has a very different goal and objective in every stage and once this is well understood, people will know that content marketing is not just about flooding customers with information about products.
Hopefully, this blogpost has been helpful in giving you a better insight into content marketing and perhaps convince you to begin using it proactively, which would certainly work wonders for your company’s sales numbers!
