How Content Marketing Prepares Buyers to Sign On The Line

April 21, 2014 by

www.jeffkorhan.com

Need a reason to embrace content marketing?

People tend to fear what they do not understand.

Therefore, they are unlikely to work with your business if they do not understand your process for helping them.

Your current customers are your customers because you have earned they trust. They know, like, and understand you and your business.

The others are simply not ready to step forward because they have doubts that are holding them back. Your content marketing can remove those obstacles.

You understand your current customers well, so naturally your business seeks to attract more folks just like them. They are out there in the communities your business serves, but there are challenges that may include the following.

  • They don’t recognize they need help
  • They are not quite ready to change
  • They are unwilling to do the work
  • Use your content marketing and social media to remove these three obstacles, and more.

#1 – Help Buyers Understand How You Can Help Them

In the film A River Runs Through It, Jesse asks Norman: “Why is it the people that need the most help won’t take it?”

There are plenty of buyers out there that your business can help, but for whatever reason they are not ready. Use your content marketing to help them recognize they have a problem.

If you bend to accommodate them you will then compromise your ability to help others. This often comes in the form of cutting prices, which we all know doesn’t work. So, don’t do it.

Instead, refine and share your success stories to clarify what your business does well and why it is unique. These stories create memorable and shareable content that prepares prospective buyers to be your next customers.

#2 – Increase The Pain that Your Solution Eliminates

This is probably the most important time to be committed to your process for helping your customers.

When you seek to put a “Band-Aid solution” on a big problem your value plummets. If a Band-Aid will do, then how necessary is your premium solution?

Without sensationalizing, take bold moves to help your buyer feel the pain.

Buyers are people, so they will differently respond to different stimuli. Some will have to see how your solutions work, some feel it, and others hear it.

Therefore, use the available multi-media formats to create content that reaches all types of buyers. Here’s a tip:

Help your buyer feel good about their pain; it means they care about something. Tweet this

#3 – Remove Obstacles to Adopting Your Solutions

When you build trust with buyers they will share the truth with you.

We learned early on at the landscape business I founded that many buyers wanted to upgrade their landscape, but only if they could be assured it would be properly maintained.

We quickly realized we had to launch a maintenance division to remove this obstacle. We also had to create tutorials for those that preferred to do the work themselves.

I’m sure you will not be surprised that to learn that many that initially did the work themselves later called us in to do the heavy lifting, such as the spring cleanup, tree trimming, and mulching. Why? Because our content marketing helped them understand there are no shortcuts to doing things right. (#1 above).

How about your business?

Helping is the New Selling

Your content marketing will sell more business if you design it to be helpful. Every single piece of educational content you create (such as a blog post) is either a stand-alone tutorial, or a portion of something more comprehensive (such as an eBook or printed reference guide).

Helping people understand how you can help them goes beyond answering questions. Facts and figures are useful, but they are impersonal and easily forgotten. Stories are relatable, and therefore memorable.

Your stories should help buyers understand how you can help them, why you want to help them, and why they will enjoy working with you.

When you do that you will make emotional connections that will move buyers to sign on the line which is dotted.

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley)  

He helps mainstream businesses adapt their traditional growth practices to a digital world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Photo Credit

What Do You Want From Social Media?

March 5, 2012 by

 

It’s human nature to make inquiries when discovering a new technology. What is it? And more importantly, what does it do?

The right question is – what do you want it to do?

Technology Now Demands More

One of the reasons people are frustrated with technology is they have been conditioned to expect it to be clear and one-dimensional.

Most of us grew up with technology that was simple. You flipped a switch to turn on a device, and reversed that operation to turn it off. 

Now buttons and switches can accomplish multiple operations – and that can be confusing.

When you were presented with a new toy as a child, your initial response was one of inquiry – what does it do? You learned that among other actions, it laughed, cried, or wet the bed; but you rarely had to choose.

Now you do.

Technology today is multi-faceted. You can now accomplish more – much more, and that requires more from you.

What Do You Want?

As a business owner, operator, or manager, you should be asking more of technology.

What do want from technology? That’s the question businesses should be asking. It’s one that requires experience and leadership.

In a perfect world, you can accomplish anything you want. This creates responsibility – and that creates fear.

Technologies that find their way to market are looking for leaders. The creators of social media and other digital technologies need the wisdom of those with experience to apply their capabilities for achieving practical results.

Facebook started as a platform for enabling college students to connect and share. Yet, what made Facebook what it is today was the application to our business environment.

Someone had to ask the right questions.

They had the thought that if Facebook can connect and engage thousands of students within a college or university, maybe it could do the same with their community – to connect and engage customers with their business.

You Have to Be Specific 

Inexperienced businesses expect customers to line up at their door. They just want to be order takers; but we all know that it doesn’t work that way.

While taking orders may be the norm during more prosperous times, the truth is we all now have to work to get what we want. This requires sales and marketing skills, to name just a few.

Getting results from social media requires a well-designed process for generating results without it.

This means you must have a process in place, one that you can break down into specific elements that can be achieved on the respective social media channels.

You can use Facebook for engagement, your blog for communicating expertise, and Twitter for amplifying both. This is just one simple strategy for managing your social media channels.

My suggestion for using social media well is to start with your overall marketing strategy. Break that down into specific elements and seek to achieve them on the respective social media channels that are best suited to their accomplishment.

More importantly, write everything out – and share it with your team.

Better yet, publish this on your primary site so that your community will know where to go to get what they want.

When you are clear – your community will naturally align with you.

The key to getting what you want is inquiry, direction, and leadership for helping your community to concurrently get what they want.

Leave a comment below and share this with your community using any of the share buttons below – or on the little red bar at the bottom of this page.  

Until next time,  Jeff

PHOTO CREDIT: JSCREATIONZ