Do your prospects believe what you're selling?
To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; credible, we must be truthful.
Edward R. Murrow
The problem: you've invented a great, new technology or service, and you've even proved its benefits in the field. Yet, your prospects just don't quite trust you or find the results your clients see credible.
The solution: content-based marketing.
Content-based marketing provides free, informational materials to your prospects. In addition to educating your customers about your products/services and its benefits, content-based marketing builds credibility by providing a peek behind the curtain, answering your prospects questions, even before they ask them. Providing sound advice and a consistent stream of valuable content also builds your brand's reputation.
I advise my clients to build content-based campaigns centered on a particular topic. We generally create a white paper first, agreeing on the content and flow in an iterative process. Then I repurpose and reformat the white paper's content into blog posts, affiliate articles, infographics, video, email newsletters, and more: i.e., something for every learning style, issued over a spread of several weeks.
For example, in my work with Motors@Work, a cloud-based asset condition monitoring software-as-a-service provider, we identified a bottleneck in conversions. Instead of building inbound leads, the white paper and campaign focused on converting leads to closes by targeting two key decision-makers:
Educating executives desiring IoT without a specific scope in mind about potential first steps; and
Reassuring IT staff that implementing IoT is doable when broken into small steps.
To create the campaign, we first drafted the "Demystifying IoT" white paper (below); we subsequently generated twelve blog posts, four infographics, two affiliate-published articles, and an email campaign. Not only did the white paper and associated campaign help with closings, it generated additional inbound leads and, as CEO Rod Ellsworth put it, “resulted in demonstrable value.”
How could content-based marketing improve your inbound leads and conversion rates? Let's chat: request your initial consultation.
