Many businesses focus their marketing efforts on self-promotion with a primary goal of increasing sales. While sales are important, this type of marketing approach ignores the customer experience. With millions of consumer packaged goods available for them to choose from, customers are quick to tune out marketing and advertising messages that are purely promotional. So how can your business shift gears to more easily attract its target market? The answer lies in adopting a “culture of content”.
Entrepreneur contributor Michael Brenner writes that many businesses operate with a sales-focused culture, causing them to forget that the business was originally formed to solve a customer problem. He goes on to say that the solution to that problem was born after engaging with potential customers and discovering what their needs were.
In today’s consumer-driven marketplace, it is detrimental when businesses take the focus off serving customers and put it on selling their product directly. With so much choice available to them at their fingertips, customers will turn a blind eye to brands that are purely self-promotional. Instead, consumers prefer brands who actively engage with them on a more personal level.
Content has the ability to produce value for your business because it connects you with potential customers. Businesses that successfully reach their target market don’t interrupt the content that consumers are digesting on the web with forgettable promotional messages. Rather, they create their own original content that is designed to educate and delight consumers.
Good content anticipates consumers’ questions and aims to answer them. After explaining what your products are, how they work, and general topics that relate to your business, you can then begin to disclose what makes your brand superior. Brenner advises that messages you create should make the customer the hero, exhibit empathy for the issues they are facing, and appeal to their emotions. Moreover, publishing audience-focused content consistently is more effective than doing so infrequently.
Another point to consider is that consumers are very likely to turn to search engines, social networks, and individuals they trust for information about products. The posts that consumers see their friends commenting on and sharing on social media can impact their perception of your business’s products. For these reasons, the content you publish should give people something positive to talk about with each other. In fact, 92% of consumers rely on recommendations from family and friends before making a product purchase, according to a Nielsen Trust in Advertising Report.
A culture of content must begin at the executive level, but all members of an organization are responsible for upholding it. Any employee with a company email address or active social media profiles is already generating content. Therefore, education, executive buy-in, and employee advocacy must be present in order for a culture of content to exist. A paradigm shift from selling to helping is reliant upon employees being aware of how your products make consumers’ lives easier. Your brand image should embody how your products benefit consumers; a good strategy for success is believing that your brand is bigger than just something you sell.
It takes more effort to create material that your customers will truly enjoy than to simply list reasons why your products are the best available. Due to the myriad of marketing messages and packaged goods that consumers are exposed to, your business has to prove that its products are designed with the customer in mind. If consumers know that your product is the solution to a problem they are facing, your brand is much more likely to be chosen over others.
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