Why Content Marketing Works
Seth Godin is famous for saying, ‘content marketing is the only marketing left’. Here’s why content marketing works.
When you’re in business or building your own personal brand you need to get noticed. You need to get clients and customers, awareness, and leads. Like the model above shows, there are ways this can happen.
Know someone who knows what they want. In the first instance, you know someone and you know they want your specific skillset or offering, so you can reach out to them via a phone call, an email, or even in person.
Don’t know someone but that person does know what they want. The next situation is where you don’t ‘know’ someone, but you know they’re within a demographic that wants your skills or services. In this case, you reach out to them via your network or through search algorithms.
Know someone but they don’t know what they want. Then there’s the situation where you know someone, but they don’t know what they want (and so they don’t know that they want or need your services). Here you’ll want to reach out by educating them on what you do, and how what you do addresses one or more of their pain points.
Don’t know someone and they don’t know what they want. Lastly is the situation where you don’t know someone and they don’t know that they want or need your specific offerings. In this case, the goal is simply to raise awareness.
In each of these cases, you want a method for reaching the individuals and letting them know who you are and what you have to offer. The issue is that it’s really only in the first instance that you can reach out directly.
The Past Present and Future Model
In the past, we’ve reached clients and customers through cold calls, sales demos, and direct leads. Back then when you needed to make some sales, you’d just pull out the phone book out and start ringing around offering your services.
In the same way, it used to be that when you wanted to buy a car, you’d go to five different car dealerships. But research shows that today more than one-third of car buyers visit just one dealership before making a purchase. And nearly half of all buyers take less than 30 days to shop for and purchase a vehicle.
What’s the difference? Content marketing.
Why Content Marketing Works
Just like with automotive purchases, people are moving away from direct sales and contacts, to online research and content marketing. In fact, according to Pixability, creator-produced videos received 93% of monthly views for all U.S. auto content on YouTube. Creators are using online content to engage viewers beyond the classic car commercial. That means that it’s content marketing that’s reaching people today.
Marketing and sales have changed.
Selling is an action that converts products into revenue. Marketing, on the other hand, is the process of meeting and satisfying customer needs and values. It used to be that we were able to market and sell separately. In fact, they worked in isolation. This has changed. Today they must be integrated and integrated well. And content marketing is the way to do that.
Reaching all your potential customers.
We should be taking the lessons of the automotive industry into our own practices. Social networks, like YouTube, but also Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., are about educating, engaging, and providing information. It’s through content marketing that provides those things (education, information, engagement) that you can reach each of the people in the four quadrants above.
‘Content marketing is the only marketing left.’ – Seth Godin
Seth Godin is famous for saying, ‘content marketing is the only marketing left’. But what does that mean? And why does content marketing work?
As you may know, we recently got a new puppy, Winston. But before we ever considered actually bringing a puppy home, we actually did about a year’s worth of research.
During that year we watched almost every YouTube video, read every blog post, and looked at every Instagram page about English bulldogs. We wanted to know everything we could about the breed, about their needs and idiosyncrasies before bringing our new puppy into our lives. It was an information-gathering process. However, during this process, we ultimately encountered a wonderful woman who eventually became our breeder.
We first came across her because she posted incredibly engaging and educational information about English bulldogs on her website. She added value and information that we needed, and so we began to follow her posts, get to know her, and ultimately trust her. When it came time to choosing the breeder for our puppy we felt confident that she knew her stuff, that she would have the care and commitment to take care of our puppy during the first couple of months of his life, and that she would continue to support us throughout our journey with our new puppy.
When we first started researching we weren’t looking for a breeder. But we found her anyway. She was giving us what we needed before we even knew what it was that we needed. She was raising awareness, engaging and educating and so, in the end, converting us into customers. Her marketing was her sales, and vice versa, through her excellent content marketing.
Research
Research from my Expert to Influencer diagnostic shows that of the almost 3,000 people who have we have surveyed, 80% are under communicating with their clients. And even once they are creating content, they’re not reaching out to the top left-hand side of the quadrant model. That means that they are missing out on the all-important lead generation.
In fact, less than 20% of the people surveyed were creating content weekly. And only 42% were creating it once a month. Yet, research shows us that it takes 11.4 pieces of content before a person will buy from you.
And it takes consistent content marketing to build the relationships and engagement that leads to visitors becoming loyal customers. You want to be building those relationships just as our breeder did through her content marketing. If you do all those things you will soon be able to answer why content marketing works!
Next Steps
Are you creating regular content?
Does your content raise awareness, engage, and educate your audience?
Are you leveraging your content on multiple platforms?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on why content marketing works...
Jane Anderson is a strategic communications expert, speaker, consulting coach and the author of 11 books including Catalyst Content.
With over 20 years of experience helping people to communicate confidently, she is obsessed with authentic influence and human connection to drive business growth in a world of disruption and automation.
Jane delivers Content Creation Bootcamps (Virtual and Face to Face), coaching and keynotes. To inquire about her working with you or your organisation please contact us here.