Rocket Content

Content is One of the Best Ways to Develop and Maintain Customer Relationships

Rocket Helstrom — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 02:49:00 +0000

Providing content is an opportunity to connect with your target audience through:

The value of the information,
Your point of view and
Your voice.

Even if they don’t buy from you at first, if they like you and find your ideas interesting, they start to align with you psychologically, increasing the probability that eventually they will become customers.

Mohan Sawhney, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management says, “You can’t expect customers to tune in only when you have a product to launch,” he says. “You need to have a constant presence.” He cites five strategies for authentic customer engagement:

Offer customers real value
Build a customer community by asking for opinions and insights
Inspire customers, perhaps by sharing your brand’s vision or making your brand an agent of social impact
Provide entertainment value
Keep the conversation going by being constantly engaged with customers

Content can drive customer engagement across each of these dimensions, building and nurturing relationships along the way. Let’s examine how.

Content as something of real value

Depending on your business, you can develop how-to guides, tools and training that your customers find valuable and engage with you to access and use. People consider video to be high value, so consider delivering how-to content and training that way, although people also give downloadable how-to guides high marks.

Infographics are also near the top of the content value chain. Why? Done well, they communicate important statistics or data comparisons and trends simply in memorable visuals. People like to share infographics, too. Why? Because they can confer authority and credibility on the person who shares them. Be sure to facilitate sharing of much of your content, but especially infographics.

Video interviews with experts or even other customers who relate their stories about how your business has solved problems for them also generate high interest among audiences.

How Content Helps with Prospecting

Rocket Helstrom — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 23:50:32 +0000

We discussed in another article how content helps the marketing team support sales in the conversion process. However, the most valuable way to support sales strategies is to integrate content with the processes of prospecting and qualifying contacts in preparation for sales.

These activities are the basis for so-called inbound marketing automation software services that have proliferated the past several years such as HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot.

Some key content components of these processes are

Promotional content,
Landing pages,
“Gated” content (often referred to as lead magnets),
Thank you pages and
Follow up emails

Promotional content can be drip email campaigns, website content, news releases, ads, blog articles, podcasts, etc.—each of which would include an offer for gated content and a call to action. Many people

these two elements together but they are distinct micro content.

An offer is an enticing description of valuable “gated” content the target prospect can get by taking some action, typically clicking a link or a button embedded in the promotional content.

A call to action, or CTA for short, is the command or strong suggestion of what the person should do to get the gated content. E.g., “Click Here,” or “Enter your email and click.”

This action most likely brings the person to a landing page, which often includes a more complete description of the gated content, accompanied by an image or a short video designed to further entice the user. There is usually a more comprehensive form that the user has to complete and submit to access the content.

This form is one the most important components of the content-driven system because it collects valuable data from the prospect, which you use to qualify him/her as a lead for sales.

Since developing a relationship with a prospect is often a dance over time, you will work to get him/her to return a few times for other gated content. Each time s/he does is an opportunity to collect additional information and round out a profile of the prospect so that when it is handed over to sales, it includes valuable insights that help to close him/her.

Gated content has value for the prospect but requires that they exchange contact and other information to access it. It includes high-value content like videos, webinars, presentation decks, how-to guides, checklists, info graphics, etc.

But what if your business doesn’t have a sales team? What if your business’s sales process occurs online instead? Content plays a key role in the conversion process, too.

Product descriptions, sales letters, case studies, testimonials, video demonstrations, competitor comparisons, etc. all help close the customer online.

Discover resources with more information and insights into how content helps manifest your sales strategy in our Why Content Marketing section.

Why Content is Vital to Your Marketing Strategy

Rocket Helstrom — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 15:13:56 +0000

The value of content for marketing is that it can fuel and support any and every strategy you adopt to help achieve your business goals. Jayson Demers, Founder & CEO of AudienceBloom, cites several core

marketing functions that content helps drive:

Attracting new traffic
Building your reputation
Encouraging trust and faith in your brand
Influencing conversions and
Even creating a separate stream of revenue.

Good marketing strategies incorporate these fundamental elements:

Target customers—knowledge of them and the jobs they use your products/services to accomplish
Your value proposition and competitive differentiation
The channels your customers use
Their journey through your sales funnel [Link to Journeys section]

Whether your sales funnel has four phases like the classic A-I-D-A model or any other variation, it’s easy to see how different types of content critically support the marketing strategies for each phase.

For example, one of your likely marketing strategies is to create awareness for your company and its offerings, which is typically aligned with the top of the funnel. Content types that best support this strategy include:

Video and display ads
Social media posts
Customer story snippets
Trends blog articles
Interviews

Another marketing strategy—this one focused on the middle of the funnel—might be to educate your target audience, potentially about different solutions for their problems, how changes in the industry

affect them, the most important characteristics of a solutions provider, etc. Content that best supports this strategy includes:

Website
Webinars and event presentations
Guides
White papers
Blog articles, videos and podcasts

A likely marketing strategy aimed at the bottom of the funnel is to help enable your sales team or conversion process. Several types of content support this, including:

Pitch decks
Emails
One sheets and other shareable collateral
Case studies and customer testimonials
Product description cheat sheets
Competitor comparison charts

Content is indispensable when executing marketing strategies throughout the phases of your customer’s journey.

A Quick Overview of How Content Drives Your Business Strategies

Rocket Helstrom — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 23:18:47 +0000

Business Strategies

If, as Michael D. Watkins says, a business strategy is about how companies “…should make decisions and allocate resources in order accomplish key objectives,” then your content should help manifest those objectives and advance your decisions for achieving them.

In other words, your content should be the hammer that nails the company’s business strategies to the wall for both your external and internal audiences to take in.

Or, as Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group puts it, “…Content strategy is the combination of an editorial approach and a business strategy: how you publish content that meets your customer needs, incites them to act and drives additional business for your company.”

A good business strategy provides a clear roadmap, consisting of a set of guiding principles or rules, that defines the actions people in the business should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritize (and not prioritize) to achieve desired goals. In other words, content should embody your company’s desired outcomes.

Simon Sinek’s golden circle model helps to align at a high level your company’s goals (Why) with business objectives (How) and content tactics (What). For example, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup might decide it wants to attract users first and foremost, as way to eventually ramp up revenues.

They may offer a “freemium model” that provides a free version of the application as a gateway to paid versions that include additional features, access for more users, etc. So the company’s primary business outcome or “why” is to attract as many users as possible.

Then the “hows” or objectives could be to:

Increase the visibility of the signup page for the free version and
Drive traffic to it

The “whats” or tactics could be many things, but creating and promoting evergreen content in the form of how-to blog articles, guide posts, list posts, case studies, etc. should be a strong candidate for the primary tactic.

There are several other articles about the power of content in driving business strategies on our Why Content Marketing is Important resource page. Be sure to check them out when you get a chance.

How Content Goes Beyond the Journey to the Customer Experience

Rocket Helstrom — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 18:39:58 +0000

The Customer Experience

The problem with models is that they are general descriptions of a more or less ideal situation, which never occurs in reality. While they attempt to describe the purchase process, they’re not very dynamic, flexible or specific.

It’s like describing a home by citing its square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms. It gives you a basic idea but it lacks a lot of information.

Another issue with these models is that they describe orderly and complete ways in which customers don’t really behave. That’s partly because they are viewing the purchase process mainly from the business’s point of view vs. the customer’s.

But as journey management and customer experience expert Kerry Bodine points out, when you look at things from the customer’s perspective, some important differences emerge.

“No prospective customer seeks “awareness” of any company (and let’s be honest, they’re not thinking of how best to solidify their “retention” either). Instead, they want to accomplish a goal or task—and working with your organization is simply the way to do that.”

This focus on the customer’s goal or task is based on jobs-to-be-done-theory, a marketing and innovation approach that seeks to design campaigns and products around “jobs” by creating experiences that help customers make progress, avoid obstacles and reconcile the social, emotional, and functional dimensions of the jobs.

Content is integral to customer experiences and in many cases ideal for communicating how to accomplish the jobs, their processes, and their social and emotional components.

Discover information resources for more insights to how content helps move customers through their journeys (and experiences) with your business.

How Content Transports People to Becoming (and Remaining) Your Customers

Rocket Helstrom — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 01:16:23 +0000

Content marketing is important to your business because it helps transport people throughout their journeys to becoming and remaining your customer.

The outcomes we discussed in the Outcomes section relate closely to the phases people go through in their journeys to:

Becoming your customers,
Remaining your customers, returning to buy again, or for service or parts, and
Recommending your business to others, i.e., advocating or evangelizing.

As we will see, different types of content can help move them through each phase, as well as transition them from one phase to the next.

The Purchase Funnel
The concept of the customer journey evolved from the concept of the classic purchase funnel, which itself was initially conceived as a phased model in which businesses:

Attract the attention of consumers,
Create interest in and then
Desire for the business or product, and ultimately
Get them to take action—presumably purchasing the business’s solution in the form of a product or service.

The original A-I-D-A model is attributed to an advertising pioneer named Elias St. Elmo Lewis, who began articulating it as early as 1898.

The metaphor of the funnel was associated with the model in the 1920s to help illustrate the size of a business’s target audience the closer it gets to purchase.

The number of phases and their names also evolved as the marketing and advertising industry grew with the classic simple version of the funnel containing three phases of the target audience’s mindset:

Awareness
Consideration and
Intent

In this model, the number of people “in market” or intending to purchase are always fewer than the number of people who are aware of your brand—and are in fact, a subset of the audience in each of the previous phases over time.

The Customer Journey
However, we know customers rarely if ever follow such a logical, linear process. Nor are there any formal rules for such behavior and every brand or product acquisition experience is different.

Over time, with the advent of new media distribution channels, digital online technology and interactive communications, the funnel model transformed into more of a circular or looping model where the customer still moves through phases but may loop

back to the beginning or earlier phases to repeat all or part of the journey.

In 2009, McKinsey & Company documented this evolutionary view and called it the consumer decision journey.

Our research showed that the proliferation of media and products requires marketers to find new ways to get their brands included in the initial-consideration set that consumers develop as they begin their decision journey. We also found that because of the shift away from one-way communication—from marketers to consumers—toward a two-way conversation, marketers need a more systematic way to satisfy customer demands and manage word-of-mouth.

Thanks to the rise of digital and cloud technologies, widespread access to broadband internet and the proliferation of personal screens with faster processors and greater storage, content emerged as a highly effective and affordable way to create awareness, engage consumers and business customers, get them to take action and stay connected.

Discover information resources for more insights to how content helps move customers through their journeys with your business.

Why Content is Great at Driving Outcomes

Rocket Helstrom — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 05:42:24 +0000

Your desired outcomes are at the heart of the answer to the question “why should we do content marketing?”

But first, what are outcomes?

They are broader objectives or goals for your business vs. more granular measurables like email opens, website visits or leads, according to business.com. Here are the key outcomes that content marketing helps drive.

Awareness

Do your target audiences know you exist? Developing content that resonates with them and placing it where they will see it helps fulfill this outcome, often without spending media dollars. Then other complementary content can increase its exposure.

Brand Appeal

Your target audiences are aware of you but what do they think of you? Creating an authentic image of you and your business is a top three outcome for most companies and content marketing plays a key role.

There is a famous quote by former Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, who said that a brand is “…the product of a thousand small gestures.” Each piece of content you provide is another gesture that communicates who you are and what your business stands for.

Market Position

Content helps articulate those things that differentiate and elevate your business vs. competitors. What value do you add that sets you apart? Service? Training or education? Expertise? Better systems that add speed, options, style? Craft your content around them.

Relationships

Cultivating relationships with target audiences is one of content marketing’s sweet spots. If engaging with and learning what matters to your potential customers and partners are important to you then content is a proven way to engage them and invite their responses.

Growth

Growth is often a euphemism for increased revenue and profit, but it can also mean an increase in users, followers or subscribers.

Sales is probably the ultimate outcome you want for your business, and content marketing helps persuade people to buy what your business is selling by building trust and credibility and showing proof like case studies, testimonials recommendations.

Satisfaction

Content can play a big part in appreciating your customers and strengthening their bonds with your business. And the more you know about why they use your products or service—what jobs they’re trying to do or what problems they’re trying to solve—the more relevant content you can create that helps them leverage your business in ways they may not have thought about before.

Loyalty

Customer loyalty has several facets and good content marketing can add luster to all of them. Show customers how much you value them by continuing to provide useful information, perspective and suggestions. And simply sharing news that reflects well on your company reinforces your customers’ decision to buy from you, and makes them more likely to buy from you again.

Advocacy

Another key post-sales outcome is when customers recommend your business to others. There are several ways they can do this where content is a catalyst for sharing information, solutions, knowledge, etc. Your content can be a gateway to referrals like these, especially when it is done well and reflects positively on the sharer.

Content marketing is integral to achieving your desired outcomes because it:

Drives communication and engagement with targets and customers
Delivers on your business’s value proposition for the customer by relieving pain points and helping to get the job done
Extends the perceived value of your product/service, helping lead to sales, resales, up sales, cross sales, referrals and recommendations.

The content strategy for achieving each of your desired outcomes depends somewhat on what your business sells and how it sells. Find more information and insights about how content drives outcomes on our resource page.