Ultimately, you simply need to sell more – whether it’s a product, a service or a partnership - so it can be really intuitive to skip the marketing and go straight in with hiring salespeople and business development managers. But no matter how good those salespeople are at translating the science and presenting your product, service or process, they need people to contact in the first place in order to do their thing. And they need a lot of them.
That’s because there is always attrition from the number of people who are aware of a product to those that are interested and then, to those that have the right circumstances and resources. And then there is further loss in numbers between those people and the ones that become customers.
And that overall attrition is commonly around 1-5%.
So, who is going to be responsible for generating enough awareness and leads at the start of the process so that by the time the inevitable conversion rates are realised, there are enough people to nurture into customers for the organisation to achieve their objectives?
This is where marketing comes in and one of the most customer-oriented and cost-effective ways of doing this is through content marketing.
Attract more people
The primary role of content marketing is to attract more people to your website. This is not advertising though – content marketing will only attract people to your website if it is something they want to read about. This means you need to deeply understand what people want to read about and align marketing activities to this.
Capture Interest
When you embrace this golden rule of content marketing and align your activities to what is of interest to the customer, you can go a step further and use the highest value content to capture interest and generate leads for salespeople to gently nurture into customers. The content needs to be high enough value that the reader will be willing to exchange their email address for it. But be careful, because asking for email addresses for too much content or for content that they can find elsewhere, will only frustrate the reader.
The Reality of Content Marketing
The reality is there is no blueprint for effective content marketing. The trick is to firmly put yourself in the shoes of your customers to hypothesise what they might be reading about – even better get it from the horse’s mouth. But even then, you will only know if you are on the right content marketing path when you produce content and put it out there. Plus, the more you publish the more you are likely to resonate with people. And yes, you are absolutely right, this is going to take some time and patience. Time committed every week to creating content, publishing it and sharing on social media. Patience to build an audience and generate momentum.
So, the best advice we can give you is to start. It’s right to reflect on your experience with customers, discuss with team members and do some desk research, but start. Just start.