The Most Difficult Thing About This Concept
This is week ten of a series where I'll be sharing a chapter from my book (Stop Selling Start Helping) each week. If you missed the previous weeks, click here to view all chapters. To learn more about Stop Selling Start Helping, click here.
CH 10 The Most Difficult Thing About This Concept
You know what I’ve found to be the hardest thing for business owners when it comes to helping versus selling?
Here’s a quick reminder of the definition of “content marketing”:
Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
So, what’s the hardest part of that definition to implement?
“RELEVANT and VALUABLE”
Myself included, as small business owners, we’re all about attracting, acquiring and engaging; and we’re especially fond of “driving profitable customer action,” right?
The challenge is in making our content relevant and valuable to the customer or prospect. We can talk about our products and services all day long. We can spew features and benefits out the wazoo! We can produce a great sales video or write an awesome introduction about a new product or service.
Truly effective content marketing has the goal of being genuinely relevant and valuable to your audience. What this means for you will vary. It could mean talking about what your product DOES NOT do. It could mean a side-by-side comparison of your service and a competitor’s. It could mean addressing something that’s not specifically connected to your product, but rather a related topic your audience would find helpful or interesting.
When you’re trying to help more than sell, the biggest question should always be: Is this relevant to our audience?
If you can answer that question in the positive, you’re heading in the right direction.
