It Pays to Go Beyond Content Marketing

What does it mean to go beyond content marketing?

You are probably already engaged in content marketing. Or you are thinking of starting. It simply means that you would like to publish different types of content that your users and prospects can engage with. That way you can secure better mindshare. Your customers will remember you when they are ready to buy a product or service that meets their needs.

Content marketing is no doubt an effective strategy.  It helps you reach your customers, educate them, and subsequently get them to buy your products and services.

But Content Marketing Is Not Enough

There are 3 main reasons for that:

1. First, it’s simply because content marketing has rapidly become akin to the traditional mass marketing and advertising of the past. It has become just “another” interruption tactic. For your content to be seen by your target customers, you need to deploy traditional advertising techniques – lots of it. The promise of the digital age was personalization and presenting a point of view. But content marketing has slowly become a segment based outreach strategy – mass personalized, but not personalized.
2. Second, it’s not special any more. Quality content is hard to come by. Everyone is putting in the same keywords as they strive for better SEO (to rank higher in google searches). And folks are publishing content with titles that promise the same thing. Differentiating by bringing in your unique point of is becoming very difficult. Your voice just gets lost in the crowd.
3. Finally, it is hard. Because it has become a mass, segment based marketing tactic, we are always in a rush to produce more content, and then pay to promote it. And that is a rabbit hole that never ends. So we do it for a while with all the right intentions, and then we just give up. Because like traditional marketing, the “create and blast content” strategy needs a lot of time and resources.

The result: We end up with a faceless strategy.

That said, we can’t give up on quality content marketing. After all, it’s the lifeblood of businesses today. Customers look for the right content so they can make informed decisions, and establish rapport with you.

So what can be done? How can we go beyond content marketing, and maximize our RoI.

What We Need To Go Beyond Content Marketing

The answer is to start thinking in terms of:

1. Evergreen anchor content. Frequent of content will follow from there.
2. Personalization to the individual in addition to the segment
3. Interactivity

By evergreen anchor content, we mean a set of content assets that address the core pain points of your customers in a systematic and comprehensive way. These are NOT your weekly blogs on current topics that will get stale quickly. Your anchor content is something that your business is based on – ours is based on building better engagement with prospects and customers. Pick the focus of your business and address the topic in a good reasonable way.

Your evergreen topics are relevant 24/7, 365 days a year to those who care, or those who will come to care. Be sure to look up some  keyword research tools to make sure you’re using the phrases your customers are using to search for your service. These content assets (e.g. a set of blogs, your methodology, etc.) is your evergreen anchor content. This is also what customers see when they visit you – quality, no-fluff content.

Then you deploy a “one-to-one” customer interaction approach to attract, qualify and nurture your customers towards your paid services and products. This personalization comes from interctivity where customers engage with your content – e.g. do a self assessment, set a goal for themselves, see what others like them are doing to address the pain points, read advice from you, etc.

You must be thinking “but that’s what I do today when a customer responds and sets up the first discovery call”.

There’s a subtle difference. And that difference comes from what we at Evalinator call “context”.

Here’s what happens today: If we can’t convert a customer during that first interaction or discovery call, we then fall back on a nurturing and reminder approach. We email them new content periodically, and we also make it a point to periodically email them and ask if they are ready to make a decision.

What’s missing? Context. Our nurturing and reminder approach is rarely personalized. It’s mass marketing disguised as personalized. Because we don’t know the individual customer. We only know the general “segment” of the customer.

At Evalinator, we think you should go beyond the routine content marketing, and engage with your prospects as an individual. When you have context, you know what their individual pain points are. You know what they need to do to keep chipping away at it. And you offer to be there during their struggles. Over time, they realize that they want you to help them get to their destination.

It’s almost like we need to rekindle that lost art of customer engagement. Machines and tools have given us the means to do so, but they’ve also made us lose sight of what’s really important.

Meaningful retention doesn’t happen because we have a busy content marketing engine.  It happens because we cared enough to go beyond content marketing to focus on our customers as individuals. We make a sale because they know we can help them get to their goals, and we keep them from churning because we engage.

Evalinator helps you build trust by engaging in a way that is truly helpful.

Go beyond content marketing. Try Evalinator for 21 days risk free.

But wait. We can do one better than that sales pitch! Before you subscribe, see if Evalinator is right for you. That way you know that we practice what we preach.

We’ll see you around.

References:

1. List of keyword research tools by Ahref
2. Image credits because the creators deserve it: Here and here