Content marketing is the most important marketing tool as all customers are now directing their own buying journey.

Who is Doing It?

And when people do start delivering the content it is hard to work out if you are delivering for search, for social or for a buyer to read to understand.

The selling of your content needs to address the problem in the customer’s head a the time they are reading.

Customer’s Problem

AN EXAMPLE OF REAL NEED VS VERBAL NEED Coaching businesses, for example; I helped deliver a study on what coaches did with their clients for $2K a month and they spent a lot of time fixing their psychological problems. One electrical engineer had capped his business at $10M turnover and the coach discovered that they have an issue with money being evil, and rich people being evil. The coach encouraged the ceo to give 10% of gross (!!!) to charity. Within three years the company was turning over $100M.

The issue is that CEO didnt walk in saying can you help me give away my money, or I think rich people are naughty. That CEO came in saying he had problems with marketing.

And you will have this in every business, why people talk to you is different to why people buy from you. Your content needs to have headlines for people to talk to you, the content is what you need to encourage people to buy with.

B2B Buying Journey

For this element it is really important to sell each step independently, the title you use on sites like facebook, twitter and other social sites are about grabbing 10 seconds of attention.

Which might be a great way to sell a trip to australia, but the article about the quokka is not what positions buying the trip.

Same with your product, finding the features, the what are the customer benefits. Now, what are the attention grabbers that hang off those stories? This is why it is important when you are spinning out content from articles and videos that are longer form, and creating the Instagram photos and tweets to find the shinny joke that catches the attention. Context and personalization and micro-targeting are important in this journey.

Software

Some software to manage this journey are

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