Making a content marketing plan that does not create leads and sales for you is pointless. The sad fact is, most content marketing strategies fail because content marketers have been given bad information about “what works.”
First of all, let us get this straight: good stories don’t cause sales. Engagement does not either. High levels of confidence in buyers (by creating compelling blogs, videos, white papers, downloads, etc.) and clear, compelling calls to action do.
If you want more sales to result from whatever you’re publishing make sure you are causing customers to become confident in themselves (as buyers). If you do this well enough, prospects will ask you for the sale.
Here are simple guidelines to ensure your digital content always creates leads and sales by super-charging buyers’ confidence in their abilities.
Sell Your Experience
Most service providers find themselves in this exact situation: Selling an experience. Unlike selling a product (a near-term result), most service marketers sell a longer-term promise, and this is the one that you want to pursue. Sell your expertise. Give your buyers useful advice. Research proves that people give higher appreciation when you add more useful value to a product rather than selling them as it is.
Create Confidence, Not Just Stories
There is a handful of ways you can approach effective content marketing plans (that create sales). The two most effective strategies are solving common problems (that customers have) and giving away mini-samples of experiences that relate to your product or service. This is the best content for blogs or any content marketing you publish. The most effective, practical way to generate sales with blogs, videos, download-able applications, etc. is to find ways to give confidence to buyers in ways that increase their ability to feel emotionally grounded and intellectually stronger.
Response matters more than just a reaction (where customers share your content).
Create Response, Not Just Branding
Buyers usually have questions and are seeking guidance before they buy. They’re yearning for a sample that gives them a reason to believe (become confident) that whatever it is they want can actually happen for them, on time, on budget, without making a mess of the place or getting them fired. They want to be confident. They want to believe that the sellers (or you) can make that something that they want actually happen for them.
Thus, your content should spend some time telling a good story and always give customers a reason to believe that it can happen for them, something that they can act on. That’s the part most people are missing.
Whether you’re a B2C or B2B marketer, there is power in making the buyer feel like “yeah, I can have this in my life… I can have this situation go in a direction that gives me a promotion or won’t get me fired!” or “I can get to that goal I want and get some help doing it the right way, on time and it without emptying my bank account.” Yet without that call to action, you’ll leave your customer hanging every time.
Trust is the Outcome of a Process
The biggest problem of today’s content marketing experts is that in the end, they claim it’s all about a good story. It’s not. You can tell the most honest, interesting, moving story possible and never get the customer to pick up the phone, send an email, make an appointment with you, click to fill out a lead form, and take an action. And that’s just a waste of a good story. You’ve got to focus on the direct response marketing process piece.
The secret sauce is actually not a secret. Making social media sell for you is mostly about getting back to basics. Being known, liked and trusted enough to earn the investment of fickle customers’ demands to give them confidence in themselves, then giving them something to act on—not just telling a good story.