Stop selling. Eliminate the promotion from your content. Bear in mind that your audience can smell an ad a mile away.
Get out your red pen and cut out every buzz phrase. Be ruthless with your edits.
Take the Hemingway approach. Use simple words. Substitute short words and everyday language for the flowery prose you’ve created.
Use the active tense. You don’t need to go back to middle school. Write plain sentences with a subject, verb and object. Skip convoluted sentence structure.
68% of consumers trust customer opinions posted online according to Nielsen. While many marketers worry about ratings and reviews, they can help qualify your product.
9% of B2B buyers trust vendor content based on CMO Council research.
Share original research. This is high quality content, often done by a trusted third party. Don’t include questions that are skewed towards your product. Altimeter does a fantastic job of this on Slideshare.
Leverage the power of other people’s platforms. Create content for blogs and third party media sites. Also support other people’s content creation by providing quotes and examples. Help A Reporter Out is a great free resource to achieve this.
Answer customer questions. This is what Marcus Sheridan calls the secret sauce. Collect the questions your customers are asking and answer them. This has the benefit of saving resources since you’re not reinventing the wheel every time a prospect asks a question.
Show customers how to use your product. Put your product in context for prospects with mini-education. This can be done via a variety of content forms including blog posts, ebooks, and presentations.
Create visual content. Make your product the star. Not only is visual content consumed more quickly, it shows your product in action in a way that’s very specific.
Tags B2B, CMO Council, David Ogilvy, IDG, Nielsen, quotes, Research. Bookmark the permalink.
Great post! Stop selling is my favourite tip. As a content led digital marketing agency, this is the biggest problem we face. Getting our clients to understand the fact that content marketing isn’t primarily about selling product and it’s certainly not about putting out sales led information. You’re looking in the wrong place, you need an advertising agency if that’s what you want.
time. I’m going to share this with all of my clients and peers.
The one that bugs me the most is having too many buzzwords. I work in the real estate industry, and when I come across a real estate bio or company about page that’s riddled with “Top Producer” this and blah, blah, blah … It really has an adverse affect. I mean, it really sounds disingenuous. I’d rather connect with a real person, ya know .
“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.” I love that quote. We’re so inundated with impersonal advertisements that I feel the public has a fascination with companies or individuals who genuinely seem interested in their customers well being. The public can smell a sell from a mile away. That’s one reason why personal brands seem to be on such an increase. Maybe we feel better buying for someone rather than from something?
I would also add to do what you did at the beginning, share personal stories and examples so your audience can relate to what you and your message.
I cannot agree with you more Heidi. Content marketing is not about selling our products. Its about giving relevant information to our customers/readers. Sad to say only few writers are doing it the right way.
There’s this strange disconnect that if you post it online, you can make it spammy. You wouldn’t start a sales pitch by shouting at the prospect right or repeating certain key words. Why is content marketing any different? Hopefully, the backlash towards bad content marketing helps bubble the good content.
This is one of the reasons we launched ShareBloc (www.sharebloc.com): to increase signal to noise.
Great post Heidi. I think with marketing we can sometimes get so stuck in our industries that we forget the people we are targeting as our readers. This is a great reminder. A writer has to find that balance between speaking professionally, displaying their authority to write, and making the information digestible.