04 Jul 2017

Scraps&Straws #5 Content with your content?

5 Problems with your Content Marketing – All with C!

Talk about digital marketing and the word content flies around like a bee buzzed on beer. Everyone agrees that content is king and that SEO and SEM are the ones that will get the clicks and the conversions. But is that true? What If you’ve got all the right buzzwords in place, and tagged the right hashes. And yet you don’t seem to be attracting enough people or enough of the right people. What could be wrong with your content marketing?

Here’s a five-part series on what could possibly be wrong with your content marketing. Strangely the five problems identified start with C! Here’s problem #1: Content.

Problem #1: Content

For most marketers, content marketing is putting the information you want people to know out there. The trouble is that that is what the marketers want. That is unfortunately not what the people want to know. Here’s what Theodore Levitt says in Marketing Myopia:

The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.

Which essentially means that you need to take cognisance of the fact that your content is about marketing and NOT selling. Bringing us back to the basics – keep the customer in mind. In the very same vein Theodore Levitt says

“People don’t want to buy quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes”

Written as far back as in 1960 in an article called Marketing Myopia, the essence of this much-quoted statement is that it makes sense to look at what the customer needs rather than trying to see what you think they want.

Same with content. Is your content revolving around what you want to sell? Or is it offering an insight into what will help a customer solve a problem. Not all content need to lead to a sale or a product or even a deliberate swipe at the customer’s wallet. It could be just offering a newer better way of looking at the problem or a smarter way of doing something. Some of the best content is good because it is not selling, it is, in effect, helping the customer solve a problem. This in turn has the readers coming back for more, establishing a relationship based on trust.

Solve a problem for the customer and you solve one of your own problems: that of creating great content that builds a customer relationship. And that’s how you can be content with your content.

Watch this space for the next problem on Content Marketing! (HINT: Starts with C).