If you don’t have either a decent content creator on staff, or at least one (or more) on retainer, then you are going to have a problem in the next few years.
Successful companies invest in marketing, and marketing in today’s business means you need to create content that people love and find helpful. If you are driving sales messages down their throats, then your company is not going to around for long. The era of the hard sell is over. And the era of the relationship sell will only work these days if your company is seen as an expert. And what’s the fastest way to that? Publishing.
Great companies make great content today. They have websites that look more like a media website than a sales brochure, so here are 10 reasons why your company should invest in content creators:
1) Customers appreciate being educated and hate being sold to.
2) When you publish helpful content you are seen as an expert and people trust and buy from experts.
3) Google and Bing do not index and rank sales brochures particularly well. It indexes great content and people don’t link to sales brochures, they link to great content.
4) Send someone a great email with helpful content and they will look at the next email from you. Send them a self serving sales message ad and they will more often than not unsubscribe or click their spam button.
5) No one follows people for their ad messages on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, but they do follow them for great content.
6) Great content can contain sales copy. And great sales copy should contain great content.
7) 100 million Internet users watch video each day.
8) 90% of online shoppers at a major retailer’s website said they find video helpful in making shopping and buying decisions
9) 50% of people at work watch business-related videos on YouTube and 65% visit the marketer’s website after viewing a video.
10) B2C content should strike an emotional cord. B2B content should contain data and facts, because the two sectors buy differently.
