The secret to fully leveraging the holy trinity of modern-day, digitally centric sales prospecting programs — Marketing Automation, Content Marketing and Social Selling — is creating CRAP.
Concise
Concise doesn't mean short. Concise means every word on the page, video script, audio track, lead magnet or sales presentation deck has a reason for being — a role. You've probably heard the joke that today, the human attention span is now less than a goldfish. Personally, we think that's BS. If you ever hear it, you should smack whoever says it, because it's not true. If it was true, we would no longer have movies, books, and absolutely nobody would binge-watch an entire episode or a series on Netflix. We wouldn't even have music because the average song is about three minutes long, right? So to say that the human being, the human mind cannot focus its attention for more than nine seconds is just stupid. But, it sounds great in a keynote presentation, but it's just not true. But what is true, is that we as human beings don't have enough TIME focus our attention on everything. So we ruthlessly edit our world to separate the important signal from the irrelevant noise that surrounds us.
Relevant
Relevant means, well, RELEVANT. Don't ask your prospective client or customer to project your fancy case study results to their industry. Don't ask them to apply the tips and techniques in your white paper to their specific problem. In short, don't make your sales prospect work any harder than absolutely necessary — ideally, don't make them work at all. If that means you rewrite the same white paper ten different times to create perfect versions for each of the ten industries or verticals you sell to, then do it. Don't ask your prospective customer to do the work — that's what you want them to hire YOU to do.
And
Persausive
Your content is doing the early stage selling, so it has to persuade. For many companies, the future is cold calling with content. With over 70% of prospective buyers admitting they're self-educating and even going so far as to create their shortlists of potential sellers without ever speaking to anyone, your content absolutely must persuade them to make you one of those contacts. Failure to create truly compelling content will cost companies sales opportunities in today's digitally centric selling environment.