Are you asking yourself, WTH is he talking about with that headline?
Well today’s post is all about making a point that in my not so humble opinion needs making – success today is more about conversations than content. This post is an effort to provide a bit of context so that you can evaluate the advice you’re reading and hearing on the social webs.
The World Doesn’t Need More Content Marketing
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Digital marketing tools make it so easy to publish anything, anytime, anywhere and for next to nothing. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
The world doesn’t need more keyword rich, epic, newsjacked, trend-jacked, whatever-jacked content designed to win the war with Google and gain more eyeballs on your website by winning the SEO battle.
The world DOES need more conversations. Because today’s world is moving so fast your customer is being asked to do more with less. That means your customer has less time to make the right buying decision and thanks to the Internet, has infinitely more options to consider. So rather than making the customer’s job easier — the Internet is actually making buying harder. Your sales prospect can find a tsunami of potential answers, but in fact, all of that content tends to just cause more questions.
Why?
Because most of today’s content marketing isn’t designed to provide an answer. It’s designed to generate a lead. And a lead, to most sales people is a person that has to reach out to you in order to get an answer.
Start Being Helpful.
I get it. You’ve been told to be awesome. To create epic content. Because if you do that your content will go viral and you’ll crush it. Who doesn’t want to go viral and crush it? But outside of ensuring you a spot on page one of Google, all that awesome content doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales.
Sure you may get a lot of eyeballs… you may even get a lot of lead forms filled out — though, admit it, most will be ttt@ttt.com because the sales prospect really doesn’t want to be a lead. They just want some free information or an answer to their question. At this point, they prefer to remain an invisible sale. They haven’t yet decided if you’ve earned the right to have a conversation.
If you want to fix that… it’s a pretty simple mindset shift.
Awesome gets shared but helpful gets bought.
So just be helpful.
It’s a heck of a lot easier and you’re far more likely to succeed.
Just ask yourself what your prospective customer needs to know in order to make the best buying decision – even if that decision isn’t buying your product. Then give them the information. That’s right… educate them. Because make no mistake, they are going to self-educate. The only question you need to ask yourself is would you rather that self-education happen on someone else’s site where the prospective buyer will remain invisible or would you rather it happen on your site where you can track the prospect and collect buying signals that you and your sales & marketing teams can use to grow market share and shrink sales cycles?
Helpfully Epic Content
The best thing is that you don’t have to look very far to find examples of helpfully epic content. Here are just a few to get you started:
Every day client side marketers need to justify their investments in social media, content marketing and social selling efforts. They struggle to effectively make the argument to their CEO and CFO’s.
Enter posts like “How Long Before a Social Media Campaign Shows Results” where we shared proprietary data that answered a common question we were hearing from clients and prospects.
This may not seem like epic content to you, but if a Brand Manager can use this post as an outline for a discussion with their CEO or CFO and at least get their boss to relieve them (brand manager) from the weight of proving ROI immediately for investments in social selling and content marketing tactics… that is a HUGE benefit to them. And I’m betting it predisposes them to think of Converse Digital the next time they plan a content marketing effort.
Twitter chats used to be an incredible help asset. While not as popular or numerous as the used to be, they’re still an incredible help tool. Wondering what is a Twitter Chat and how do I get involved in one – just click here. Once you learn how to play along, you can start participating, or you might decide you want to take the next step and host a tweet chat for your brand.
Enter Mack Collier, author of Think Like A Rockstar and host of the incredibly popular #BlogChat. Mack’s a helpful guy so I’ll give him a pass on the headline of his very helpfully epic post Your Brand’s Guide to Creating an Amazing Twitter Chat, where he gives a brand manager a step-by-step guide to recreating his success for their brand.
And lastly, any inbound marketer worth their salt is interested (or should be) in how to apply A/B split testing to their blog, website and landing pages to create more sales conversions. Enter Joanna Wiebe’s super helpful (read Epic) post 6 Proven Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Call-to-Action Buttons (guest post on Copyblogger) that is seriously one of the most detailed, helpful and educational A/B split testing posts I’ve read.
Epic Content is Like Porn
You can’t always describe it — but you damn sure know it when you see it.
So don’t get caught up in creating content that others define as epic — i.e., goes viral, gets lots of likes, shares, tweets and retweets. Focus on creating content that your customers and prospects will consider epic — content that is so friggin helpful that, as my friend Jay Baer says, your prospective customer would pay for it.
Because when they’re ready to pay for it, they’re ready for a conversation. A real one. A conversation that turns into a customer. And that, after all, is kind of the goal right?
photo by marcberryreid
To play devil’s advocate, how do you define ‘helpful’? That’s no different than defining ‘epic’ or ‘awesome’ in my mind.
The reality is, if we come to someone that’s new to social media and tell them ‘don’t worry about creating epic content, just create helpful content’ they are likely still going to be confused. This is where I don’t agree with you on ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’. That’s exactly what it means. We learn by doing. I started blogging in 2005 because I could. I read a whole lotta blog posts from a whole lotta experts that told me how I SHOULD blog.
But I learned far more through my own trial and error than I did from those ‘experts’. Does the world need more crappy content? Nope, but what the world does need more of is people that are trying to take that crappy content and make it into something better. That only happens by trial and error and doing the work.
Ok Devil,
First Epic vs Helpful. Agree both have a degree of subjectivity to them but Epic is both a far greater range of subjectivity and far more difficult to achieve. Epic means something that is grand.
Helpful on the other hand is subjective only in terms of current knowledge. If you write a blog post about doing tweet chats and I’m already well versed, then I’d agree that to me, the post isn’t helpful. But that doesn’t make the post inherently not helpful.
Thus, to me helpful is fairly straightforward in terms of what is or isn’t helpful.
Now to your point of learning by doing — can’t argue with that point… but my statement — just because you can doesn’t mean you should — was more to the intent vs the action.
Too many are just publishing to publish — and I guess that is more where I was going with the statement.
Thanks for chiming in Mack… always nice to see you make our posts better.
I am of two minds about this. 1) I think experienced marketers can and should do better. Content can do more than help. Helping is the minimum that’s required. More is possible—inspiration, action, or even consideration of a differing viewpoint. 2) Too many people are publishing crap on the web. But in this overabundance of content, we hone our filters, trust our social contacts to curate the best stuff, and overall gain access to a variety of perspectives, so the “come one, come all” nature of content marketing today is, in my view, a net gain for consumers. Finally, I think we can all agree that Mack is an epically helpful guy. I <3 him. Incidentally, Tom is pretty fantastic, also. But saying that doesn't help anyone, except Mack and Tom, so I guess my comment is an epic fail. 😉
Kerry
Fair points all around – but even in the curation arena I find that the quest to produce more leads so many to simply share vs curate.
So many times I’ve clicked on a link from folks I know well and who I know can differentiate between good, helpful content and linkbait only to find the latter.
That’s happened to me, too. I just figure they’re in a hurry. 😉
Hmm… I see that our “great” minds are thinking alike right now. (Though maybe calling myself ‘great’ is a selfie of the brain.)
Can we ban the word EPIC from the content conversation? I agree with Mack that the conversation we’re having is largely about semantics; but it’s overlaid by too many people who are far more focused on being EPIC and cool than on the quality of their content. The problem is that the activities of many “epic” marketers are rooted more in keywords and driving traffic than in what the end user needs — stuff that’s useful. It doesn’t have to be sexy; it has to be effective in furthering your business goals.
Well said ma’am… figures you’d do in a simple comment what took me a whole post and then I still didn’t nail it 😉
Love that folks are encouraged to create epic, just think it’s important that they don’t feel like a failure when they’re content isn’t judged epic by the masses.
There’s “Notice ME!!” epic-ness – that’s typically noise. Then there’s “Let me help you” epic-ness – that’s valuable.
Completely agree my friend… completely.
I think we all make this mistake at one point. We get so focus on wanting our content to be epic and shared that we forget that the most important part is for our readers to appreciate it’s value and take them one step forward, towords buying.
Alexandra,
You’re probably right… we all want to be acknowledged and shares and likes is a simple, immediate benchmark… so we look to that as opposed to the longer term KPI – sales.
Thanks for stopping by — don’t be a stranger.