Flip Your Marketing Focus
Marketing content is no longer relevant if it’s focused on what companies want their
customers to know about them. The only thing that matters is to provide information that your prospects and customers care about—content that addresses what matters most to them. The ability to do this well requires a flip in focus from our companies to the people we serve. Marketing content needs to focus on what prospects are buying instead of what companies think they’re selling.
Without a change in perspective, marketers will find increased difficulty in:
Generating inbound interest that attracts prospects to seek out their companies.
Creating two-way dialogues with multi-touch points that increase engagement.
Separating the wheat from the chaff to prioritize high quality, sales-ready leads.
Building pipeline momentum that moves prospects toward making a purchase decision.
The reason that flipping your marketing focus is so important to achieving the above is that the entire evaluation process has shifted. Buyers are now using the information they find online to qualify the vendors they choose to buy from. And, they’re doing so with much higher scrutiny and attention to detail than marketers are using to qualify them.
With today’s marketing increasingly turning to online avenues for execution, the challenge marketers must overcome is the urge for prospects to click the back button to move on in search of information they find more relevant. According to the Marketing Experiments report, Clarity Trumps Persuasion, your content must answer at least the first two of these three simple questions within the first seven seconds of a prospect’s arrival to the Web page.
Where am I?
What can I do here?
Why should I do it?
Whenever a prospect clicks on a link, the first thing they need is to orient themselves about where they are and why they should stay. If your content doesn’t clearly establish that relevance for the prospect, they will leave. If their perception about the effort it takes to answer those questions is too high, the back button is only a click away. Prospects are busy. Their responsibilities are many and their time is a precious resource they must optimize.
The Marketing Experiments report discusses landing pages, but their findings apply to any and all content including your Website, articles, blog posts, email messaging, Webinars, white papers, videos and more. As the report states, “the chief enemy of forward momentum is confusion.”