One Simple Idea That Leads to Successful Content Marketing: Be Human and Make a Connection
Unless you begin your marketing with legitimate concern for your customers and potential customers, you'll fail (or never do as well as you could).
What’s the most important thing companies get wrong about B2B marketing?
They forget that marketing is about making a connection with a person.
You don’t market to clicks or traffic or visitors – or another business.
You market to people.
Yes, yes; of course you want them to click – to subscribe, to comment, to buy. But first you need to think that every click is an opportunity to make a connection to a person.
And while your company may be selling to their company; the “company” doesn’t make a buying decision.
Susan from purchasing does. Or Chad from operations.
Your company isn’t selling to Susan or Chad either. Sam is; hopefully in full partnership with your marketing team.
Business is about people. Connect to people first; sales come second.
Marketing can help you make that connection, but only if you truly give a damn about your customers.
For a quick highlight of the main point, check out my Too Long; Didn’t Read video.
Humans Everywhere!
I’m using the word “human” intentionally, here and in the title.
Businesses talk about their customers, clients, and partners when talking about the people that buy things from them.
You talk about suppliers, partners, providers, and network when you’re talking about the people on whom you depend for the materials and support to stay in business.
Marketers often talk about eyeballs, traffic, click-through rates, and the dozens of other statistics that reveal how people are using your content.
We should stop.
Instead, we should think about Robert, Tammy, Dave, Rosa, Neville, Jeremy, and Staci – the people we work with.
The people we’re doing this FOR.
Permission and Attention
We don’t often see “permission marketing” as a phrase any longer even though the concept is foundational for successful content marketing strategies. And I love the phrase “permission marketing.” Every sign-up form is an opportunity for someone to give us permission to continue to talk to them with our content.
We’re asking for permission for their attention. A person’s attention. Time is our most precious commodity. We should respect our audience by only creating and sharing content that will be useful to them.
When someone shares their email address with you, they give you permission to talk to them. Treat that with the respect it deserves.
Years ago, I read, in succession, Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing (Godin is the godfather of content marketing) and an interview with him (see the quote below). The interview made me think about a disconnect between how people think of marketing and how that perspective will prevent your marketing from being successful.
You Can't Fake Caring
If you’re doing marketing as a checklist, stop wasting your money.
You can’t fake it. You need to authentically give a damn about your customers. That's one of the reasons I respect former client Robert Caldwell from Datamax Texas. His company focuses on creating Raving Fans©. When you add a copyright to a phrase that focuses on making a point of great customer service, you're serious about customer service.
I worked with Robert for about three years. He always focused on making sure we created content that worked for his customer. Sometimes he struggled with the sales side of the house, but marketing was absolutely customer focused.
On the other side of sales, I had the great good fortune to work with John Pulley. He’s a sales guy that gets it, During our time at Prospect Builder he wanted us to succeed, but he was also constantly pushing us to make sure his prospects were able to succeed too (for the record, that was everyone’s goal!).
Having worked with a series of “salespeople” who thought putting a menu in front of a client and asking them what they wanted was sales, working with Pulley was a refreshing change. It was instructive to watch someone actually sell by uncovering a potential clients’ needs rather than just shoving something in front of them and asking them to buy it.
How many of you have had some variation of the following conversation with a salesperson:
Me: Sales, if you were on the receiving end of this marketing approach you want to sell to support our product, would you respond to that as a customer or be turned off and no longer trust that company?
Sales: I’d ignore it. And probably the company unless I already trusted them.
Me: OK. Cool. Let’s think of a different approach then.
Sales: No, we need to sell it that way because that’s what our sponsor wants and that's just how I need to sell it.
Oy vey!
I wish I were kidding.
People respond to authenticity and make connections when they care. Fool them or break their trust and you lose Robert, Tammy, Dave, Jeremy, and the rest one by one.
Why This Matters With Content Marketing
Here’s where this intersects with content marketing and what content marketing agencies and consultants do. The entire interview is excellent (sadly, it’s no longer online: You Need Editors, Not Brand Managers, though Contently continues to produce good content marketing content). The question and Godin’s answer that really got me thinking is this one:
But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided?
Godin: Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.
I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.
The challenge that we have when we industrialize content is we are asking people who don’t care to work their way through a bunch of checklists to make a number go up, as opposed to being human beings connecting with other human beings.
Godin is still correct. I still love his answer.
You can see this urge to “industrialize” content in the endless stream of “AI will write your ANYTHING for you” crap pushed by the latest round of marketing snake oil salesfolks.
Yes, AI, specifically generative AI, can be a useful tool to assist the writing and editing process.
However, anyone who sells you AI-generated content as THE SOLUTION to your content marketing woes is clueless or a liar. Ignore them.
Churning out bland crap because someone said you have to write X number of pieces of content is a waste of energy, money, and attention.
It also does nothing to build trust.
One piece of advice I will share over and over (and over) again is this:
write for the people you want to attract.
That doesn’t mean ignore SEO – you should use SEO tactics to wrinkle out questions your customers and potential customers are asking, plus important keywords and phrases. Just remember that Google is an answer service. It does this through its search engine. Google rewards content that answers peoples’ – people, not search engines! – questions (this is a topic for future posts!).
But it’s scary to do the hard work required to create that trust – to embed that goal as the core of your business. It’s a lot easier to track stats, watch the numbers grow, and call it a success.
You have to do both.
When I was writing for Robert or Tammy or Monique, the goal in the back of my mind was to write something that’s going to be useful for THEIR Roberts and Tammys and Moniques.
This Is Scary As Hell!
I understand that this is scary for you.
I’d encourage you to think about who you do business with regularly – do you buy your car from the dealership that earned your trust, or do you go back to the one that you worry just shafted you on your last car purchase?
My guess is it’s the business that earned your trust. The business that was human and showed personality and made a connection with you. I didn’t buy a Ford Explorer from Apple Ford; I bought it from Steven (who looks a little like Steve Carrell). And I returned to Apple Ford because their mechanics had been upfront 18 months before about repairs to the Explorer I traded in.
It’s a funny thing we do when we go to work, especially sales and marketing people. Many times, we get into the office and get lost in the minutia of doing what we do without remembering why.
We focus on tactics and the goal of getting people to do what we want and risk missing that connection and losing trust.
I wrote about trust and marketing in a blog post, Always Be Human, a few years ago. IMO, it remains good advice.
A quick note, I DO believe in tracking and metrics. I also believe that there will be a progression of metrics that matter in every content marketing engagement – some will be basic, others will be more advanced. Without trust and connection though, I also believe that the metrics will never really matter because you’ll just be treading water as a company.
What’s the First Experience a Person Has With Your Company?
Your website is your storefront.
It’s often the first experience anyone has with your company.
Your website is content. It’s:
Landing pages
CTAs
Web pages
Ebooks and whitepapers
A blog perhaps
Videos
And so on and so forth
All of this content – these words – need to be focused on your customers and potential customers.
Knowing who these people are and what they need to know is the essence of content marketing.
You begin building trust from their first experience, in store or online. Think about how to make a connection with another human and you’ll be successful.
Thanks for reading!
All of these things are words. Someone has to plan what to write and then write.
Struggling to decide what words to share with your people? Say howdy and let’s see if it makes sense for us to work together. Contact me here or bryant@simplyusefulmarketing.co.
The image of the trees is by Psychoshadowmaker. For more of their work: https://www.123rf.com/portfolio/psychoshadowmaker/2.html