"Marketers who embrace demand generation and lead nurturing programs must generate a lot of content to keep those programs running," Ardath Albee notes in a recent post at the Marketing Interactions blog. But generating content for content's sake alone never gets the job done, she adds. To be effective, lead-gen content must have a solid business reason behind it, she says.
"Regardless of the role (audience/segment) your content is designed to engage," Albee explains, "it must lead with a business reason that resonates with your prospects and customers in order to get their attention."
Lucky for us, Albee offers her insights into what a proper business reason really is. To be clear, she says, a business reason should:
- Have movement: increase, decrease, accelerate, grow.
- Add value: improve, simplify, drive, eliminate, connect.
- Integrate: merge, pull, push, combine.
- Align with objectives: match, parallel, cooperate.
To further clarify her point, Albee stresses what a business reason definitely is not:
- A sales offer
- Discounted pricing
- A free iPod, T-shirt or Starbucks gift card
- Your product or solution
- Something based on a request for information
"The next time you want to tell everyone about the great new feature your product development folks just rolled out, STOP," she insists. Instead, try to:
- Ask yourself what impact that feature delivers to your customers.
- Find out how it delivered that impact.
- Collect the evidence available to support your claims.
"Now, write your marketing content based on [that] business reason," she concludes.
The Po!nt: It really is all about them. To include a solid business reason in your outreach copy, always consider your product or service from your recipients' point of view, and write accordingly.
Source: Marketing Interactions. Read the full post.
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by Christina "CK" Kerley
