Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen (eBook)

02:
Connect With Your Audience

In all my research, the greatest leaders looked inward and were able to tell a good story with authenticity and passion.

Deepak Chopra, Author

I’m going to cover three important topics in this chapter: authenticity, emotional connection, and branding. Companies that overlook any of them seldom succeed in the quest for effective content marketing. Customers find such companies confusing, inconsistent, disingenuous, and difficult to trust, which means they prefer to take their business elsewhere.

The first, authenticity, is about self-awareness and integrity. Consistently producing authentic content is difficult but it is essential if you are to earn the trust of your audience, a prerequisite for earning their business.

Emotional connection is established by consistently associating your business, brand, and content with a purpose, mission, vision, and value proposition that attract and engage your target audience. These are the corporate foundations to which you should anchor your content marketing strategy. We will discuss the why, who, what, when, and how of your business and the significance of capturing them in statements of purpose, mission, vision, and differentiation. This requires spending time with your CEO to make sure the statements are clear, concise, and understood throughout your organization.

The ways in which your content is presented will also trigger emotional responses in your audience. Visual brand elements and your brand’s personality must work consistently and in harmony if you are to harness the full benefit of the emotional connection you’ve established.

Authenticity

Authenticity is the practice of being undisputedly genuine. It leaves no doubt that the information a buyer reads, hears, or sees depicted in a video comes from your company and is an accurate representation of who you are, what you do, and why.

Authentic content gives substance to your business, building its identity into something influential and elevating it above the competition. People can more easily relate to you and your business. Authentic communication makes it easier for prospects to understand how what you offer is of benefit to them.

Most importantly, authentic businesses engender trust. This matters because, at the end of the day, B2B transactions are really B2H (business-to-human). One or more humans will ultimately make the decision whether to buy from you or not.

However, authenticity is a fuzzy concept that means different things to different people. It’s practically impossible to measure, except in customer feedback. However good your intentions, the measure of authenticity lies entirely in how your content is perceived by the audience.

Being authentic requires establishing a human connection. Attributes that buyers associate with authentic content include realness, respectfulness, and reliability. Anything that looks fake, applies a heavy filter to make things seem better than reality, wastes your customer’s time, fails to address their needs, or turns out to be unreliable could be damaging to your brand reputation.

We often find authenticity in organic and customer-created content. Organic content is posted for free, rather than as part of a paid campaign, so its visibility depends on it being found helpful and consequently worth sharing. Customer-created content often provides unfiltered validation of the business or product about which it is written. Contrast both with the picture-perfect ads and unsubstantiated claims that companies are prone to publishing. Which would you rather read?

Prioritizing authenticity is the most important element running throughout this book. Without it, none of the other great things you’re going to learn and implement will matter.

I realize this can be challenging, especially when, for example, your business sells un-sexy widgets to heavy industry. Regardless of your product or sector, here are some ways your marketing team can produce content that customers will find authentic:

1. Personalize the content: Personalization done right can go a long way toward building trust. We will talk in depth in the chapters ahead about your customer’s needs and how you can tailor your content accordingly. You should take full advantage of modern customer relationship management (CRM) software to introduce appropriate personalization.
2. Share real customer stories: User-generated content, such as online reviews, social media posts, and video testimonials, is powerful stuff. But don’t be tempted to fake it; buyers are highly adept at spotting manufactured content. Remember that realness matters, so you must publish the good, the bad, and the ugly. Being open to all types of feedback reinforces your honesty and transparency and showcases a customer experience that’s real and relatable.
3. Showcase meaningful impact: Content that explains how your products deliver an impact beyond saving the customer money or making them look cool is both engaging and authentic. If you can legitimately claim to improve the buyer’s wellbeing or enhance their company’s social or environmental impact, make that the focus of your content, ahead of any financial and performance benefits.
4. Show that you and your fellow leaders are human: An authentic brand is inextricably linked with authentic leadership. Everyone at the top of your organization, beginning with you and your CEO, must be visible and demonstrably human. This means connecting with your customers using channels like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can be seen “walking the talk” and demonstrating care for the company’s purpose, its impact, and its employees.
5. Screen everything your company publishes for authenticity: Before anything reaches your website, blog, social media channels, video library, sales collateral, or any other channel, you must ensure it is authentic. The more extensive your content marketing strategy becomes, the harder this will be and yet, the more critical. If it doesn’t read or sound genuine, don’t publish it!

Recommended Actions

Make a list of B2B brands that strike you as especially authentic.

Capture what is it about them that you find convincing.

How do they achieve that level of authenticity in their marketing communications?

If someone you’ve never met was answering the same questions about your company, how would you want them to describe it?

Emotional Anchors

Anchoring refers to tying your company’s key messages back to sound business foundations. In the same way that you wouldn’t construct a building without first pouring some concrete or driving in some piles, your company’s content needs the solid base of anchoring on which to stand.

There are four foundations that you must help your leadership team create, upon which you will then build successful content marketing:

• Purpose: Why is the company is in business? As Simon Sinek put it: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” A clearly articulated purpose provides a guiding light to employees, fellow leaders, investors, and customers as they make decisions about joining or leaving your company throughout its journey.
• Mission: Who does your company serve and how does it create value for them? Unlike your company’s purpose, its mission can be completed and should evolve over time. It should give customers a clear idea of what they will get if they do business with your company and help keep team members aligned and on task. When tough decisions must be made, the concept of mission critical identifies which things are essential to business operation or success and which can be deferred without near-term regret.
• Vision: How will the world look in the future when your company successfully pursues its mission? The company’s vision is a primary motivator, empowering team members to set goals and take actions to move the business forwards. It helps them visualize what success will look like, which is important when the going gets tough. Effective vision statements paint a clear picture, illustrate a change, are grounded in values, describe a pathway from here to there, and include a challenge that must be overcome.2
• Differentiation: How are the solutions provided by your company distinct from those of its competitors? To motivate potential customers to choose you over your competitors—one of which is their status quo—you need to show them how you offer superior value. Harvard Business School professor and renowned management consultant, Geno Wickman, talks about a company’s “three uniques.” These are three things that you believe your business offers that the others don’t. For your company to be successful, a given competitor can have one or two of the things you list as “uniques” but never all three. Sustaining more than three or four points of differentiation in any established industrial sector will be extremely difficult.

While marketing doesn’t own these statements—they are the CEO’s responsibility—your role and effectiveness depend on them more than anyone else in...