All day.
Every day.
It gets tiresome.
Especially this time of year.
Email solicitations.
Sponsored Facebook posts.
Interstitial ads that you have to sit through before getting to where you wanted to go.
Commercial breaks on TV and Radio that include five advertisers in one pod.
Direct mailers stuffing your mailbox.
Pop up ads at the bottom of that FREE phone App.
It's hard not to shut off and stop listening to the noise.
Which is what most of us do.
According to McKinsey until some trigger sets us off on the path to purchase we are pretty much not paying attention to anything.
Which is the big challenge for marketing in the digital age. To create that trigger so we start paying attention.
Content marketing is today's first pick to set the customer journey in motion. As Jay Baer, author of Youtility Marketing says "Content is the fire. Social media is the gasoline." That's how today's word of mouth referrals work.
But you need to be careful.
Content is not a sales pitch.
Yes, a call to action at the end of a blog post is a good idea. But a call to action is not necessarily a sales pitch. It could be something as simple as asking people who like what you wrote to share it.
The danger occurs when every blog post starts out as good, useful, perhaps even thought provoking content and quickly turns into a pitch to get you sign up for something that costs money.
The result - your message as an authority gets diluted.
The one we get is that what is most important to you is making money. Your message is merely the vehicle.
I will never dispute that making money is important. It is after all, the end game to all this marketing.
But when everything sounds like a sales pitch it's not content marketing.
It feels pushy.
It gets annoying.
It sounds inauthentic.
It creates distrust.
It's so last century.
It's not even a very good sales pitch.
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