Lisa Gerber is the founder of Big Leap Creative, where she helps organizations and executives take their big leaps by communicating their ideas.
Create relevant content. Be awesome. Tell epic stories.
Terms like these get tossed around hilly nilly these days in the “content” marketing world.
What does it mean to be relevant and awesome and epic? And is it helping you achieve your business goals?
Departure Roulette: it’s epic, but does it sell beer?
Heineken launched Departure Roulette this month. They invited people at JFK airport to ditch their travel plans at the last minute and push the red button to fly where ever the board tells them to. If you haven’t seen the video, you might want to check it out.
I call that epic. It was inspiring and entertaining. But does it sell beer? That remains to be seen. Does it raise brand awareness? Sure.
More than likely, you want your content to do more than raise brand awareness, it has to drive business and tie back to your sales goals.
In this context, being relevant means being helpful. Jay Baer’s book Youtility is entirely based on this premise. Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman say “Solve, don’t shill” in Content Marketing Rules.
By gearing your content strategy around solving your customers’ and prospects’ obstacles, questions, and problems, you gain your ground on relevancy.
Let’s get more specific with four content types that drive leads.
1: Answer questions.
You are in business to solve a problem in the marketplace. Your audiences have different questions and issues at different stages of the sales funnel. They are turning to Google with those questions.
Create a matrix with your various buyer personas across the top and buying stages on the left. Brainstorm with the team from sales and marketing, to service and product development. Create an exhaustive list of all the issues and questions that arise. Each of those becomes content ideas.
2: Share customer stories.
How have you successfully solved others’ problems? Have you made their lives better in one way or another? Those make great stories and there are many ways to present them.
Conduct interviews, request video or written submissions and repurpose the stories on your owned assets or as part of your media and blogger outreach.
3: Address the tough topics.
Is there a perception or myth about your business or industry that exists which might be hurting your business? If a prospect is concerned about an issue – faulty brakes, unreliable service, more expensive than the competition; you can bet they are researching the issue. Rather than ignoring the issue, provide content on your site that directly addresses these topics and share your side of the story. When your prospect looks it up, they’ll come direct to you for the answers.
4: Conduct an industry study.
This is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader while providing helpful content to your audience. Conduct a survey about topic of interest in your industry and share the results in a white paper to current customers, prospects, and media.
Epic might be good for building brand awareness but being helpful and informative is going to pay the bills. What would you add to the list?
