At the essence of content marketing, it is important to understand that your customers want to find what they’re looking for and quickly. Therefore, to create content that converts, we need to get rid of anything that doesn’t get customers straight to what they want. We need to build a reputation of doing this, so that our customers will trust that we will deliver on our promises, every time.
We are all in the business of building customer trust. Honest and transparent digital content is the greatest sales and trust-building tool in the world. Period. Here’s how to create communication strategies that builds trust and drive sales.
Content that brings trust and traffic
By the time our potential customers get to the moment of truth, the point at which they reach out to contact you, 70% of their purchase decision have already been made. It is therefore absolutely paramount that you provide a range of informative and useful information to your customers that they can easily access. This builds traffic and establises a level of trust with you, ready for when they reach the final stages of their buying journey.
The content that converts will build traffic and trust is that which answers the questions that potential customers have when getting ready to buy.
This can include open and honest conversations about the differences between yours and competiting products or services, the issues and challenges your product or services solves, pricing questions and any other key content that comes from answering your customers primary concerns.
Take the time to know your customers and their concerns, so that when they ask, you answer. You then turn this into content on your website so that you can answer the questions of you potential customers before they have asked you. By doing this, you are already providing solutions and problem solving for them – even before you start doing business.
No more fluff
Customer trust is quickly erroded if you repeatedly send them ‘fluff digital content’ meaning content which has limited value in meeting their core needs. If you do this too often, you are likely to loose their trust and potentially, their custom. As a business, it is important to have a strong, company wide commitment to only creating content of value for your customers that in turn, is content that will positively impact sales.
To be truly successful, an internal understanding that your greatest sales tool is the content that you are creating, needs to be reached. Management and sales team buy-in is critical to the success of your content strategy. Look at further increasing the internal ownership of your marketing communications by in-sourcing the creation of content.
Be the experts and provide expert information about the space in which you operate. By providing valuable and informative content for your customers, you inderectly drive them towards sales through building trurst and traffic.
Talk about price – sales transperancy
As primarliy a service provider I have found it dissuclt to ‘productize’ my services and set fixed fees. My challenge in this is that every customer is different, their business needs and communication requirements are all unique. How could I possible apply a one size fits all approach?
However, last year I had the absolute pleasure of listening to the Sales Lion, Marcus Sheridan talk about the critical importance of including prices on your website. As he spoke, I felt myself shrinking a little lower into my seat! He explained in a very logical and compelling fashion 2 key reasons why this should and can be done:
- Internet search capacity now means that your potential customers are more informed than ever. If your website doesn’t contain the information they are looking for to aid their decision making process, of which price is often a key factor, they will move on to the next option. End of story. You have therefore lost the opportunity to potentially capture their business before you even had the chance to interact with them.
- The service you provide has a cost. You have the information within your business to determine an average cost for the base range of services that you provide. If a particular customer requires more tailored service, you can discuss this but you must set a base fee to provide price indication.
Going through this process for me has had huge benefits, not only in making it easier for my potential customers to understand what I do and how much it costs, but also internally as a way to manage my business and resource scheduling.
Tip from Marcus: Write an article about “How much does a (insert your product or service here) cost” use the areticle to explain that the end price dependson various factors. Explain the variations and why they impact end price. This article becomes part of the honest and transparent content that you are providing your customers. It builds trust and understanding.
A commitment to transperancy, honesty and providing value through your content marketing goes a long way to driving the success of your business. It will allow you to make digital content that connects.
If you would like to know more bout how we can help build you content that drives sales through building both trust and traffic, I’d love to hear from you! I can be emailed directlly via amelia@narrativemarketing.com.au
