Interview Tips
They Ask, You Answer. A Content Marketing Best Practice That Deserves a Revisit
One of the most powerful and innovative works on content marketing is the book They Ask You Answer.
This is a fantastic guide for helping entrepreneurs and marketers adapt to the quickly changing digital world in which clients, customers and potential customers can see, at a glance, how much better off someone else is and encourage them to strive for the same success. While that’s great in concept, it is increasingly different to reach ever-loftier goals that have been expertly shaped to dominate the conversation and expectation on social media.
Customers need to be at the center of your business. You need to reach them where they are on a creative basis in order to help them understand their goals and then achieve them.
Fight Their Fears Up Front
Customers want their marketing team to innately know what their big-picture fears are, how to make them go away, and how to create the perfect solution so those fears are never realized. But they don’t want to talk about it. What they’re looking for is a marketing company who will tell them, on the company’s website, that all their fears are manageable and can be overcome; they need to look and the content available on your website and be comforted and convinced that your company is the one to help them navigate through troubled waters and stormy skies. Talk up your success, your innovative concepts and your track record of wins — because when you’ve helped other companies grow and expand and thrive, you can do that for a new company too.
This is one of the 10 core concepts in They Ask, You Answer and it’s really a combination of five different content topics that will be most impactful and helpful to users coming to your site without any prior knowledge of your company.
The Other Nine Core Concepts Include:
- Assignment selling: Use engaging, effective, interesting and educational content on your website to hold a customer’s interest as a sales tactic and technique without overtly “selling” anything but your company.
- In-house content management: Who can tell a better story about your company than the people who work there? This also makes it faster and easier to produce website content and it will be better aligned with your company’s needs and the ways in which you want to talk with, and introduce your company to, your customers.
- Revenue team: Have marketing and sales work more closely together! They’re different halves of the same brain, working toward the same goals; they should be more closely aligned for stronger and more effective communication internally and externally.
- Learning center: Effectively optimizing the way information is available and displayed on your website allows customers to find what they’re looking for more easily and with less frustrated searching. This means when you get questions, the potential customer will be looking for confirmation or will be ready to sign on.
- The Selling 7: There are certain types of video that are most effective at building customer relationships and associations with brands before first contact is made. Utilizing these videos on your website cuts through the static and awkward conversations that come with cold calls and questions from customers who don’t really know what your company is about.
- Virtual sales: The digital world is more than just social media and video conferences. Video should be your first introduction, point of contact and selling tool for new customers, with sufficient information provided in video format to help them feel confident that this is the firm for them.
- Self-service tools: Make it as simple and convenient as possible for your customers to do things for themselves while having easy access to chat and scheduling tools if they need assistance.
- Sales and marketing alignment: The more these two teams work together, the more they will naturally unify around their shared goals and strategies, all the while improving teamwork instead of a feeling of competition.
- Martech and CRM adoption: Take a data-driven approach to all business decisions, leaving emotion behind, along with the fallacy of “that’s how we’ve always done it, so that’s how we’re always going to do it.” If a technique has stopped working as effectively as it used to, based on the available data, it’s time for a fresh start.
Digital marketing is a brave new world that requires some old-school mentality combined with the latest and smartest technology. But at the heart, it’s about connecting with people, making them feel like they will be cared for and that you, or more specifically your company, can be trusted to steer them in the right direction. They Ask, You Answer is a new look at that time-honored concept.
Contact Method Recruiting Today
If you’re looking for more guidance on how to take your digital marketing to the next level and revive your business, call Method Recruiting. Our team of experts is glad to help you navigate this ever-changing landscape. Let Method Recruiting take care of the questions you want answered.
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