I (and probably you) have read
- article
- after blog post
- after ebook
- after whitepaper
- after listicle
about improving your B2B content marketing. Coming up with fresh ideas. Getting better results. Standing out from the competition.
Truth be told, I hate most these articles. Because 90% of them fail to mention the most fundamental and foundational way to accomplish all those goals.
Here is the One True Ring, the key to credible and authoritative content, the North Star:
Talk to your customers.
Customers tell stories; personas don’t.
Customers offer details, insights, and real-world grit that your marketing messages and campaign slogans won’t.
Customers can explain the correlations and causations that surveys and research studies don’t uncover.
And customers believe each other more than they believe marketers.
In many big companies, a lot of the marketers rarely or never sit down and have a conversation with a customer. And if you think about that just briefly, you’ll realize it’s ridiculous. Incredible.
If you talk to your customers, you’ll never run out of blog post ideas and you’ll write in their language, not yours.
So talk to your customers!
In my next post I’ll give a wonderful example.
Photo by Juri Gianfrancesco on Unsplash