What Comes First, Product Development or Content Marketing?
Robert Wynne once said, “The goals of Content Marketing are to: Build relationships with existing clients, attract new customers, demonstrate benefits, tell interesting stories about your brand, appear in search engines and increase web traffic.”
This reference may not be described with minute accuracy, but the sum and substance of it is correct. The scary truth to why content marketing fails isn't necessarily because of a bad strategy, it might just be your products.
What's Wrong With My Products?
There might not be anything wrong with your products or the services you offer, but have you ever taken a step back to evaluate if they still appeal to your buyer personas? Placing a constant focus on the intangible aspects of your strategy can lead to forgetting about the also important tangible aspects of your buisness. The turning point of those who succeed usually comes the moment they open their eyes to this concept! You should ALWAYS be evaluating just how good your products are or how your services benefit your current target market and your future target market.
If your marketing department is not evaluating your products or services before developing a content marketing plan, you should be questioning their strategy. Your marketing team needs to fully grasp the competitive value and differentiators of your offering in order to fully understand if those competitive advantages and value actually align with your target audiences' needs, wants and desires. When you understand your buyers' current and future preferences and how your products satisfy them, creating a successful content marketing strategy is easy (well, easier!).
So, as a fitting climax to this post, here are 3 areas to start working on TODAY before developing a content marketing strategy tomorrow:
1. Good Products
When planning to acquire your lion share of website traffic, leads, customers (whatever your intended goals may be), first acknowledge that none of these are born out of indifference, complacency or "good-enough" state of mind. You need to constantly be innovating! Sometimes products fail, and marketing often takes the fall for not effectively promoting, but sometimes, a product just isn't good enough. Make sure your products and services are WAY better than good-enough.
Our advice: Heavily integrate your marketing department into the product development process. By having your marketing department take a more sophisticated approach to evaluating new products, they can provide an accurate opinion with great emphasis on how it willl appeal to consumers.
2. Great Customer Service
This is where content marketing can really earn its “subscribe” stripes. Take a long hard look at what your business is doing internally. How well are you using content to create value? Are you reinforcing the customer’s decision after the sale?
This goes way beyond the FAQs on your website. If you’ve seen other ways your product or service has delivered extended or unique solutions, let your customers know! They’ll be more than interested in knowing how they can get the most out of what they purchased and will likely become promoters of your brand if you leave them exceedingly satisfied. So, engage, engage and engage again!!
3. Easy-To-Navigate Website
Ideally, your products are perfect and your customer service is award winning, right? (Don't worry if you're not there yet, the best businesses are constantly improving!). Now, you have to consider the critical importance of your website. Although your site is essential for generating qualified leads, it’s also undeniably important for the success of any content marketing strategy. Whether you’ve had your website for one year, three years or a decade, I’m sure at some point you've been told you need an easy-to-navigate website. But here's where that gets tricky:
When you're involved in building the website or look at ALL THE TIME, you begin to glaze over any flaws (even obvious ones). So instead, put yourself in the shoes of a first-time visitor. People coming to your website for the first time are notoriously short on patience. To ensure you don’t drive visitors away, make your navigational bars accessible and consistent, and maintain the same location, style, font and color to assist them in easily determining the best next place to go/click to accomplish the purpose of their visit. It’s a website, not an Easter egg hunt!
So, again, why does this matter?
In order to market well; a good product, great customer service and an easy-to-navigate website are all essential to your success. No matter how many difficulties you've had in the past, maintain focus on these three things. Content marketing is not a magic elixir, and it certainly will not cover up the fact that your product or service is sub-par, lame or misaligned with your buyers' needs. By exploring the link between what your marketing department is capable of and your overall success at product development, you will soon begin to reap the benefits of your content marketing efforts.
If you're unsure whether or not your website is "easy-to-navigate", we can help you evaluate your site and give you ideas on making it as user-friendly as possible.
