“Marketers who embrace demand generation and lead nurturing programs must generate a lot of content to keep those programs running,” Ardath Albee notes in a recent post at the Marketing Interactions blog. But generating content for content’s sake alone never gets the job done, she adds. To be effective, lead-gen content must have a solid business reason behind it, she says.
“Regardless of the role (audience/segment) your content is designed to engage,” Albee explains, “it must lead with a business reason that resonates with your prospects and customers in order to get their attention.”
Lucky for us, Albee offers her insights into what a proper business reason really is. To be clear, she says, a business reason should:
- Have movement: increase, decrease, accelerate, grow.
- Add value: improve, simplify, drive, eliminate, connect.
- Integrate: merge, pull, push, combine.
- Align with objectives: match, parallel, cooperate.
To further clarify her point, Albee stresses what a business reason definitely is not:
- A sales offer
- Discounted pricing
- A free iPod, T-shirt or Starbucks gift card
- Your product or solution
- Something based on a request for information
“The next time you want to tell everyone about the great new feature your product development folks just rolled out, STOP,” she insists. Instead, try to:
Ask yourself what impact that feature delivers to your customers.
Find out how it delivered that impact.
Collect the evidence available to support your claims.
“Now, write your marketing content based on [that] business reason,” she concludes.
The Point: It really is all about them. To include a solid business reason in your outreach copy, always consider your product or service from your recipients’ point of view, and write accordingly.