It’s all about telling a compelling story when it comes to content marketing. But many businesses get the story wrong for their company – the story they tell makes their business the center of attention.
The true focus in your brand’s story is your customer. You are the guide.
Spire practices this storytelling approach with organizations on a daily basis. Everything we create for our customers is driven by their customer and his or her problems. By understanding who your customer is and what their needs are, you position your organization as the guide your customer needs to solve their problems.
But how do you establish a relationship that will ensure your customer will turn to you as their guide and not some competitor? What is it about you that makes you a reliable guide?
When it comes to this approach in the marketing world, we’ve found a new friend in John Hall, the CEO of Influence & Co., and author of the book, Top of Mind: Use Content to Unleash Your Influence and Engage Those Who Matter to You.
Hall’s book leads the reader through the ways your consumer is changing, what they’re looking for from the brands they trust, being transparent and likeable, the importance of consistency and familiarity, and more.
He also gets into the nitty gritty of marketing funnel building, too, but it’s his 40,000 foot view of relational content marketing that really gets me excited.
The foundation for any solid relationship, in marketing and in life, is trust. If your customer can’t trust you as their guide, they aren’t going to buy from/hire/work with you. Your content marketing isn’t just about putting your brand out there all the time (quantity of exposure), it also has to be about what you’re saying and doing to create trust (quality of content).
You build trust with your customer by establishing key touch points that will keep your brand top of mind (hence the title). In his book, Hall outlines these touch points as important ways to establish credibility and build trust with your audience:
- Authenticity: “You cannot trust what you don’t believe to be real.”
- Helping Others: “It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to help yourself is to help others.”
- Likability: “It’s hard to trust someone you don’t like. … It’s necessary to find a balance between intensity and accessibility, one that neither suppresses nor sacrifices authenticity.”
- Familiarity: “Familiarity is the other side of the likability coin–it evokes a sense of closeness, a feeling of genuine connection.”
- Brand and Thought Leadership: “A vibrant, flourishing brand is one of your most powerful tools in creating trust and opportunity.”
- Content Triggers: “[ Content triggers ] are the patterns that emerge when you listen to the demands of your target audience.”
Top of Mind takes each of these touch points and provides the reader with tactical approaches to establishing trust with your customers.
If you don’t have time to pick up Top of Mind, here’s the key takeaway—make your content about your customers. Listen to them. Respond to them. Create content that speaks to their felt needs and problems.
And if you don’t have time for creating that content, let us know. Our team can help you find clarity about your customer and his needs so that together, we can create compelling website copy, articles, emails, videos, and ads that get your brand in front of the faces that want what you’ve got.