Strategic Content

Convert your Potential Customers into Buyers

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell.

Essentially it’s a process that educates your prospective customer from maybe not even knowing you, through to liking, trusting and finally wanting to buy from you.

This section is continually updated and contains an excerpt for all articles on Content Marketing that can be found on this site.

How to Position Your Product in a Crowded Market

Positioning is what sets your product or service apart from your competitors. It’s not just a case of being different, it’s also being better.

To successfully position your product, it needs to be:

1. Unique. Is it different from what your competitors offer, and in what way?
2. Beneficial. Does your product offer a compelling benefit that your competition doesn’t?
3. Positioned in the mind of your potential customers. What do they think of it?
4. Remarkable in a positive sense. Will your customers recommend your product and share with their networks?
5. Memorable. Will your product or service have an immediate and lasting impression?

By taking this approach, your product can be uniquely positioned as being different and better than your competitors.

With great positioning, you have carved a niche in the market where your product will resonate with the potential customers you’ve developed it for.

Dispense with a Horse and Reduce your Anxiety

The very first advertisement for an automobile had a jaw-dropping headline. But the brilliance of the ad is how the benefits are described and are then supported by the features.

The headline says nothing about the vehicle and its fantastic features. That comes later.

Instead the headline drills into the immediate benefit of saving on the expense and care of owning a horse. Then there’s the transition into the ultimate benefit which is reducing the anxiety of keeping a horse.

The features of the vehicle only then follow on from the headline and first paragraph.

As is the case 118 years later, focusing on the benefits your product can offer potential customers isn’t a new way of marketing, it’s the correct way.

Know the Difference Between Features and Benefits

Your potential customer is wanting to buy benefits. She’ll hand over her credit card once she understands what’s in it for her. What is the benefit to her when she buys your product?

To sell your product or services you need to stress the benefits, not the features.

Why? Because customers really don’t care about you or the products and services you’re selling. They just want to know what’s in it for them and how your product can benefit them.

When buying a product, your customer is thinking of the benefit she can obtain and sub-consciously the ultimate benefit. She’ll then justify her decision to purchase based on the great features your product has over the competition. It’s as simple as that.

Create a Persona to Visualize and Understand Your Audience

A persona is a fictitious person that’s made up from a composite of who you believe your prospective customer is likely to be.

I like to think of a persona as being one person that represents the behavioral patterns, attitudes, lifestyle choices, and motivations of your prospect. Importantly, a persona is an individual, not a demographic.

Creating a persona gives you the opportunity to visualize and empathize with your prospect or audience. It’s your audience of one person who you know so well. You’ve literally been in their shoes and seen how they view the world. What you write or talk about will resonate.

And the persona you’ve created represents your prospective customer.

Your Customers Worldview and Why It Matters

We all have a worldview. Simply, it’s how we see the world and it’s responsible for our behavior and actions.

Knowing your prospective customer is understanding their behavior and actions. It’s being able to empathize with them and see their worldview. That’s the starting point to creating products or services they’ll want to buy from you.

Being able to empathize with your prospective customers is literally putting yourself in their shoes to understand their behavior.

But this behavioral information lacks context because we need to know the WHY behind the behavioral patterns. The WHY is their worldview and that’s why it matters. How does your prospect see the world?

Create an Empathy Map to Better Understand Your Customers

Knowing your prospective customer is the starting point to creating products or services that people want to buy.

It begins at the emotional level by having empathy with them. What are their feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another? Ideally, it’s putting yourself in their shoes to truly understand them and this can be achieved by creating an empathy map.

An empathy map represents the sensory information of the customer and is usually shown as four quadrants broken into “Thinking”, “Seeing”, “Doing”, and “Feeling”.

This article shows you how to create an empathy map.

This is not about creating a buyer persona or persona – that comes later. Instead, it’s working out who your ideal audience is to buy from you.