Michael Halper, CEO of SalesScripter, recently presented at Email World 2013 on how to use content marketing to improve Here is a recording of the presentation.

Producing good content is becoming increasingly important when it comes to excellence in the areas of sales and marketing. You need to have good content that grabs the prospect’s attention and that communicates effectively.

 

Bad Content Marketing

Producing content is not necessarily an easy thing to do. Not only does it take a little time and effort to produce, but it can be easy to not produce powerful and quality content.

What does bad content look like? There are two very common areas that we can fall into when producing content, and those are listed below:

  • Company info: Talking too much about your company in your content. This is talking about facts about your company –where your offices are, years in business, etc.
  • Product info: Talking too much about all the great things that your products do.

When we are trying to communicate with prospects, we can often jump to these areas first and feel most comfortable here. The problem with that is that these areas are “all about me”. And if we are communicating with new prospects and working on cold calls, they might not care about hearing about us. They care about “what is in it for me?”

 

Good Content Marketing

If that is what can drive bad content, one way to shift is to focus more on the prospect. By doing this, you shift from “all about me” to “all about you”.

Here are some categories where you can focus content to be more about the prospect:

  • Value: Value delivered to your clients when they buy your products. This is not what your products do, but what they help your customers to do.
  • Pain: What is the pain that your typical clients experience that you help to resolve?
  • Qualifying Questions: You can actually build content around the pre-qualifying questions that you should be asking prospects.

Once you have communicated and established a relationship with prospects, you can begin to speak more about yourself. Here are some areas where you can do that in a more skillful way:

  • Objections: Build content around the common objections that you receive.
  • Credibility: You have likely helped other customers. You can build out content marketing pieces where you tell stories about your other clients and how you helped.
  • Interest: Content marketing can be a way to build interest, and to do that, focus on how you differ, the ROI that you deliver, the impacts of not doing something, etc.