We can all learn quite a bit from industry publications and magazines. They are content factories that become a trusted hub of information for people interested in buying products, solving problems or growing their knowledge. They are living, breathing hubs that become a place where an ongoing connection can happen with readers and possible customers.

Wikipedia, WebMD and Inc. are content publishers that put forth information that helps people looking for answers at an industrial scale of production. Inc. magazine has over 390,000 pages that can be found on Google search and is available to the world 24/7/365. They are an authoritative site that has earned its place online, not only from their great content, but also from their persistence in their content publishing process.

You may not have an army of content creators, but if you are not even in the game, then someone else can easily become the industry leader to uneducated prospects. Their content is available and growing as an immortal asset that can provide helpful information. This means valuing something that can be created once and augmented over time in the form of remarkable content and watching it grow as an asset that attracts attention over then next several decades.

Living And Breathing Hub Means Freshness

The reality is that if you are not remarkable and consistent, then the efforts you might put forward will die off and become obscure. The work really never ends. The quality standards are increasing because so many companies and individuals are raising the bar on what is valuable, meaningful and helpful content.

The execution and processes for acting like a magazine, researching topics in depth and adhering to a relentless publishing schedule can deter many companies from even starting or investing in a content strategy that would otherwise help them get new business. There has to be a vibrant, fresh set of activities that signals to the world that you are open for business and providing timely content that matters.

Your authority comes from how tuned in you are to your industry and the freshness of your content. All the while, your arsenal of resources is able to be accessed for new readers.

Wasting Money On Meaningless Marketing

Perhaps many companies shy away from the hard work or strategy of partnering with a content marketing company to drive a living, breathing hub for their market because it can feel overwhelming. The alternative is to expend money on marketing that is a one and done. Direct mail campaigns, billboards, and traditional marketing which is hard to measure and has a fast half-life become attractive places for spending marketing dollars.

The problem is that those dollars don’t translate into an asset that you own or can use to continue attracting new customers. Once you stop paying or the campaign is over, then the dollars are gone.

Content that engages readers and doesn’t just purely sell them and repel them builds your reputation and grows trust. Remarkable content positions you as the leader in your industry. It establishes your authority and helps you to grow an audience of people that want more. These people buy, refer and recommend items every day. A living, breathing hub provides a place for them to come back to and bolster their own needs for growing their businesses or developing social currency.

When you think about where you are going to invest money, how would a living breathing hub of content, much like a magazine publisher, put you in the mind of your buyers? What holds you back?

As speed, access and people’s entitlements online grow, is your content available 24/7 to service them?

We are excited about Google Fiber coming to Austin. Life is only going to get more convenient and more powerful for our town. As our world becomes more about bits rather than atoms, the opportunity to be open for the world 24/7 with a customer experience engagement starts with digital assets, namely content assets. People are searching and sharing information continually and business is open when there is access and content to digest.

While media continually changes and can be pushed through gigabit pipes, the fact that we are all readers does not change. We consume information in the form of written content to get answers, learn something new or just to be entertained. Google is not only making it faster, but it is continuing its mission of organizing the world’s information into what is helpful for the customer’s experience. Speed and quality of content are part of that mix.

If all your content is still in your head rather than available 24/7 for the world, then each day that goes by is a day you are left behind.

Take this article for example. It will be read by thousands of people over the years after it has been posted, indexed and available to the world. It will be found and used in many different ways. It is immortal on the internet where people can find what they are seeking in easier and faster ways.

Your own knowledge becomes an asset if it is made available on a platform, distributed to your networks and lives persistently for search engines to provide results to focused information seekers.

Think Of Your Content As A Store

Whether you sell hard goods or services, your content is a store front. It doesn’t have to close because it doesn’t need to obey the laws of natural human interactions. The internet is always on. There are no people to manage the store or lights to turn off.

As people are thinking of things, they search. If you have authority and credibility then you can get found and provide a pathway of engagement if you have remarkable content.

The store only works if you have a thoughtful customer experience that gives people what they want in a pleasant and valuable way. It’s a self-service model with thoughtful design integrated into the fabric of the system.

Information highways are continuing to get upgraded and hooking into places that bring value to those that travel the bitways looking to meet their needs. In the changing game, think of each piece of content like the bricks and mortar we value in the physical world. It’s an asset that we care about and build meticulously one layer at a time.

What would your store look like in this 24/7 model?

The weight of authority online is being measured by your authorship and substance.

We say a loud “Amen!” to our friends at Copyblogger who summarized their hard work and research on Google’s Author Rank and its effect on page rankings. While the signs point to the rollout of the social layer and author ranking for Google to establish credibility with content creators and authors, it has yet to be fully implemented. However, having substantive content that is engaging on a human level is rewarded. It is what people want.

The trends from Google’s algorithm updates reveal their desire to make a refined web that rewards remarkable content, not gimmicks. If you are able to engage readers and have a strong reputation based on authority, then this adds up.

Putting your name on your content and knowing what content is ascribed to you helps to establish your authority. We have been refining our client’s content marketing systems to reflect their authority around Google Authorship and their search results are benefitting from their increased authority on their industry thought leadership topics.

Your Credibility And Reputation Matter

So your reputation is going to follow you online more than ever. The anonymous web is converting to an intelligent and responsible web where you put your name on what you put out there. It is permanent and public for the world to access. If your name (and face) are behind the content now, then it shows more responsibility. There’s not some kind of trolling mechanism that is turning what should be helpful value into gimmicky marketing.

I welcome the changes. I think it will continue to filter out the gamers and those of us who work hard to put out true value will only continue to rise.

As for our clients, our work to ensure there is consolidation and strategic integration between the brands, domains, people, content and processes still remain an ongoing labor of hard work, creativity and strategic focus. It’s great to know that while the rules keep changing, the foundation of work from content assets and the growing audiences our customers gain are durable to help them grow revenue.

We will continue to monitor these developments and integrate them into our client’s systems and strategies as we learn more.

There are just too many good products out there. In fact, my guess is that if every seller could get 30 minutes of complete, distraction-free attention from their target customers, they would sell an overwhelming amount. Full attention and understanding the value proposition is a precursor to the sale. And it’s hard to come by.

Sales people serve the purpose of getting this coveted time and attention. One by one they troll through prospects to see if they can get what is in their head out into a conversation with an ideal prospective customer. The hard part is getting the meeting to be able to share, woo and educate the customer. The information is in the seller’s head. It’s a slow and linear process.

Selling this way was not so painful when buyers had much more time. They relied on the expertise of account managers to educate them. Good information helped to frame what their problem looked like and how a well-designed solution could remedy the situation. However, this is not how buyers behave today. They are not looking forward to talking to a salesperson. Instead, they get on Google and find what they are looking for themselves. The world of information is at their fingertips.

If your competitor is the content leader and provides the questions and answers a prospective buyer is trying to understand, then their brand is creating trust in the mind of the buyer. They are perceived as the leader in your industry, especially with a content system that engages the reader on a deep level.

It’s Not Clicks, It’s Engagement

Many companies are enamored by how much traffic they are getting. This can be a feel good, but nothing substantive. If you are face-to-face with a buyer and having a dialogue where you can educate the buyer, you are creating engagement. Their mind is focused and intrigued by what you are saying.

Likewise, your content has to engage the buyer to continue investigating and educating themselves. If a visitor to your content doesn’t even finish an article, then it is mere noise. If they move further into the other interrelated topics and content on your site, then they are engaged.

This is all possible if what is in your head is available to the world as valuable and accessible content. If it’s in your head, then you do not have any distribution. You can only reach the person that you choose and that are in front of you. It’s not very scalable.

What’s in your head has to be captured for someone to find and have a self-service way of educating themselves. We are all used to doing this as buyers. Before we talk to a seller, we want to feel empowered and understand what the conversation should be about in the first place. We want to understand what is in your head first so we can feel intelligent in our eventual personal engagement.

So, what if the sales pitch you use up close was in a system that everyone could access 24/7? What would that do to build trust?

In a world where we are all publishers and your customers all have easy access to choices, your content becomes a critical asset. The stakes are high. Your customers are not allowing themselves to be sold to or marketed to. In fact, they work with vigilance to eliminate noise from their lives and search for the things they are looking for.

If you compete within a defined industry, your competitors show up in search results. The ones who exemplify thought leadership show up higher. We are experiencing a more intelligent web today. Google manages those results on the internet and the algorithms for who gets found serves web searchers, not marketers. The results that are shown rely on credibility and consistency along with relevance and authority. Google authorship is ascribing a real human being to the content and an author’s credibility is on the line now. Anonymity and clever keyword gamesmanship is going by the wayside.

However, for those of us who have worked hard to build lasting content assets and establish thought leadership in our space, a continual pipeline of business becomes the reward. Thought leadership establishes a company or person as the leader in the mind of the customer. They provide up front value and frame the thinking for someone who is trying to understand how an industry space works. Your content should resonate with your audience to win the battle of the mind in an attention-scarce economy.

Someone will become the thought leader in your industry. If you become the hub where your customers come for information, education and insight about your industry, then your competition will look inferior when compared in the final buying decision.

However, if you drag your feet or can’t seem to put the decision and actions together to drive thought leadership via content, then your competitor who does it well will take a giant chunk out of mindshare space from your market. They will own the virtual sales funnel.

If you want to make your selling easier, commit to a content strategy that starts with world-class, remarkable content. Take a look via Google search to see who your competition is in your space and if they have thought leadership content. If not, then you can own this space. It’s not necessarily about doing the activity. It is about being committed to a long-term strategy and having the systems, content and processes for deep engagement by a prospective customer. There has to be substance, not busy activity. Remember, we don’t like wasting our time on things that look like value but are not.

Are you the thought leader in your industry? If not, what is holding you back?

Being in step with your customer’s thinking builds trust

Marketers can be out of step with customers simply because they are not thinking like the buyer. They are thinking like a seller. As a seller you have a large disadvantage based on your own biases. You can be thinking of how a person ought to buy instead of how they actually buy. When a new visitor to your content or site does not know you, they are looking for something specific, especially coming from Google search.

The buyer wants to learn about your industry, not necessarily buy something, at the beginning stages. If your content sounds like a sales pitch then it is not uncommon to see a visitor simply click once, stay for a short period of time and then leave altogether. Compare this with someone who is engaged with your content. They read your content fully because it engages them and helps them think about a problem or how your industry works. As they learn more, they are enticed to click around to the links within the body of an article or the suggested calls to action banners surrounding your article.

Buying Means Your Content Is Highly Engaging

With so much content on the internet today, the game of trying to create breadth is no longer valid. Winning new customers has much more to do with depth of content. The attention, care and time someone experiences from what they read has to draw them further into engagement with your content.

Highly engaging content can take various forms. One is a narrative that tells the stories of how your solution has worked for a real life customer. Other approaches involve specific and practical ways to solve a problem that is common. People use the internet to find solutions by searching or asking their networks of friends. If they land on one of your content pieces, then the next step is to create a deep level of engagement. Otherwise, the click was in vain and you would have been forgotten. Quite frankly, a frequency of this behavior makes your content questionable as far as its value.

Create a Trail Of Knowledge

You may take your knowledge of your industry for granted. This is a mistake. Such familiarity can reduce the value in your own mind, but it is the expertise which newcomers to such information crave. Getting this out of your mind and into a system for people to easily engage with, perhaps on a current and updated blog, is critical to find new customers that value the depth of insight and are seeking such knowledge.

Creating a trail of knowledge means thinking through a process. It is laying out the next steps that would increase engagement and help your readers to grow deeper in their understanding and ask the right questions. Ideally, they want to ask those questions personally with you. The end of the trail could be an easy way to set a meeting or phone call with someone on your team that can continue nurturing a buyer who is ready. They want to have a dialogue. They have been prepared with new knowledge they gained from learning on their own.

Your content has to work together and help a person who has engaged to continue to grow deeper and see your brand as a valuable resource in their quest to grow in their own knowledge.

Developing the trail which leads to a first meeting then becomes the pathway for the selling to become more of a formality. Your buyer knows the questions to ask and feels empowered in the sales conversation.

What would your content strategy look like if you could start in the mind of the buyer and help them get the knowledge they want? Are there tweaks to your process you can make?

We talk a lot about staying away from tempting and costly gimmicks and work hard to educate our clients on how to create connection rather than chase vanity metrics. In a world where you can build your own audience and have a relationship directly with your prospective and current customers, it is important to stay away from a spam reputation whether it comes to keyword stuffing your site, sending thousands of emails to a bought list or sending unsolicited direct mail.

Making sure your direct marketing efforts are not perceived as junk requires vigilance for any business that wants to avoid being ignored based on their reputation. It takes some intentionality and patience to build a marketing engine that will provide ongoing inbound leads for your business. We like to stay inbounds with a few best practices.

Building Engaging and Useful Content Beats Having To Interrupt People

Email providers are punishing domains that are spammers. Google is filtering out web spam. The web regulators are interested in helping customers. And customers do not want to be interrupted. Trying to find workarounds to this and interrupting people may feel good for the short term, but we look at it as not only wasted energy, but it can kill your future efforts to connect. Your emails may not get delivered or you may not get found.

We would rather play by the rules and do the hard work of researching valuable content, writing something that will last and provide value for our client’s customers. It’s energy that builds online assets that are immortal. Google indexes the content and it becomes a body of work that creates a backlist which becomes extremely valuable. The more touches that your content makes with a person’s mind, they more they become agreeable to your worldview. That is what makes them excited to eventually or continually do business with you.

Breadcrumb Trails Recognize That Consumers Are In Charge

Spammers think about how to sell. They are thinking of themselves and what they want. Too bad it comes with a cost now.

The intelligent marketer on the other hand recognizes that the customer is in charge. If you find your customers are getting really good at ignoring interruptions, then change your approach. We like to study buyer behaviors and think deeply about what a buyer naturally does to learn about and buy what they want.

This, of course, means that we have to recognize the buyer can do this for themselves and opt out or click off of your site quickly and easily. Thus, the hard work of having a strategy and then making it work with clean logic and natural experiences becomes an art form. It means listening, noticing and designing processes that feel delightful, not disruptive and annoying. The customer’s control demands this and we build the breadcrumbs for them to follow accordingly.

Tell Your Story To Win

Your story is something unique about you and being able to share who you are, why you exist and what you are wanting to do to change the world invites the type of people that get you. Such shared core values is part of a greater law of attraction. Putting yourself out there and knowing that the people who get you will raise their hands means that your story resonated.

We all have a story and your marketing needs to center around this to promote your brand and establish connection with your audience. Story telling comes across not only in the content that you create but the way you engage a new buyer and provide services. Everything that touches a customer has to be congruent. If it’s authentic, this will naturally happen. It is what the delighted customer will tell their friends about you. That story has a ripple effect if what you say, what you think and what you do all line up in the customer’s firsthand experience.

It’s About The Marketing Assets

When you look at a business that continually chases after the elusive jackpot to get found or get leads, what do they have to show for it? If they are on Google’s blacklist, was it really worth it?

All that energy and time is not replaceable. It could have been used to build marketing assets that connect with buyers, bring them value and nurture them 24/7/365. It takes patience. Perhaps that is why so few plug in and build what would work for the long-term.

When you think about your marketing strategies, do these make sense for you? How can you create higher engagement with your prospective customers?

Let others vainly pursue silver bullets while you build something real and lasting.

We have a skeptical eye towards quick fixes on our team at AscendWorks when it comes to generating sales qualified leads. We know there are plenty of companies out there that may be focused on vanity metrics such as visitor traffic or lead counts. However, with the real goal being a sale, then filling a pipeline full of noise may feel good, but it’s just a bunch of empty calories.

Selling over the course of time can be trying for those looking for gimmicks for the five-minute sell or the one-day sale. While these may exist, it is likely more of the exception rather than the rule. Customers with high pain may be looking for the fix and want to engage now.

For the vast majority of people that are trying to tune into their pain or understand the value you are offering, it takes time to build trust. Your content that continually offers value, insight and education plays a vital role in helping to build a relationship between you and your prospects. It is how relationship building online is done and the frequency and depth of your content plays a strategic role in positioning you as a trusted resource for the buyer when they are ready.

Furthermore, as you are building your content for the long-term, it becomes immortalized. Google indexes each of your articles and the authority of your site over time helps to bolster the page rankings for keywords that become a focal point of your content library. Thus, your content becomes a storefront open 24/7/365 for anyone looking for answers to find. The more engaging your content is over the long term, the more attraction is built between you and the people that value what you are offering in the world.

It is not necessarily a quick way to make sales, but it is increasingly the viable and steady way as you get found and established. Different readers and buyers will share the insights you offer with their networks and your readership increases over time. Thus, your future customers will be part of the broader self-selected number of readers that your content is nurturing.

In comparison to your other marketing strategies, what would a continuous pipeline from an audience of readers look like for your business? Do you feel it would curb the ups and downs of other marketing approaches and gimmicks?

With so much choice, you are in one of two categories in your market – you are either better or different. Being better than your competition is a hard road to follow. It requires better packaging. And the more commoditized your products are, the more packaging you need to augment your perception in the mind of the buyer. If you are a commodity, then you are inevitably in the packaging business. For what else will distinguish you if you are fundamentally the same as everyone else. You are left to present yourself to be perceived as better via your packaging. Your website, your marketing and your branding have to be polished and appealing to create differentiation. This is regardless of the actual substance of your offering.

For the truly different product or service you have another choice. The substance of your offering can stand on its own. There is not a comparison to be made in the mind of the buyer and without options, the clarity of choice becomes easier. However, packaging takes the shape of education, storytelling and proof. This is a much more defensible and winning game in a world of increased commoditization. Your content has to shine and present your products with the uniqueness that comes from the user experience and what you deliver.

The marketing game can be played on multiple levels. There are interesting intersections such as what is happening in the book publishing industry. Like the record companies, what happens when you take away the packaging? The book cover, artwork, paper quality and ink created a visceral experience to attract readers to a title carefully presented on a bookstore shelf.

When the physical medium has been displaced by unlimited distribution of ebooks and data read online or via a Kindle, then the packaging differentiation has all but disappeared. The content is what counts. Is the writing good or not? Is the content helpful? And, what was the true cost of a book if it wasn’t about paper production. The packaging game shifted.

Your game in packaging will depend on your commitment to being better or different. The marketing required to help you sell in either case should not be confused nor misapplied.

Which packaging game are you in? How can you ensure your substance can overcome commoditization forces today?