About ten years ago I started out with inbound marketing. However, I would get this complaint from management about blogging and content creation.
“If we do this we are giving away all of our secrets! Our competitors will steal all our ideas!”
Oddly enough I still encounter this objection on occasion.
So let’s do our best to put a final nail in the coffin of this objection.
- You don’t give away everything
- Your competitors (if they are smart) are pursuing content creation already
- Sales has changed
- Give value before the sale
1. You don’t give away everything. For instance, I am not suggesting that if you are an industrial company that you use the blueprint of one of your widgets as a piece of collateral.
First of all, none of your prospects are going to see any value in a blueprint. People don’t care about the technology; they care about how the technology helps them.
So your collateral and blogging are based around helping them solve their problem. And is giving people information on how to address a problem online really any different from what you do on the tradeshow floor or magazine article interview?
2. Your competitors are already pursuing content marketing to some extent. In fact, if they are smart they are looking at inbound marketing (think content marketing combined with automated marketing).
That means that the perception in the market is that your competitors are thought leaders in the industry and you….well… maybe you aren’t. Your competitors are probably also generating leads and opportunities through their content marketing strategy of which you never hear.
3. Sales has changed: In the pre-internet days, actually maybe even a decade ago, to get information about a solution you had to talk to a company. That usually meant hearing a sales pitch or going to a tradeshow.
Now in a matter of minutes, you can log on and learn most of what a company has to offer and how their solution might work for you.
Today customers go 60% of the way down the sales funnel, on average, before they pick up the phone to talk to a company. They progress that first 60% with information that they find online.
What happens if a prospect comes to your website and they can’t learn about the information that they want? That’s right they move on to the next site.
4. Value before the sale: If you can help a customer with their problem before they even talk to you, don’t you think you change their perception of your company?
I would say heck yeah!
If you are offering value on both sides of the sale, then you become a resource, not a vendor. Who do you think people want to work with resources or vendors? And who do you think they feel is more expendable, a resource or a vendor?
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