How Do Your Customers Decide to Buy From You?
There are lots of reasons customers eventually decide to go with your product or service. They make a decision based upon their past relationship with your company, referrals from others, the value that you provide, and many other factors.
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But before prospects ever get to the point of talking with your sales force they are very likely to form an opinion about your company and your products. This opinion can encourage or discourage them from contacting you. What are you doing to influence that opinion?
The first place every prospective new customer goes is the internet. Depending on their search criteria and the extent of your online presence, your company may end up in their search results. But the sites that prospects eventually decide to investigate are heavily influenced by what they already know about a vendor. If they don't have some idea of how qualified you are as the source of a solution they may never get to your web site. And you'll never know.
The very large vendor companies in the document industry marketplace understand the importance of this prior knowledge. That's why you see big advertisements, blogs, newsletters, sponsorships, webinars, and articles written by company experts all over the web. When valuable information is published by a company by design it's called "branded content" and it is fantastically effective.
In a survey conducted by The Custom Publishing Council, 78% of the respondents rated branded content as more effective than advertising!
Branded content is simply relevant material that has a value of its own. It is meant to engage an audience you wish to target and help them form a favorable impression of your company. It is not hard-sell marketing.
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That's great for the big companies - but what about the rest of us? Smaller companies don't have the budget for those expensive ads and sponsorships. They can't afford the full time services of a public relations or marketing firm to develop and maintain the newsletters, articles, and blogs for them.
In smaller firms, the subject matter expert is often the founder or president. They simply don't have the time to create articles and get them published in places where their prospects will see them. This puts them at a significant disadvantage.
There are vendors in our business with great products to offer, but they lack the ability to develop that familiarity and comfort that is so critically important when a buyer starts researching solutions.
The selling really starts long before the prospect identifies a need. If you are not consistently reinforcing your brand today you are unlikely to produce satisfactory results.
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