If you've read my newsletters, blogs, or articles in the past, you're probably aware of my philosophy when it comes to favorable long-term marketing results. I'm pretty adamant about providing useful information that is viewed as valuable by your audience. Product information needs to be available, but your entire marketing strategy shouldn't be focused on laying out product benefits and features.

This is a difficult concept for a lot of marketers to embrace. But if you're really going to do content marketing, you've got to keep this idea in mind all the time. Making your messages about your customers instead of it being all about you is so important that I made that topic the subject of my very first 90-Second Content Marketing Lesson.

EDITORS NOTE: You can listen to all the free lessons HERE. New lessons are posted monthly.

Marketing Focus vs. Customer Focus

The conflict is obvious. You, the marketer, are trying to figure out how to get prospects to pay attention to your fantastic products. But your customers are only interested in how they can create fantastic results for themselves. The trick is to show your audience how they can get what they want, while discovering for themselves how your company can help them.

There are lots of ways you can gently lead prospects down the path that culminates in a strong opportunity to win their business when they are ready to buy. I'll continue to cover those methods in my newsletters and lessons. Check out the newsletter archives for hints published in previous issues of Customer Retention NOW!

Being perceived as a credible and trustworthy subject matter expert is quite valuable. Once you've established that trust, prospects are more receptive to consultative sales processes, and they will refer other potential customers to you.

Establishing credibility is dependent upon the subjects you choose to cover in newsletters, articles, and blogs of course. But equally important is the angle from which you approach those subjects. Look at challenges and problems from your customer's point of view, not from the perspective of a vendor trying to sell a solution. What do they need to know? Where can they find the information? What is the sequence of tasks they must address? What are the industry trends and how should they prepare?

Case Studies

If you really want to improve credibility and have your leadership in the marketplace acknowledged, write about the success of your customers. Use case studies to show what kinds of customers choose your products to achieve their own fantastic results. Case studies are not thinly-veiled sales pitches. They are stories that your customers will find to be interesting and engaging.

In addition to being powerful ways to help prospects envision similar success for themselves, case studies are quite versatile. We have customers who have used their studies as web content, newsletter links, magazine articles, and trade show collateral. And case studies are easily adapted as webinars or in-person presentations, too. Clients pay for the case study once, and use the content over and over.

Testimonials

Testimonials and reviews can be pretty compelling as well. Especially video testimonials. Seeing the face of the customer providing the testimonials eliminates the suspicion that the vendor somehow manipulated the customer comments.

By the way, we're looking for customers who want to add video testimonials to their content marketing mix. If you're interested, please get in touch.

Even negative testimonials have value. Talk about credibility! Posting testimonials or reviews that aren't the typically glowing endorsements one generally encounters communicates a level of transparency and honesty. If the thought makes your blood run cold, look for instances where there was some kind of silver lining you can report. You don't want to blame the customer for a failure. But you can share news about the development of additional functionality or improved documentation that took place after learning of a customer's dissatisfaction.

Outside Opinions 

Another way to take the focus off of you as the promoter of your product is to develop relationships with objective analysts, writers, and editors in the industry. Find out who is writing about your market space by reading trade publications and searching the internet or blogs. Reach out by commenting on their published articles or contacting them directly to ask them what they know about your product and your competitors. See if they could use a product demo or some information not publicly available to write an article or review. And for goodness sake, link to favorable analyst content from your website, newsletter, and social networking sites.