Why You Need to Start Treating Your Business Like a Media Company
We’re all familiar the standard marketing formula: you must create content to get conversions and increase your company’s revenue.
Right?
Consider this: maybe your content IS the product, not just the means to sell your product. When you start thinking of your content this way, it will revolutionize the way you produce your content AND the way it’s perceived by your intended audience. In a way, you’re changing your business marketing into a media company—content is king, not only for conversions.
Read on for why turning your business into a media powerhouse will change everything and how you can get started today.
This article is taken from our B2B Podcasting episode interviews with Mark Hunter, Scott Clary and Anna Furmanov.
Why
Turn your content into the product and avoid the dreaded ‘sales pitch’ style
People don’t like being sold to.
It’s why marketers put such extreme amounts of thought and effort into their craft—we’re all trying to get around this unavoidable fact. Unfortunately, when something feels salesy or inauthentic, customers can smell it from a mile away. Even if they may have been interested in your product, a sales pitch shuts down the conversation before it even begins.
Some marketers address this challenge by creative attention-grabs, promotions, or throwing their net even wider in the hopes that more views will translate to more customers in the end.
There’s another way—and it’s more effective without making you want to pull your hair out in the process.
When you shift your content away from being the means to sell your product or service, you end up with content that is informative, authentic, and genuinely useful for your audience. Meaningful content generates real inbound demand for your company instead of empty views. Wouldn’t you rather have 10 productive leads than 100 empty ones?
Make your content useful for your audience and stop trying to herd them down the sales funnel with your marketing. There are times when things like paid ads or email campaigns pay off, but it typically doesn’t work as your exclusive B2B marketing strategy.
Building relationships for lasting impact in your business
What’s often missing in marketing is TRUST. Your content should serve a purpose beyond a sale—and that’s building relationships. Build relationships with your content and you’ll have customers for life.
Content should be real.
Trust your audience by giving away valuable information. If you’re truly a thought leader, you don’t need to be afraid of giving away your content because you’re always growing! There’s always more to learn and always more to share.
Businesses should be defined by the meaningful relationships they have with clients and customers, not just profits.
How
Craft a content narrative that solves your customer’s problem…for free
Give away content? For free?
Your sales team might wring their hands at that one. It may seem counterintuitive, but when you offer content that genuinely helps your audience, it builds trust and relationship. That foundation sets the stage for potential business opportunity down the road. People are more likely to buy from people they trust—it’s psych 101. When you’re a trusted brand, you can sell practically anything!
Here’s the important part: you have to GENUINELY want to help your audience with no expectation of closing a sale in exchange for the content. If sales are still the final goal in your marketing, your audience will sense it and you lose out on the trust you were trying to create (see point #1).
Once you’ve set that intention, start out by really digging into your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Narrow down your audience, and then narrow it down again. The more specific your ICP, the better results you’ll have with optimizing your content in the next step. Businesses that know their customers personally can give them exactly what they want and need, which builds even more trust. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Invest in content creation systems that help you create content at scale
When you treat your business like a media company, you’re going to be producing a lot more content than you were before. Don’t let that scare you—there’s a lot of ways to do it efficiently. Our favorite is to start a video podcast.
Podcasting has taken the business world by storm, and for good reason. It’s an excellent way to create a comprehensive marketing strategy (link, Show Marketing article or email sign up for ebook?) that also provides inherent value to your audience. Video is currently the most engaging form of content online, and it really builds trust when people can put a face to a name—a double win.
Each video podcast can be turned into multiple forms of content for different applications—full episodes, micro videos and images for social media platforms, articles, emails, and more. It’s a strategic goldmine for companies when you consider your content the product instead of just a sales funnel.
If you don’t know where to start, this is a strong foundation for your marketing strategy.
Why you should be using a video podcast (not just audio)
How to create a “content flywheel” for planned content
Need help?
Is all of this making sense, but you don’t have the time to figure it out on your own?
Marketing strategy is complicated and requires a lot of time and forethought to figure out—and many businesses simply don’t have the bandwidth to do it themselves. Reach out to Rveal on our website, www.rveal.media. We partner with businesses who want to transform their marketing through video podcasts.
