Pick up nearly any business book and you’ll see a lot of aggressive language. Be the best. Make more profit. Destroy the competition. Always do more and be better. You know the deal here.
But what if those books have had it wrong all this time? Or perhaps had the wrong perspective?
What would happen if your aim was to make the customer the winner, not the business? How does customer success contribute to business success? That’s what we’re going to explore.
Who Has My Money Today?
There’s a phrase in sales and marketing circles. A great marketer wakes up and thinks “Who has my money today?”. That is, who do they need to convince that day to give up their money in order to succeed.
It’s not a bad thought for a profit-minded marketer, but how you go about doing it can make all the difference in the public perception of your brand. We all know businesses who see their customers as marks, people who need to be suckered out of their money as often as possible in order to grow the business.
This can work. You can probably name several verticals where this is the standard. But we don’t think it’s the best way. The most profitable businesses are in the business of making their customers succeed in their goals or removing their pains.
But it’s more than just solving their problems. You have to make them feel good while doing it.
Good Feelings
What we’re driving at here, ultimately, is creating good customer experiences. Great marketing and sales tap into the underlying needs that drive the customer’s pursuit of a solution to their problems. If you can solve those deeper needs and make your customers or clients feel good about the experience at the same time, that’s how you get a customer for life.
Here’s a simple example. Say you need to buy a hammer for a big home repair project and you want to try several first. There are two stores in town. At the first store, the salesperson points you to where the hammers are hanging, and then leaves you by yourself. The store has lots of hammers, but you can’t choose between them. You don’t know how to weigh your options. Frustrated, you leave the store and try the second one.
The second store sells the same hammers as the first but has a different approach to customer experience. When you ask for a hammer, they ask you about your project. They understand that the real goal isn’t to sell the hammer but to solve how the customer will finish their DIY project. After explaining your project, they point out a few hammers that are best for the job and explain their differences and how they might apply to your project. Maybe they even have spares and a few nails so you can try them before you buy one.
Now, which one would make you feel better about your purchase? Which one would make you feel more confident and successful about your purchase?
The second, right? Furthermore, after the project is done and you see that the advice you received was correct, why would that customer ever want to go back to the first store?
Customer Success And Content Marketing
Winning the game of profit is about more than just separating money from other people. That may work once or twice, but it won’t lead to lasting success. It’s about solving problems and making your customer or client feel happy about their choice.
We think this is one of the reasons why content marketing is such a powerful form of marketing these days. Unlike the shop example, it’s hard to try things before you buy them or ask people questions. Instead, we’re presented with information and we’re expected to search for the information ourselves.
SEO is one part of the equation, but the real heavy lifting starts once someone makes contact with your content. That’s when the customer experience journey begins. Google may serve up your page but it’s your content that delivers on the promise of Google saying “this is what you want”.
Content marketing is not about throwing up words for the sake of having words for Google to find. It’s about giving your visitors the information they need to feel good about your brand and your way of solving their problem.
We can take Concured as an example. Our product is the leading AI-powered content strategy platform. But that’s not what we sell. What we sell are answers to questions like:
- What should we write about next?
- How are we doing against our competition?
- What is the audience interested in that we are missing?
- What content gaps do we have?
Or, to wrap it up in one question:
How can I feel confident about our content marketing campaigns and prove it to others?
That, in a nutshell, is the real thing that Concured is selling. Marketing and sales have always been full of uncertainties, but the Big Data revolution has given businesses the tools and the information they need to really see how different kinds of marketing affect the responses of customers and clients.
However, there is a huge gap between sales and marketing types and data scientists. Marketers aren’t trained to interpret data like this. They may know that content marketing works since it’s somewhat similar to direct marketing, but they don’t know how to read the data to prove that a campaign is working.
Furthermore, marketers and salespeople are now facing greater levels of proof of success that they’ve ever had to supply before. That’s fueling the explosion of metrics and tools to do this. Proving the ROI of marketing has never been more important.
But in order to bridge the gap between “visitor” and “Concured user”, we have to prove our value to you through our content and through our demos. If we can give you something that solves one of your issues or points you in a direction you never thought of before and makes you feel good about it, then we’ve done our job.
Long-term success doesn’t come from aggressive selling and trying to get as much money as you can from a client. It comes from an ongoing dialog with your clients where you solve their problems and emotional needs through your products and services. When businesses know they can get a reliable solution from you and feel like their choice will make them a success, the money will come to you all on its own.
If we’ve done our job right, our content will lead you to ask us about our product and what it can do for your business. Your experience with our content will help you remember our brand when you are ready to schedule that demo.
Winning The Profit Game
Long-term success doesn’t come from aggressive selling and trying to get as much money as you can from a client. It comes from an ongoing dialog with your clients where you solve their problems and emotional needs through your products and services. When businesses know they can get a reliable solution from you and feel like their choice will make them a success, the money will come to you all on its own.