The Future of Marketing is Content, Capability and Personal Brands

It’s no secret that we live in a world of intense competition to win new business, retain clients and grow revenues.?

You are now dealing with the most aware and connected generation that has ever lived. According to Sirius Decisions, 70 percent of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales. Customers now have access to more information than ever before.?

When most of the players in any industry have product parity - where most products or services offered are about as good as everything else on offer – you need a bold, attention-grabbing way of engaging customers. The future of marketing isn’t about brand awareness.

You must transform your marketing into a high-octane conversation engine. It must spark conversations that generate demand. So how do you create a high-octane conversation engine??Here are the three gears that power that engine:

Content

Brand recognition is no longer enough. Your communities expect your brands to create meaning. So, what type of content must you create? According to the book, The Challenger Sale, successful companies challenge their clients with commercial insights that help them to make money or save money. Don’t overwhelm your clients with the features and benefits of your solution.

You must have an investigative mindset to understand your clients’ business drivers. You must create insights that address their pain points and give them a competitive edge. You must challenge your clients to think about their businesses in radically different ways.

In other words, marketing organisations must transform to media organisations. You must create content assets rich with insights. These are white papers, opinion pieces, blog posts, infographics and press releases.?

People now spend more than 2.5 hours per day on mobile devices. So, you must create content that is “glance-able”. An infographic can be consumed quickly. People like to engage with it and share it with their connections.?

TED Talk videos have transformed how people educate themselves. You must create more informational videos.?Clients love to hear from their peers. Recruit existing clients to participate in your case studies.?These content assets need to be amplified via various tools such as events, email, blog, newsletters, LinkedIn and Twitter. Don’t underestimate PR. Use it to add a solid layer of credibility to your message.?

Consulting firms such as McKinsey, Accenture, PWC and E&Y create insights and amplify them to engage with their clients.

Capability

Customers self-educate on a purchase, before engaging with a supplier. According to a survey, 78 percent of customers now use a digital channel to research suppliers. The best driver for increasing sales is to teach the customer something new about their business. This requires a new set of marketing skills.?

Skills related to writing copy for flyers, creating brochures and executing roadshows are important skills, but they are no longer enough. Marketers must acquire new skills around content for demand generation and conversion.?

Successful marketers adopt a newspaper's mindset for their brand. They figure out what would make news, and what type of content is likely to get their audience inspired. They tell stories that people want to read and build relationships with their audience. However, producing content that educates is important, but not sufficient. Marketers must be adept in using digital channels to amplify content, engage with their audiences and grow their communities. They must make sure that their content gets found via search engine marketing.

At the same marketers must be change agents. How do you inspire change?

You must inspire collective action and challenge the status quo.??According to his book on activists titled Market Rebels, professor Hayagreeva Rao says: “The challenge for market rebels becomes how to forge a collective identity and mobilise support by articulating a ‘hot cause’ that arouse emotion and creates a community of members, and relying on ‘cool mobilisation’ that signals the identity of community members and sustains their commitment.”

Marketers must create a “hot cause” around which their audiences can rally and engender new beliefs. They must also develop “cool mobilisation” techniques to gain buy-in from their audience and trigger change in behaviour. In the personal computing movement, the hot cause was the tyranny of the central computer. The cool sources of mobilisation were hobbyist clubs.?

The hot cause for marketers now is to turbocharge sales. For this to happen, you must transform the way your organisation shares content with the outside world. The cool sources of mobilisation are content advocacy tools such as GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal. Other cool tools are video creation applications such as Wochit which make it easy and fun to produce videos at scale.

Personal brands

A key component of a personal brand is expertise that is highly visible. Research shows that visible experts consistently win more business for their firms. Most clients go online to research suppliers before they make a purchase decision.

Marketers must help their companies develop visible experts for a competitive advantage. You must inspire your subject matter experts to build their personal brands. Elon Musk, Tony Fernandes and Indra Nooyi have strong personal brands.

How do you create a personal brand??Expertise coupled with visibility results in a strong personal brand. You must amplify content using your company’s blogs and other digital tools. Get speaking slots in external events. Post photos of these events on LinkedIn.?

Do your subject matter experts take a stand and are known for it??In this connected world, information is freely available. Coach your experts to have a point of view. If you just provide data, you won’t differentiate yourself.?Help your audience grasp and remember concepts quickly. Codify insights and communicate in short sound bites as if journalists are quoting you.?Some memorable sound bites are “Red Bull gives you wings” and “Marketers must think like journalists and act like publishers”.?

The future of marketing is about sparking new conversations with existing and future clients. It’s about leveraging content, capability and personal brands.?

You must use these three gears to transform your marketing into a high-octane conversation engine and create commercial outcomes for your business.