You diligently developed your customer personas, carefully selected relevant keywords, and added funny memes to your content strategy.
Presenting it to the CEO, you observe a look of confusion. At its conclusion, they clear their throat and say, “This all seems fine, but I don’t know how it’s going to bring in $5,000 in sales.”
Your heart sinks, realizing this executive is “content clueless.”
Winning over stakeholders who don’t understand how content marketing makes a meaningful business impact presents a challenge. Fortunately, as a content leader, you’re a pro at educating and persuading audiences to take a desired action.
By constructing your buy-in conversation around these six strategies, you can convince clueless stakeholders to endorse the content plans and give the support to execute them. These six strategies can help you convert those naysayers into passionate, active content champions.
1. Focus on what they gain
Help the content clueless understand how a well-developed content marketing strategy contributes to the priority business goals. Highlight these benefits — and how successful brands have used them — to pique the stakeholders’ curiosity and motivate them to become more enthusiastic advocates:
- Strengthen brand loyalty. Effective content can help bond your company and its customers. LEGO achieves this with its movies, magazines, and product catalogs. By using content to inspire nostalgia and imagination, LEGO deepens the relationship with its customers as they evolve into adulthood.
- Boost customer retention. Netflix personalizes its recommendations based on the customer’s previous likes and dislikes. If you give a thumbs up to Lincoln Lawyer, Netflix might recommend a similar show, Suits, to watch next. It’s no wonder Netflix has one of the lowest subscriber churn rates in the streaming industry despite increases in subscription costs, according to Yahoo Finance.
- Demonstrate industry expertise. Software company HubSpot offers educational content through its academy. This authoritative offering positions the brand as an industry expert, prompting B2B consumers and prospects to consider HubSpot when they’re in the market for a CRM system or other marketing software.
- Increase sales. Home Depot mastered using content to enhance its sales. As Convince & Convert founder Jay Baer pointed out at Content Marketing World, Home Depot’s toilet installation page cross-sells by displaying links for related products and professional plumbing services.
- Create a positive impact. The Cleveland Clinic blog, Health Essentials, is a safe space where readers can discreetly explore credible healthcare content. This platform is a positive resource, empowering readers, their families, friends, and communities to create healthier lifestyles.
2. Meet them where they are
To help the content clueless evolve into content allies, you need to meet them where they are. But how do you know where that is?
Ask questions to determine their level of general content consumption and understanding. What are they fans of? Where do they get information about the topics they are interested in?
Use their answers to determine their score on the content consumption scale, as illustrated below.
Zero represents the content clueless — someone who consumes little to no content about their passion topic. One indicates general awareness, while a two signifies a non-committal view. A three means infrequent action, and a four is intentional. Five represents a content fan who eagerly and regularly consumes content, from email newsletters to videos, books, and blogs.
Once you know the stakeholder’s score, you can gently increase their interest level by recommending content tailored to their interests and hobbies.
For example, if they are an avid gardener, recommend a gardening podcast. Later in the week, you can say, “Remember that gardening podcast I recommended? I want to launch a similar podcast for our company to help build brand loyalty.”
Your target can better understand the power and value of content by exploring it through their personal interests. The added perspective might make them more inclined to champion your next strategic initiative.
3. Earn their trust
Building trust with leadership, team members, and other internal content partners is an increasingly important step in marketing success. It’s also crucial to gaining alignment. As Velocity Partners’ Doug Kessler has said, “Getting stakeholder buy-in isn’t a big fat obstacle to your job; it is your job.”
As content leaders, you must get stakeholders to trust content marketing is the right strategy, the right business to be in, the right investment to make, and the right way to think about solving customer problems.
At the same time, don’t take their lack of trust personally. If you face doubt or distrust, it may have little to do with you and everything to do with the human condition.
Just like audiences, the content clueless can become more distrustful and more skeptical over time. In an episode of their This Old Marketing podcast, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose call this a critical issue. To counteract that lack of trust, brands increasingly communicate their values through their content and position their expertise in a non-transactional, non-promotional way.
Building trust with the content clueless isn’t so different. If you need to start a personal trust campaign in your organization, you should:
Read More at Content Marketing Institute