BUSINESS HAS ONLY TWO FUNCTIONS

Peter Drucker’s famous words: “Business has only two functions, marketing and innovation.”

In this week’s Tuesday Challenge we focused on the importance of creating WOW experiences for our clients, prospects and referral partners. Today we are continuing with a related subject and that is reaching your target market.  Creating content, although it is a critical part of the marketing process, is not the difficult part of content marketing. The difficult part is the distribution of your content.

Content, once it has reached the target market, should provide value so that the recipient looks for your content, becomes a loyal reader and then a loyal customer. In other words, the goal of marketing your content is to develop and deliver value to your market and continue to provide that value so that they keep coming back.

A key term in this process is the establishment of long-term relationships. I believe that these past few months have created a technology rush, thus more content is being sent out and less is being read. Several types of relationships are needed:

Referral relationships exist when the other person knows:

• What you do, how you do it and why you do it. They also know the benefits your product/service provides to the target market.

Customer relationships exist when your customer is receiving a WOW experience and on-going value.

Prospect relationships start when the prospect has accepted your message as being something that will solve a problem and wants to see more in the future.

To share your content, always start with the “low hanging fruit”, that is your existing network (everyone who knows you). This is the best place to start your relationship building process; tell them the What, How and Why and the benefits you provide.

The next step is to bring your current customers up to date by sharing how you are improving their lives with new innovations. Remember that the pandemic has accelerated consume behavior shifts toward activities like e-commerce and teleconferencing – behaviors that won’t recede when the virus does.

Now you can start a value based, content marketing campaign to share your story with a highly targeted group of prospects.  The purpose is to deliver value over a period of time, always using innovation as a way to keep them coming back.