I spend a lot of time browsing through content on technology company websites and am often surprised by the lack of content that, if I were a tech buyer, would genuinely educate me or help me make a purchasing decision.
Naturally, I expect to see a whole load of pages explaining about the company, its products and why they consider themselves better than their competitors – after all, your website is an important member of your sales team. However, unless I quite quickly come across some content which is less about them and more about me, then I soon get bored.
What so many technology companies seem to forget is that, yes, a prospect comes to your website because they have a need but the reason they have a need is usually because they have a pain.
As Steve Jobs once perfectly stated…
“The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him. One reason for this is, of course, that nobody pays for a ‘product.’ What is paid for is satisfaction.”
And Ted Levitt beautifully quipped…
“People don’t want quarter-inch drills… they want quarter-inch holes.”
Companies think they are selling products and services, but what they are actually selling to customers are solutions to their problems and the ability to get their jobs done. Therefore, if you want to connect more effectively with visitors to your website, your content needs to address their pain points.
For example
Let’s say that you provide cloud-based services and I am the MD of a company which has just experienced a particularly lengthy server crash. I am looking for a better disaster recovery solution and, so far in my internet search, I’ve looked at various cloud-service websites, all of which have told me how great they are, how long they’ve been in business, how their service is second to none bla bla.
Then I come across your website where I find an article explaining how companies that use cloud-based services don’t need complex disaster recovery plans as the cloud provider sorts any problems for them, and faster. Next I stumble upon a news article informing me that businesses using the cloud are, on average, able to resolve problems in 2 hours compared to the average 8 hours for non-cloud users. What’s more, I then find myself reading a blog post entitled ‘Is moving to the cloud the right thing for your business?’.
At this stage, I know nothing about your company but you have very quickly connected with me in a way that your competitors haven’t. It feels as though this content has been written specifically for me and is directly addressing my pain points. You guys seem to know your onions, I need to talk to you!
That is content marketing.
So the next time you load content to your website, ask yourself, what problem is it solving? Are you simply selling the ‘quarter-inch drill’ or are educating how to get the ‘quarter-inch hole’?
It’s interesting that we still haven’t stumbled upon the right method of choosing a software tool when there are so many sites out there that help us decide on restaurants or other types of services. BestVendor is a young company but is trying to provide some method to the madness.