Sway Engine Marketing

Remember AIDA? Attention, Interest, Desire, Action? This acronym was supposed to guide writers through the process of creating compelling copy. Somewhere along this way, these principles got lost by a lot of companies. The one most frequently lost is “action.” Content marketers who don’t understand sales tend to devalue the importance of a call-to-action. They focus on the development of useful, relevant content and then assume that when enough customers are reading that content, somehow it will convert to sales.

I have been on both sides of the business, developing content and making sales. From my point of view, the call-to-action is the bridge between the two. Quality content is a must. It is an absolute imperative, the cornerstone of a successful strategy, but without some call-to-action, content will only attract the interest and desire of customers. It might generate leads, but it won’t close a deal.

Sometimes content marketers start to “get it.” They ask for an e-mail address in exchange for some content, whether it’s a whitepaper or something else. That’s a good start, but the sales process doesn’t end there. In the whitepaper, for instance, the another call-to-action is needed, but it’s often missing. There’s no instruction to customers about what to do next. After they’ve read the whitepaper, what should they do? What can you do for them? Instead of using content in a whitepaper to advance a sale, content marketers consider the whitepaper an end in itself. They hand off the emails they collected to clients who a) don’t do anything with them or b) revert to a traditional e-marketing sales strategy that negates the relationship that content marketing built. In other words, say goodbye to the attention, interest and desire part of the equation.

Asking someone to buy something from you is not easy for a lot of people to do. It’s why some people are good at sales and some are not. It’s why some salespeople are better at prospecting and some are better at closing. I believe that the entire sales process is made easier when you have a relationship with prospects and that content marketing is the most effective way to do that. But for content marketing to work, it has to be integrated into the sales process. This is more difficult than it sounds, because the culture and values held by content marketers are often different than those held by finance and sales departments. I’ll focus more on these differences in upcoming posts.