For most businesses, it takes a year or more to make inbound marketing work. Why? Because the majority of these businesses don’t understand what content they should be creating to move the needle.
Armed with good intentions, companies focus on creating educational “brand awareness” content. This kind of content is fluffy and, ultimately, useless in driving sales. Instead, they should be creating content that addresses the five most common sets of questions their customers actually have about their products or services.
- How much does your solution cost?
- What are the negatives or issues with your solution?
- How does your product or solution compare to alternatives?
- What is everybody saying about your solution?
- What is the best solution available?
These five subject matter areas quite literally are the fuel of your industry. These are the questions every single one of your buyers are researching every single day before they choose you… or one of your competitors.
And yet a good number of business leaders don’t want to answer them. The answers are uncomfortable or too complicated. Or they’re worried they’ll scare potential buyers away with their honest answers.
So, instead of answering those questions, they embrace what we call “ostrich marketing,” where they choose to bury their heads in the sand for as long as possible. They stick to safe topics in content and pretend The Big 5 don’t exist. Oftentimes, they want to wait until they are face-to-face with a customer to address them at all.
The result? Visitors to your website, the people looking to give you money, are left frustrated because they can’t find the information they need in order to commit to that face-to-face meeting or call. And as we all know, frustrated is the F word of the internet.
When your company is willing to address The Big 5, and it’s done the right way, you won’t be waiting a year or more to see results. Businesses willing to address these questions see an immediate rise in qualified traffic, a steady stream of qualified leads, and a dramatic increase in sales, in less time.
