High-Tech Communicator

5 Steps to Turning Your Strategic Vision into a Finished White Paper or Article

While technology vendors often have a high level idea of what they want to say in whitepapers and articles, transforming their ideas from a five bullet point outline into a fleshed out marketing piece requires a fair amount of research and analysis. Typically, a marketing piece will require research and analysis of the customers’ challenges, the benefits of solving them using a particular technology and often, why existing solutions are inadequate.

People ask me how to do this research and analysis all the time. Here are some tips.

1.    Start with the end in mind.

Before starting any project, always understand the marketing objectives for the piece, who it’s meant to address, and the key messages that need to be delivered. This step requires a company to define its goals and messages for a particular piece and work with a writer to produce a creative brief that transmits this information to the writer.

2.    Identify sources of information.

It goes almost without saying that the right information source depends on what you’re looking for. For information about customer challenges, good sources of information include interviews with customers, subject-matter experts, sales reps, and resellers. Additional background information comes from customer success stories, magazine and newspaper articles, reports from industry analysts, white papers from competitors (to see their positioning and capabilities and to find new primary sources), articles from professional and industry organizations, blogs, social media sites, and descriptions of conferences and seminars.

For information about existing technologies and their advantages and disadvantages, I often find information from specialized and technical trade publications, industry analyst reports, competitors, product managers, and technical sales support.

3.    Consolidate information and analyze themes.

After gathering the background information, sift through it carefully to identify common themes. Analyze where the content from different sources overlaps. Where is it different? Do the differences reflect the fact that the different sources provided incomplete information? (For example, white papers from competitors may leave out points that conflict with the vendor’s differentiators or value props). Do the differences simply reflect different use cases? In some cases, it may take consultation with a subject matter expert to determine the answers to these questions.

4.    Create a detailed outline

At intermediate points, it’s helpful to create a detailed outline of the existing information. Review the outline for completeness and logical flow. Do you have enough information to address all the points you set out to address at the outset? Do you have enough information to make a logical argument? Do questions remain?

5.    Wash-Rinse-Repeat

The next step is to create a draft. But the draft is hardly the last step. Creating a white paper or article is an iterative process both before it goes to the client for review as well as during and after the review process. A good writer will create outlines and drafts early on, and using their ability to look at the information from a reader’s perspective and with fresh eyes, keep asking themselves whether the outline/draft meets the client’s objectives and whether it answers all the questions that might come up for the reader.

Eventually, the client will review the outline and draft. Clients typically want to ensure that discussions of the customer challenges meet their understanding of what they see in the field and to clarify product positioning—which in some cases can be a moving target.   

At this point, the writer will take the comments from the client and review them to make sure the text continues to make sense from a reader’s perspective.

It’s this iterative process, with the writer continually reviewing the paper from the point of view of the reader and the client’s marketing objectives, that will ultimately ensure that the piece is highly readable and that it meets your company’s marketing objectives.

How do you all ensure that your copy is readable while meeting client’s objectives?

Interviewing Content Experts

Interviewing content experts for background for white papers and other marketing materials is different than interviewing customers for case studies (as I discussed in my last blog post) because you can’t work from a pre-established set of questions for the interview. Instead of simply asking about the problem, solution, and benefits of using your product as you would for a case study, you may need to obtain a high level overview of areas that may need to be covered in a particular white paper in one interview while in another interview for a datasheet you may need to drill into the specific details of technology or messaging.

How can you effectively interview these content experts to get what you need without taking too much time from their busy schedules? The following tips can help.

1.    Determine and communicate your objective for the interview.  Do you need to have a high level discussion to determine the direction for a particular piece? Do you need to know the primary messages a piece should convey? Do you need clarification of messaging? When you set up the interview, let the content expert know in advance the areas you’d like to discuss so they can prepare themselves before your meeting or call.

2.    Do advance research to come up with a list of questions. Content experts are typically so busy that you need to make the most of their time while you have them on the line. As a result, you’ll want to be as specific with your questions as possible. If you’re looking for high level direction, you might simply ask the questions from a creative brief. A creative brief will ask about the goals for the project, the audience, the customer problem the piece is meant to address, the highest level message, the 3-5 supporting messages, and so on. Alternatively, if you need detailed information for a white paper or datasheet, start by reading existing company materials on the topic, those from competitors, as well as articles from trade magazines and organizations. The content expert will be most useful if you can ask for clarification of key points mentioned in the materials, rather than asking them to give you a basic education on the topic. For example, instead of asking them to describe the capabilities their product offers, see if you can read existing materials from competitors then ask how their capability is different from one that sounds similar from your competitors . 

3.    Always ask why.  Many content owners are highly technical and are happy to talk about features. Frequently, your goal will be to find out how those features help customers and why those benefits are important. How will it allow them to improve their business processes? What will it allow them to do that they couldn’t do before and why is that important?

4.    Request specific examples. Software tends to be very abstract. Marketers often describe benefits that include improving business processes or speeding time to market. I find these phrases meaningless and often find my eyes glazing over when I read them. Instead, I prefer to ask content experts to describe an example of how a customer would use a particular capability in their business and how using that capability allows the customer to perform the task better, faster, cheaper, or more intelligently. For example, a content owner for an ERP solution might mention that talk a healthcare provider could use the accounts receivable module of his company’s product to save money. I’d ask them to expand on that and tell me how they save money. It may, for example, turn out that the ERP automatically matches the original purchase order to the actual invoice to ensure that the healthcare provider did not pay more for supplies than specified in the original purchase agreement.

By having a plan, specific questions, and providing content owners with amble opportunity to explain why things are important, you’ll get more value out of content expert’s time.

What are your experiences gathering information from content experts?

How to Conduct Effective Interviews for Powerful Customer Success Stories

Most technology vendors understand that customer success stories provide critical proof of the effectiveness of your solutions in delivering on their promises. Interviews are your most important tool for getting the material you need to create great customer success stories.

How can you get the information you need to develop the most effective case studies possible while making the most of your customers’ time effectively?

Here’s the process I use to make sure that I get a full understanding of how a customer benefits from a particular technology solution so that I can create powerful case studies: 

1.    Come up with a list of standard interview questions. Most customer success stories are straightforward. They incorporate standard sections such as the business problem that the customer faced, why they chose their particular solution, the implementation process, how the customer uses the solution, and the key qualitative and quantitative benefits the customer achieved. A questionnaire that asks about each of these issues is a good start for your interview questions.

2.    Modify the list of questions for each product. While you never want to put words in the customer’s mouth because that will make the case study seem inauthentic, you want case studies to reflect your messaging and positioning wherever possible. Make sure your questions touch on all of the key capabilities and benefits you typically emphasize in your messaging.  Customers often experience product benefits but forget to mention them. By specifically asking about these benefits, you can jog their memory about benefits that they’ve experienced that may not be top-of-mind.  

3.    Determine specific ROI metrics. Determine what ROI metrics are critical to support your messaging and put them on the list of questions. For example, if your product is time and attendance software, ask about how much customers reduced their costs by eliminating payroll re-runs due to more accurate time and attendance data. An electronic health record vendor might want to look at the number of staff hours saved per week from eliminating the need to manually pull paper patient files.

4.    Ask open ended questions. While you need to have your list of questions at the ready, it’s also important to find out what capabilities and benefits are most important to the customer. This information will enable you to determine what to emphasize in your story. To obtain this information, start by asking open ended questions. For example, ask what were the most important benefits the customer experienced by implementing your product.  

5.    Take advantage of a moment of silence. When someone stops talking, give them a moment of silence before you jump in with your next question. People abhor a vacuum in the conversation and will often come up with another idea that they might have forgotten in if you rushed them with your next question. In the same vein, once someone seems to have run out of steam on a particular topic, I ask them if there’s anything else they want to add. Often I get the most interesting information from the off the cuff responses they give to this question.

6.    Now ask specific questions. Once you’ve found out what’s important to the customer, review your list of questions to be sure to cover all the bases. 

7.    Find out how specific processes worked before and after the product was implemented. Many software products are highly abstract and it’s easy for a reader to get lost.  I like to get as specific and detailed a picture of how the customer uses the product and how they benefitted as possible. Therefore, I always ask customers to describe a particular work process and how they performed this process before using the software and after the implementation.  Another way to get specific information is to ask them to describe a particular time they used the product and how it helped them. For example, ask customers to describe one time that they used the product to solve a particular problem, how it helped solve the problem, and why the solution was better than the way they did things before.

8.    Ask why the changes were important to the business. Whenever customers describe a benefit, ask them to go one step further and tell you why that benefit was important to the business. For example, if the customer says that the product makes their workers more productive, ask them whether that added productivity allows them to spend more time improving customer service or serving more customers without adding employees.  

By using a judicious mix of open-ended questions, specific questions, and moments of silence, you’ll be able to get the information you need to produce a great case study without taking more of your customers’ time (and patience) than necessary. And because people usually love talking about themselves, chances are, your customers will have a great time during the process.

How have you improved your customer interviews?  

Boost Your ROB (Return on Blogging)

Measuring the ROI from blogging is notoriously difficult. Particularly when you’re first starting out, the results can be strictly anecdotal. Nonetheless, blogging can be an extremely valuable marketing tool.

Here are a few first-hand observations on how to get a blog to work and the true value of blogging in building your business:   

· Simply posting to a blog doesn’t do anything. No one is going to miraculously find your blog, even if you use keywords and post it to the various blog-aggregation services. I get some, but very few, hits from these sources.

· Publicizing your blog works. I could definitely do more, but here are a few ways I publicize my blog. I :

o     Post my blog on my LinkedIn profile. Everyone who’s a contact gets LinkedIn updates that include blog updates. Thus, my contacts are reminded of my existence every time I update my blog.  

o      Post my blog as a discussion in my LinkedIn Groups. To avoid angering people on the discussion boards, I’m careful to post only content that will be useful to my readers—I never post blatant pitches about my services.

o     Send links to recent blog posts to my in-house mailing list.

o     Automatically create a Tweet for each new post. 

· Getting someone else to publicize your blog works even better. In several cases, other bloggers found my blog and posted links to it on their site—those third party postings work far better than my own publicity, especially if the blog in question has a bigger readership than mine. For example, when MarketingProfs posted an excerpt of one of my posts along with a link to my site, traffic skyrocketed. Not only that, a number of people tweeted about the post, which further added to my hits.

· Blogs work best at reconnecting with previous customers. People in high tech move around frequently. I may work on several successful projects with someone, and then they’ll stop calling. Inevitably, I find out that my contact has moved on. By publicizing my blog in places where these people are likely to be, I’ve found that they remember me and many of them contact me when they have a new project in my area of expertise. They don’t mention the blog per se, but it’s difficult to believe that it’s mere coincidence that quite a few old contacts reconnected when I started my blog.

· Blogs help turn cold calls into warm calls.  When I am most active on my blog, other sales efforts are far more effective. While no one mentions the blog explicitly, I close much more business more quickly and easily when the blog is active—and conversely, new business is more difficult to close when the blog is not updated regularly (shame on me).

· Inquiries increase. On occasion, new customers that I haven’t approached at all have approached me. I’ve heard that many people do get new business this way, but that seems to be a longer term benefits, say, after six months of blogging, or even longer.

Based on these experiences, the evidence is strong that blogs are effective marketing tools. But blogs only work if you publicize them, and they work best if someone else publicizes them for you. And people only do that if they like your content.   

What business-building experiences have you had with blogs?   

 

How Much of a Thought Leader Must You Be?

Most technology companies understand the value of thought leadership. Developing innovative solutions to problems is a great way to achieve competitive differentiation. And communicating these new ideas to the marketplace is a great way to establish credibility and trust. So it’s not surprising that companies all want to claim to be thought leaders.

But is it realistic to think that every company can be a thought leader? Isn’t that like Lake Wobegone, where all of the children are above average? And if you’re not a thought leader, are you doomed to the dust heap?

The Traditional Take on Thought Leadership

Britton Manasco, is a thought leader about thought leadership. In Manasco’s view, it’s thought leadership or die.

“It's probably clear by now that your growth potential is tied to what sets you apart. You won't succeed in this marketplace if you don't specialize and offer something that is truly distinctive. But it's not enough to provide distinctive value. You also have to communicate that value to the prospects you are trying to reach and the influencers that influence them. But believe it or not, that’s still not enough.You win by being the one that owns an issue.”

But What if You’re Not Unique?

At the same time, there’s also a sizeable minority of technologies that simply aren’t any different from their competitors. I work with one very large company whose resellers are consistently unable to come up with anything unique about its products. And yet, this company does differentiate itself in the market.

How?

Through content marketing.

For example, when presenting its admittedly plain-vanilla offering to a target market of healthcare providers, we did considerable research, speaking with many resellers and customers and reading a wide range of analyst reports and articles about this market, to see what problems customers typically encounter. With the help of resellers who solve problems for customers day in and day out, we then zeroed in on the problems that the company’s products help the audience solve.

In this case, a key challenge was how to tie revenues to costs to determine actual profitability for various services offered. Based on this research, we developed information resources describing this problem in the context of key healthcare issues and trends and how to use technology to address this problem.

In this way, even though the product itself is not unique, this vendor was able to provide something of unique value to its customers. Namely, a description of how to solve a pressing customer problem. 

Is this thought leadership? Not in the traditional sense. In some ways, it’s like creating differentiation for a brand of peanut butter. Most peanut butters are the same, but vendors create a unique differentiator by pointing out something that other vendors don’t—even though their product may have the same capability. But it goes beyond creating a unique selling proposition; it’s about creating unique value for the customer in the form of unique content.  And this unique content provides just the differentiation the company needs.

How have you used content marketing to differentiate your products?  

 

 

 

Getting Ink: How to Deliver Your Message Through the Trade Press

With all that’s written about Social Media, blogging, and content marketing, it’s easy to forget that specialized niche publications, also called trade magazines, still exist and continue to have loyal readers. From a marketing perspective, these publications can still give a vendor’s message the stamp of approval that only an objective outside entity can provide. At the same time, the costs associated with getting ink for your company in these publications can be far less than commissioning an analyst firm to create a white paper.

So it should come as no surprise that many B2B companies continue to seek out coverage in these publications. Companies may pitch an idea for the publication to follow up on. Or better yet, many B2B publishers create byline articles by content experts in their company, and then propose them to an editor, who often runs them with little editing. Not only do many of these magazines have small staffs that welcome submissions, you can choose to target magazines whose readers are your target audience.

So how can you take advantage of this highly credible and inexpensive source of publicity? Follow these steps:

1.    Create a list of target publications.  While it may be possible to get a byline in a larger business publication, your best bet is to look for publications and trade magazines written specifically for your target niche. For example, the many publications I’ve ghost written articles for include IndustryWeek, which targets manufacturers, and Contract Management. You can find directories of specialty magazines on the web. For example, Yahoo Directory provides listings of trade magazines in a wide range of categories. Another way to find appropriate publications is to conduct a keyword search on terms of interest to your target audience.

2.    Read the magazine.  Get a copy of the publication and be on the lookout for sections in which your content may fit. For example, the publication might have a guest opinion spot that would be perfect for a byline article from your CEO about pressing topics facing your industry. They might publish case studies about companies solving industry problems. They might also run articles about industry trends. Use this knowledge to come up with the types of pieces to pitch. 

3.    Come up with a list of issues/problems that the magazine’s readers face that your solution can address. If you want a publication to publish a short article about your new product, send in a press release that can be published verbatim as a news item. But if you want to publish thought-leadership pieces, think like an editor. An editor is looking to help the reader solve problems. So pitch a story about issues the publication’s readers face and new ways to solve them.  For example, I recently worked on an article about current challenges that manufacturers have in managing outsourced and contract labor.

4.     Write in an objective style. I come from a specialty magazine background, having been an editor for PC Magazine, DBMS and other magazines, and freelancing for Infoworld, Software Magazine and many others. In all my years as an editor, not once have I heard an editor say, “I want to run a piece that promotes XYZ vendor.” Publications look for pieces that address issues in a vendor-neutral fashion. If you want your piece to appear with the minimal changes, talk about the types of capabilities that can solve a particular problem (that you happen to have in your product), but don’t talk about your product.

5.    Hire a journalist to ghost write your article. With the slowdown in the publishing industry, many writers with a journalism background are available that can write for trade magazines. These journalists know precisely the right tone and content to include so that the piece will sail through the editing process with minimal changes and will, therefore, be published saying what you want to say.

 

While trade magazines may seem old school, they remain a valuable tool for establishing your company’s credibility and thought leadership. Your best bet in seeing your copy published with little editing is to know what editors are looking for and give it to them.

 

What have your experiences been with writing for trade journals?

Does Your Lead Nurturing Match Your Buyer’s Purchase Process?

Technology companies increasingly recognize the value of adding lead-nurturing activities to their marketing mix. The purpose of lead nurturing is to stay top-of-mind and help buyers through a purchase process that often involves considerable upfront research over a long time period—and engaging with sales reps late in the process. However, many technology companies engage in lead nurturing as if were a one-off campaign. This approach can lead to a disconnect between what marketing provides and what buyers need.

What Companies Do Right

When I work with technology companies who are running lead-nurturing campaigns, it’s clear that they’ve done their homework.  

Since different people tend to absorb information in different ways, these companies provide information resources using different media. For example, they may try to reach people initially through a mix of calls/voice mail, direct mail and email. And their informational offers will include a mix of industry research reports, white papers, webinars, videos, case studies, datasheets, brochures, and even podcasts.

These companies also do a great job of providing information that’s appropriate for buyers at different stages in the buying process. These campaigns progress from offering educational or thought-leadership content to materials discussing the company’s product and its benefits to case studies that prove the company’s claims to online demos that help the buyer evaluate alternative solutions. Often, companies provide multiple offers for each touch; for instance, an email will offer both a thought-leadership white paper and a video that discusses a similar topic for people with different learning styles.

Where Companies Can Improve

While the information does address the learning styles and informational needs of buyers, typical lead nurturing campaigns take place over a relatively short period of time—often four to eight weeks, depending on the complexity of the campaign.    

Yet the buying process takes place over many months or even years. A lead-nurturing process that extends only over a month or two is not nearly long enough to keep in touch with buyers who are not yet ready to take the next step. In order to keep in touch with these same prospects, companies may resort to a series of campaigns, but that approach can be confusing as they jump back and forth between the various steps of the buying process in the different campaigns.

A better approach is for marketers to design lead-nurturing programs that take into account the length of the typical buying process for their products, prepare a number of touches for each step of the buying processes, and allow use of an automated system that allows prospects to select which types of material they wish to see in the next installment and at what interval they’d like to see it.

Lead-Nurturing Campaign Resources

Many excellent resources are available to help marketers design lead-nurturing programs. The granddaddy of these tools is Brian Carroll’s book, “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.”

Additional online resources include:

Ardath Albee’s “Design Nurturing Programs to Drive Sales”

Marketo’s “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing”

What has your company done to nurture leads over the full length of your customers’ buying process?

How to Find a Really Good Marketing Writer

“I once hired an outside writer to write a white paper and ended up rewriting the entire thing myself. How do I find someone that does what they say?”

Marketing vice presidents, directors and managers ask me this question all the time. These professionals are more overworked than ever. One marketing director recently complained about working until 4 a.m. on three occasions over the past two weeks. With budgets loosening somewhat, many are eager to outsource some of their writing workload. But often, they’re afraid to do so because they’ve had a bad experience in the past and ended up having to rewrite the white paper or brochure themselves. “Why should I pay someone if I end up doing all the work myself?” they wonder.

Yet at some point, the deadline will be so tight or other projects so pressing that you have little choice but to outsource. How can you be sure that the project is done right?

Here are some tips for choosing a writer who can keep projects on track while minimizing your time investment:

Be clear on your goals

Some companies take an “I’ll know it when I see it approach” when they commission marketing communications materials. This is the number one cause of project failure. Before you even think about hiring a writer, establish your communications objectives for the particular marketing communications piece. By knowing what type of piece you want to create and what you want to say, you’ll have a better idea of which writer to choose for the job. Before starting a project, define:

·     The type of piece you need (white paper, brochure, thought-leadership article).

·     The stage of the sales cycle it’s for (early-stage education, research stage, options exploration).

·     The audience. Be as specific and narrow as possible: “IT staff at pharmaceutical companies” is a better target audience than “operations, marketing, merchandising and distribution at apparel and grocery retailers.”

·     The one key message you want people to remember as a result of reading the piece.

·     The three to five key supporting messages and their proof points.

·     What you want readers to do as a result of reading this piece.  

Ask about the writer’s experience and writing samples

Most clients do a good job of asking about the writer’s experience. After all, it’s better to get someone with relevant experience. For example, B2B writing is much different than targeting consumers.  

However, while it’s true that a general marketing writer will have a difficult time picking up the nuances of technology, a marketing writer with long experience in technology should have no problem learning about a new technology. Someone who’s written about ERP software can easily learn about time-keeping software; someone with knowledge of triple-play technology can get up-to-speed quickly on wireless.

For example, technology writers typically have enough background in a wide range of technology-related topics to know what they don’t know, what questions to ask and how to do the research and interview the experts to get the answers. In addition, they are, in a sense, your audience; they know a great deal about technology, but they’re not experts in your technology, so they can look at your content with fresh eyes.

It’s more important to review the writing samples to see if you like the level and style of the writing. Also, most good writers should at least have references on LinkedIn or others that are available to contact.

Do a gut check

Just as important as experience is the writer’s attitude and independence. Does he or she expect all of the background information to come from you? You may end up spending more time than you’d like getting the writer up to speed. A good writer with a strong work ethic and research skills will be able to take the top-level messages from you and get up-to-speed quickly by reviewing the extensive resources that are available on the web to fill in the rest without taking up more of your valuable time than necessary. For questions specifically about new product messaging/capabilities/positioning, the writer should review existing materials and be able to zero in on specific follow-up questions.

Establish intermediate deliverables

Some clients think that the first deliverable should be the first draft. But when you see a draft, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. Reviewers can easily get bogged down in word choice and don’t see that the messages aren’t quite right. The result is endless review cycles that sap everyone’s time. To improve the efficiency of the process, ask for an outline before the first draft. This way, you review the structure of the piece and the messaging before getting hung up on word choice.

Despite justifiable reservations over hiring a writing consultant, you can find one that will deliver content that meets your high quality standards. Once you’ve found a writer you can trust, you’ll have a resource on hand that you can turn to whenever you're pressed to complete a demanding writing project on a tight deadline.   

What have your experiences been hiring external writing resources?

Overcoming Hidden, Emotional Objections with Lead Nurturing

Much has been written about why companies should nurture leads until they’re ready to buy. These arguments tend to be logical, typically citing the need to assist prospects through the buying process and keep your company top of mind. But arguably, an even more important reason to nurture leads is overcoming prospects’ emotional objections—specifically, their fear of buying from you.

Logical Reasons  

As you’re probably aware, the logical reason for lead nurturing is that while it’s easy enough to generate leads by attracting people to download a white paper from KnowledgeStorm or buying lists, most new leads are not yet ready to buy.

Moreover, the buying process has changed. Five or so years ago, buyers turned to the sales force relatively early in the sales process. Now, buyers prefer to do much more research online, and they engage the sales force much later in the buying process.

This makes it imperative to keep in front of leads and provide them the information they’ll need throughout their buying process until they’re ready to speak with a sales rep.

According to Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation and the Complex Sale, up to 95 percent of qualified prospects on your website are there to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, but as many as 70 percent of them will eventually buy a product from you or your competitors. Moreover, a DemandGen report has found that on average, nurtured leads produce a 20-percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.

So far, this sounds cut and dried. You get leads, but they’re not yet ready to buy, so you provide useful information. You stay top-of-mind. And when they’re ready to buy, they’ll consider you.

Emotional Reasons

The catch is that the human decisions are rarely as logical as we may want to think. While people may think they’re making decisions strictly on logic, people make emotional decisions and then find facts that support their decision.

Marketo’s “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing,” makes an interesting observation about the emotions of buyers. It notes, “In B2B marketing, there’s an asymmetry between the upside and downside of B2B purchases: the buyer may or may not be rewarded for making a good purchase, but a bad purchase can damage the buyer’s reputation and job security. As a result, fear and risk play large roles in B2B-buying decisions. Organizational risk can be dealt with rationally, but personal risk is usually unstated and hidden from the rational process. Yet, personal risk is a huge factor in B2B buying.”

The report goes on to say that it's therefore critical for B2B vendors to establish credibility and trust. And the best way to do this is by sharing useful information. If you can help frame the discussion, your company will be seen as a trusted advisor and thought leader, and if the buyer believes your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them, this reduces fear and can dramatically improve your odds of being selected for consideration and purchase.

This argument rings true from personal experience. I’ve done content marketing since the mid 1990s, first with a printed newsletter, then with an online newsletter, and later with this blog.  While I also use other forms of marketing, content has been my most consistently successful tactic for keeping in touch with prospects, winning trust, and ultimately gaining the opportunity to work with them.

So when you do lead nurturing, remember that staying top-of-mind is only half the battle. It’s just as important to minimize the fear of purchase by demonstrating through your content that they can trust you.

Can describe any lead-nurturing campaigns you’ve done that have minimized fears of your potential buyers?