When I create marketing content for B2B companies, I’ve long advocated that the pieces describe solutions to a customer problem that the company’s product solves. My clients are usually happy with the results, but I’ve rarely been in a position to see firsthand how their customers respond to the materials I’ve created. My clients are either too busy to give me customer feedback or they fail to track it themselves.
Now with this blog, I have a tool that allows me to test some of my theories for myself. Although I can’t test the actual marketing materials I write for my clients, nor is the testing scientific, the fact that I get immediate click-through information has allowed me to see whether some of my long-held theories about the best ways to create marketing materials are valid. My experience with blog posts—which are, after all, marketing materials for my own business—has illustrated the power of addressing real customer pain points.
Let me illustrate with a few stories.
Exhibit A
This first anecdote is about a customer problem I uncovered by talking to actual customers. When I came back to posting my blog this summer after a 5-month hiatus, I didn’t have time to research potential blog topics. I wanted to start posting quickly to get back on the radar screen. So I decided to write a post about questions that kept coming up when I spoke to companies about writing projects.
One of the most frequent laments from marketing vice presidents and directors was that they really needed the extra bandwidth that an outside writing resource could provide, but that they’d had bad experiences with outside writers. They’d then proceed to ask me about my process and ask to see my writing samples. From the conversation, it was clear that their real, underlying question was, “How do I find a really good marketing writer?”
So I wrote a blog post with that title that provided some answers. While my earliest posts in the first iteration of my blog got a bare trickle of hits, that post received a torrent of hits and a number of comments—not only on the blog itself, but on the Linkedin groups on which I publicized it—without the benefit of time to build an audience for the blog.
Exhibit B
My next example is a post about a problem that was uncovered by a market research study. My idea for my recent post, “Creating Compelling Content: Tips from a Journalist,” was taken from a recent survey that found that creating compelling was one of the biggest problems facing content marketers. (The report also mentioned that the vast majority of technology marketers use content marketing.) When I saw that problem I thought, “I can address that concern.” Once again, the response was much higher than average.
Exhibit C
Still another post came from first-hand observations of marketing vice presidents and directors. I’ve long been aware that marketing vice presidents and directors devour market research about their markets and about marketing in general. Clearly, they’re always on the lookout for new ways to solve their marketing problems. That’s why when I ran into a raft of new research about content marketing, I wrote a post about it, “New Research Describes the Most Effective Ways to Market with Content,” which garnered considerable interest.
Exhibit D
In contrast, when I write posts based simply on observations of phenomenon that I find interesting, such as my recent post “The Age of Micro Targeting,” the response was much lower than that of the posts described above.
One Major Exception
Clearly addressing a problem with a blog post, and with any other type of marketing communications, is highly effective in gaining attention from your target audience.
That said, my most popular posts of all are the ones referenced by MarketingProfs. Now this particular post, which I wrote because I found it interesting, did not pull especially well when I first published it. However, the hit rate went through the roof after MarketingProfs sprinkled it with its fairy dust. Clearly, having the endorsement of a well recognized name and a much broader distribution list can trump the results of a blog describing a solution to even the most pressing problem. But that’s a topic for another post.
How do these observations jibe with your experiences?
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