Apparently there are many businesses that still think they have a secret weapon, an edge that their competitors would use successfully against them if the secret was revealed. These businesses think that by limiting the amount of information they publish they will keep their secret sauce recipe from those who want to outsell them.
These companies have seen way too many movies about corporate espionage. Most businesses aren’t selling a product or service that is any different from others in the same industry. The way to blow by your competition is to build trust in your brand by building relationships with people. It’s all about giving the customers what they want.
The True Secret Sauce
The real secret isn’t in your product or service but how you market it. Inbound marketing isn’t really a secret either but it may as well be since it takes effort that most of your competitors won’t want to expend.
Say you put out a white paper and a daily blog post promoted on Facebook and through Twitter with links to a landing page on your site. There is a lot of up-front work to get this done before you can ever put out the content, right? Do you know what your competitors will probably do?
Nothing.
Why? Because they are too lazy (or cheap) to do (or pay for) the work. They don’t realize how much business they are losing out on. More for you, right?
Besides, There Aren’t Really Many Secrets
That’s right, there are very few real secrets left out there, the internet has seen to that. You can find pretty much anything through a search engine if you type the right query. And guess what? This is how your customers expect to find you.
If you aren’t publishing content using the terms your customers typically use then you aren’t going to get found. This is another argument for letting go of the “secret sauce” mentality. Today’s customer looks online first. If you aren’t there, you don’t get their attention or their money.
The business with a true secret is very rare. Most successful businesses are studied and picked apart to determine their methods.
Open up and Build Relationships
Customers want conversations with real people, not monologs by sales clones. You must be willing to listen and interact without “selling.” Selling means you are doing all the talking, probably using jargon to sound knowledgeable, and the whole time your customer is tuning out. Be your own professional yet informal self when writing content for your prospects. Show genuine interest in them.
Who are your prospects? You need to know this before creating any content. It is time to develop a buyer persona so you have a specific person to write to. At a minimum you should know your ideal buyer’s demographics and title.
For narrowly targeted content you need to know even more:
- What a day in the life of your prospect is like.
- What are their pain points?
- What are their goals?
- What buying experience do they want?
- What are their common objections to your product or service?
You need to develop the persona so that you can recognize it in real life. Once you know that much detail about someone you can easily write your content to appeal to that specific person without being creepy.
Consistency and persistence also play a role in building rust. If you blog, do so at regular intervals. Send out newsletters on the same day each month. Answer questions as soon as possible; if it is going to take a while tell the customer when you expect to have the answer.
Plan Carefully and Completely
Inbound marketing has too many moving parts to improvise. Take your personas and create a plan that includes the type of content to be offered, how often, in what format, and where it will be promoted. This requires you to research how your ideal buyer consumes content.
You need to find out how he or she prefers to get information. Which would be better, video or text based? Does the persona prefer hardcopy or reading online? What social networks does she frequent? Will he click through to a landing page from there?
Now you can work on putting your content into the format most appealing to your buyer. Be sure that content answers the questions your customer is likely to ask and counters the objections you predict will come up.
Measure for Measure
Metrics are your friend. You should be pulling analytics daily to see how your content is performing. The great thing about digital content is that it can be quickly and easily changed. As you become more sophisticated you will want to perform A/B testing between two versions of the same content to see which one is best.
To Reiterate
There are no real secret sauces, trade secrets, or other information to be hidden for fear of what a competitor will do. All of your content is going to address how to solve a problem or address a pain point. The customer won’t want to know the details of how that happens until near the end of the cycle. Even if you put the information out there it is unlikely your competitors will stir themselves to copy it.
So relax and set up your inbound marketing plans as soon as possible. You will be so far ahead of your competition they won’t be able to catch up. Much less steal a secret.
