aka Value-Rich Content

As marketers and business people we walk a fine line between explaining our product in a manner that achieves sales, and over-selling our product.

The holy grail of marketing is selling 100 percent of your inventory at retail price. The way to do that is to locate the audience that: wants your product, can use it, and has such a great experience with it that they buy more and tell other people about it.

Finding that audience is a bit like fishing. Where you look are the fishing holes, and what you say is the bait. It’s the bait we want to talk about today.

Keeping a steadfast commitment to providing value-rich content actually starts with your advertising copy and continues through your product delivery. It might sound airy-fairy, but are you enriching someone’s life? When someone clicks on your ad, are you taking them down a path of value?

The Internet is filled with those who shill. (How much time do you waste on click-bait?).

 We call it advertising haiku: an authentic representation of your product in 10 words or less. It’s not easy.

• Avoid the potato chips of digital marketing – high volume keywords with no conversion.
• Don’t gratuitously use a competitor’s high-volume trademarked brand name (even though Google lets you).
• Avoid baseless emotional pleas – a child will die if you don’t click now; or everyone’s favorite: you should have seen what happened next!

Truthfully, we all know the don’ts. It is the do’s that are a little harder to consistently apply.

• Does your ad pass the sniff test? Does it accurately represent your product to your target audience.
• Once someone clicks, do they get something of value? Something that enhances their life (and that might not just be the product purchase).

Every business is an expert in something. Are you offering your customer your expertise? Is it easy for them obtain? If you are sending someone to a landing page, besides the conversion is there something on that page (or the Thank You page) that breaks off a little bit of what makes you special and shares it with your audience?

Perhaps that is a white paper, an insight, or a blog. Include something valuable on the autoresponder (selling travel? Maybe it’s the top 10 places to get a hamburger.) Think about it not as an opportunity to continue to sell yourself, but an opportunity to share your knowledge and passion.

At the end of the day, it is what most of us want: an experience that transcends the ordinary; knowledge that helps us grow; an affirmation of community.

Your advertising can be the first step in achieving that. Seriously.