Content Marketing is Crucial for Selling

Content marketing doesn’t only ensure greater loyalty and give you a big audience to sell to though: it also gives you more impact and authority.

Think about your favorite celebrity. Someone that you really look up to, whose work you admire and who you think has got their life up together. Imagine if they recommended a certain item of clothing, or a certain health supplement. Would you be more likely to buy it?

The objective of content marketing is essentially to build that kind of trust and authority directly. Instead of working with an authority, you are going to become that authority.

Take a look at someone like Tim Ferriss, Pat Flynn or even Tony Robbins. These are people who offer value through their blogs and their videos so that when they have something to sell, they have millions of people waiting to buy from them. Everything they release is a hit, which is because of the groundwork they put in at the start. The same goes for YouTube personality Elliott Hulse, or bodybuilding site T-Nation.com. These are sites with fans not just readers.

How Content Marketing Creates Fans and Buyers

We’ve seen the basics of how content marketing works, but now let’s dive into it in a little more detail. What is the precise process that converts a first-time visitor into a rabid fan? How does content marketing take someone from a ‘cold lead’ all the way to a ‘buyer’?

Sales Funnels

This is the power of content marketing and it’s something that you can see used effectively in countless sales funnels and by many other marketer.

Think of it this way: if you landed on a website and the very first thing it did was to try and sell you something, what would you do? You’d probably leave! You never asked to buy something and more to the point, you have no reason to trust the person selling. It looks like spam and you leave.

This is considerably different from being a long-time reader of a blog and then learning that the writer also has a book out. This is a much less invasive way of discovering a product and more to the point, you know something about that blogger, you know that they know their stuff and you can trust them. They have built a brand through their content marketing and that means you’ll feel much more comfortable handing over your cash.

This is a typical ‘sales funnel’, which in turn is any system that is designed to take someone from their first encounter with a brand all the way to wanting to buy from the creator. A funnel will almost always start with something free – a free taster – and then encourage more and more engagement right up until the point where it tries to make a sale.

But this sales funnel – like all sales funnels – also relies heavily on content, making it an example of content marketing as well. If you want to build trust and generate sales from your own website or blog, then you need to mimic this process. And it starts with amazing content.