5 Philly tech companies that mastered the art of content marketing. The best way to sell in 2017 is to stop selling. The content that breaks through is never about your products; it’s about the audience. “We needed customer-focused content produced like a publisher to reach and engage new audiences. SAP has since built a massive marketing database for the company. The analytics company developed several viral content hits by rolling up its sleeves and digging into data to tell a compelling story, creating pieces like the 2015 benchmark report on Ecommerce Growth. As RJ’s former director of marketing, Janessa Lantz told Scribewise last year that the company spurned the addiction of feeding the content beast with frequent blog posts, focusing instead on creating and distributing high-quality pieces that would have an impact. Shelly says there are four main goals the company is trying to accomplish: Bringing new leads into the sales funnel As with all successful content marketing initiatives, the focus is not on what Curalate sells, but rather on what its customers are looking for — information that helps them do their job. Tech should be a role model for the way diversity works. Done well, that’s what content marketing can do for your company — build trust with prospects and customers, lead to faster sales cycles and fuel growth.
The best way to sell in 2017 is to stop selling. Stop pushing your product or service on people. They’ll buy when they’re good and ready, and when they believe that you have their best interests at heart.
In other words, they don’t want to hear how awesome you are, they want to hear that you’re on their side and looking out for their best interests.
The content that breaks through is never about your products; it’s about the audience.
At Scribewise, we define content marketing as “the creation and distribution of journalistic, audience-focused material that ultimately increases customer acquisition.”
“Journalistic” because that connotes a higher level of quality, focused on providing value to the reader rather than some keyword-stuffed gibberish an SEO firm might create. “Audience-focused” because the content that breaks through is never about your products; it’s about the audience — make them the hero of your stories. And “increases customer acquisition” because this is marketing and the goal is to generate leads to drive sales; if you’re just writing for the sake of getting your thoughts out there, start a personal blog.
So, who’s doing a good job of content marketing in the local tech scene? Fortunately, we have some Philly-area companies that are hitting it out of the park.
I know, I know, your company has nowhere near the budget that SAP can get its hands on. However, when Michael Brenner launched content marketing at SAP five years ago, he was a man on an island. With almost no budget, he did most of the writing himself, then begged volunteers to pitch in.
“I created the site because our marketing efforts at the time were mainly speaking only to people who already knew SAP,” Brenner told me recently. “We needed customer-focused content produced like a publisher to reach and engage new audiences. Our key to success was harnessing the power of our internal employees and customers who wanted a platform to share their expertise. Our only editorial rule was that we did not allow direct promotion of SAP products.”
It worked. SAP has since built a massive marketing database for the company. What is now SAP’s Digitalist Magazine reaches more than 1 million readers a month, more than a lot of top business publications. They even sell some…
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