Content Marketing
Why You Should Stop Selling In Your Content Marketing

Why You Should Stop Selling In Your Content Marketing

June 7, 2022
6 min read

We often get asked by our customers to create content that is more promotional, or that has a direct product tie-in. Which is exactly the kind of content no one wants.

Over the course of my career, I’ve heard more than a few executives huff: “we are in the business of selling stuff ya’ know.”

At this point, I always love to share the fact that over 90% of buyer journeys start with a “basic” search like “what is content marketing.” Guess what? We only rank for that keyword because we wrote other basic posts like what is marketing, what is thought leadership, and what is brand storytelling. These people aren’t ready to buy from us right now. But they will someday.

Ands we’ll know because they’ll read why content marketing is important, how to build your SEO rankings, and how to measure content marketing ROI.

And then we’ll see conversions from our articles on why your business needs a blog writing service, and the truth about content marketing agencies.

As my friend Jay Baer says, there are only 2 letters different from “selling” and “helping.” I’ve tried selling. I’ve obeyed as executives asked me to create content to sell people. I watched that content fail. So stop selling in your content marketing. And start helping. Here’s how.

Stop promoting products in your content marketing for these reasons:

  1. Content marketing must help the buyer. And in doing so, you help the business.
  2. Brands need to think and act like publishers. This means creating content people actually want. Then promote your brand and product “on the edges” of that content.
  3. Promotional content simply doesn’t work. Buyers ignore it as we all have become amazing filters of any content that is trying to sell us something.
  4. Customer-focused content attracts readers who read and share the content providing increased reach, conversion and ROI.

What is content marketing?

I have often said that content marketing is the overlap between what brands know and what buyers ask.

There’s a large amount of content that brands create that no one actually wants. This is the “I am awesome.” “I am smart.” “Buy from us” content. Don’t be that guy or gal.

There is a large amount of content that your buyers are reading and sharing that comes from respected industry publishers. Be more like them.

Today, brands pump out a ton of promotional material. And yet, when we are ready to buy, we seek out the information we need or we love. This consumer-directed search means brands have to work harder to create more effective consumer-focused content.

Content today must compete with pictures of babies and kittens and puppies. If you want your content to be seen, read and shared, it has to be helpful, educational, or entertaining content.

The biggest mistake in content marketing is making the content all about you. We love to quote one of the earliest leaders in content marketing, Ann Handley, who said that in content marketing you need to take your brand (or product) out of the story and “make your customers the hero of your stories.

Effective content marketing seeks to help the buyer. In doing so, you gain their attention, their respect, and ultimately their trust. This trust is what leads to sales.

But try to add a product pitch or promotional tie-in directly to your content, and the readers start to run for the door.

Don’t Believe Me? Test It!

Back in 2007, I joined SAP to run an online lead generation program. The aim was to get more high-quality leads for sales. The natural instinct of the business was to push product brochures, thinking this would provide a smaller number of more highly-qualified leads.

My instinct was to get new leads through thought leadership content, research reports and white papers focused on the buyers in our space.

So we tested this approach through publisher pay-per-lead programs. We gave publishers the content. They gave us the names and contact information of those who downloaded it. At one point we were testing more than 200 pieces of content across a dozen or so publishers. And the results were clear.

Product-based, promotional content drove almost zero response and no qualified leads. While customer-focused content drove, not just a higher volume, but also higher quality leads.

The responders of non-promotional content converted at a higher rate to new business that we could count as closed deals and cash revenue.

We also found out something else that was interesting: targeted content didn’t deliver more leads in the targeted audience.

What does this mean?

When we wanted leads in the retail industry, and pushed content specifically “for retailers,” even helpful thought leadership content, we received just as many leads in the retail industry as more generic, topic-based content such as “how to deliver amazing customer experiences.”

But these topics also drove high-converting leads in other industries as well.

The lesson? You must understand the topics that are interesting for your buyers. Then publish content that seeks to help them answer their biggest questions, challenges and concerns. You topic will likely be broader than you might initially think. And your content will be much more basic than you might think.

The bottom line: if you want content that works – that truly drives leads and sales – create helpful, non-promotional content.

If you want content that gets ignored, try to promote your business or sell your products.

The promise of content marketing is to attract an audience vs. buying it. 

This is why leading brands like Kraft, GE and Red Bull have said that content marketing delivers a significantly higher ROI than their traditional, promotional marketing efforts.

This is how we rank #1 and get a million visitors and nearly all our new clients from our own content marketing. This is how Televerde saw a double-digit increase in leads in 6 months. This is how B2B SaaS companies can 4-5x their traffic and trials.

Because when you earn your audience through effective content, you earn their trust. And when they are ready to buy and looking for information about the products you sell, they will come to you before they go to the competition.

So How Do We Promote Our Products?

The best way to promote your products is on your website.

We help more than 30 businesses to create content marketing experiences that attract early-stage buyers.

We advise our customers to create consistent, high-quality, helpful content that their audience wants to read and share.

Then we work with you on driving leads, trials, or sales conversions in a couple of ways:

  1. Your website’s main navigation. Do you invite people to explore your helpful content? I know a CMO who hates the word “Resources” on websites. TBH, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. Just let people know where they can get educated on the trends and important topics in your industry. Maybe even profile some of your articles on the homepage for those who aren’t ready to but. When your content marketing is part of your website’s main navigation, you will bring in visitors to your site that never came before. Some of them may read a helpful article and decide to check out the products you sell in the main navigation of your website.
  2. Middle-stage offers. Promote a “middle-stage” offer on the right hand side of your content, or at the bottom of the article like we do here. See that content offer after the 3rd paragraph of this page, the one on the right, and the one on the bottom of the page? They are all powered by a wordpress plug-in called AdRotate. Check it out. Create e-books and whitepapers to capture leads. (Or ask us to do this for you!) This is called “promoting on the edges” and constitutes the main way publishers make money today. If you look at our site, you’ll see we like e-books, webinars, free book PDFs, templates and “Ultimate Guides.” These are longer and deeper resources that middle-stage buyers are interested in. They require a name and email address, but are still customer-focused.
  3. Subscribers. If the goal of content marketing is to attract an audience, then the most important measure of success is the number of readers who subscribe to your content. But the added benefit here is you are building a database of names to nurture and convert deeper into the funnel.

At SAP, we had just one rule for our content marketing efforts: no promotional content or product tie-ins allowed.

We put this in place because 99.9% of our website traffic came from branded searches. This means only late-stage prospects who entered our company or product name into a web browser were visiting our site. Most of them had already completed their buyer journey and were just looking to validate the information they had already gathered themselves.

But the audience of people searching for unbranded terms in our product categories was 1,000 to 3,000 times bigger than this. And we weren’t reaching any of them.

By creating a content marketing resource center that sought to help our buyers and not promote the business, we attracted early-stage prospects. We measured our success based on the number of subscribers who opted-in to our content. And we converted a ton of leads that we would have never seen.

We ranked in the top position for the kind of web searches we knew our prospects were conducting. And in doing so, we delivered new leads and new paying customers for the business. We also elevated our internal experts and began what became a passion for me to help activate employees.

So stop trying to promote your product in your content marketing. It doesn’t work. That’s what your website is for.

Helpful content attracts an audience of prospects you would have never seen.

Ready to start helping and stop selling but gain more leads in the process? Learn more about our weekly blog writing services and get in touch with us to learn how we can help!

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of "Mean People Suck" and "The Content Formula", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group. Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.