Is An Attractive Website Enough?

Some business owners and marketing managers feel that having an attractive website to capture the customers attention and making them "WOW" is just enough in their marketing drive.

However, a "WOW" website that propagates your product or service message is not enough. Customers have grown pass this stage of product or service message bombardment. Frankly speaking, customers have seen and read a lot of the same propaganda messages all the time. Product or service message have now become unauthentic and seen as empty noise by discerning customers.

Being in an information era does not mean putting out information only about your products or services. It means going beyond that and providing real information that solves customers real problems.

Be seen as thought leader in your market niche. Have the passion to solve customers problems by providing them with the valuable information. Be sincere and even willing to give out what you consider as hidden or reserve secrets that can solve a customers problem. 

These are what delights a customer and not the attractive website and the propaganda product or service messages. 

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How To Promote Your Brand Through Thought Leadership

“Thought leadership centers on earning trust and credibility. Thought leaders get noticed by offering something different—information, insights, and ideas, for instance. Thought leadership positions you and your company as an industry authority and resource and trusted advisor by establishing your reputation as a generous contributor to your industry.”   RainToday.com

Now! how do you promote your brand through thought leadership without mentioning any of the products or services that you offer? This will be quite uneasy for marketers since they have been thought to always mention products and services during the marketing drive.

The following highlights some key things to consider when thinking of how to create thoughtful content:

1. Do not write about your company and products. Thought leadership content is designed to solve buyer problems or answer questions and to show that you and your organization are smart and worth doing business with.

2. Define your organization goals first. Do you want to drive revenue? Get people to donate money to your organization? Encourage people to buy something?

3. Based on your goals, decide whether you want to provide the content for free and without any registration (you will get many more people to use the content, but you won't know who they are), or you want to include some kind of registration mechanism (much lower response rate, but you build a contact list).

4. Think like a publisher by understanding your audience. Consider what market problems your buyer personas are face with and develop topics that appeal to them.

5. Write for your audience. Use examples and stories. Make it interesting.

6. Choose a great title that grabs attention. Use subtitles to describe what the content will deliver.

7. Promote the effort like crazy. Offer the content on your site with easy-to-find links. Add a link to employees's email signatures, and get partners to offer links as well.

8. To drive the viral marketing effects, alert appropriate reporters, bloggers, and analysts that the content is available and send them a download link.

"Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Meerman Scott. This book is available at all bookstores and online booksellers."

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