Editorial and Opinion
SShare your thoughts. What’s your opinion? What annoys you about the state of your industry? Where can improvements in business process be made? If you’re an industry veteran, it’s almost certain that you have formed opinions based on your personal experiences over the length of your career. As you draw upon your knowledge you see incorrect assumptions and erroneous observations being expressed. Sharing knowledge that helps existing and potential clients adds prestige to your brand. Brass Razoo can help by assembling your raw ideas and transforming them into a cohesive narrative that you and your team can revise in the fraction of the time it would take to do it yourself. Regularly – just like clockwork. It’s called content marketing: using knowledge and ideas to help build a sales pipeline. Content marketing is all about raising your profile by increasing the perceived value of your organisation and shifting your relationship from supplier-customer to trusted adviser. It’s vital that you utilise this marketing channel to become an effective influencer and opinion leader. Being a trusted adviser describes the most valued business relationship your organisation can build with clients.
Content marketing - nuanced
KKnowledge and experience is invaluable in the IT industry. Editorial often isn't just about product selection or features and benefits but more about rewarding your audience with knowledge and insights that help them make informed decisions. That’s the goal for your messaging – to assist customers in the development phase of a project by sharing your experience and reducing business risk. Adding value to your relationship enhances your brand prestige and helps to strengthen bonds with both existing and prospective clients. By demonstrating you are a market leader, your profile as a trusted adviser is enhanced. Collateral benefits accrue in every aspect of your business because you can attract better calibre candidates as employees or go straight to short-listing without rigorous qualification oversight.
Goals
- Assert your market leadership
- Influence
- Change the status quo
- Use new methods to influence prospects i.e. Tutorials
Instructional, DIY and tutorials
When people think of marketing they visualise advertising, brochures or a website. The messaging is usually simple: "here is our offering and these are the features and benefits we deliver".
Will you buy it?
Content marketing is more subtle. The objective is to inform and educate customers about peripheral issues that may help them solve business challenges using the solutions you provide. Investing in a brochure may help achieve some short term goals but creating a reasoned business case establishes trust and helps your customers’ create their own value proposition and build upon the most important goal in any relationship: being considered a trusted adviser.
Goals
- Assert your market leadership
- Influence
- Change the status quo
Business case templates
In the technology world the biggest challenge service providers’ face is getting noticed. Getting three quotes is fine but building a business case for clients is a real differentiator that makes your business stand out from the crowd. Your customers are in the service delivery business themselves and are benchmarked against key performance indicators or KPI’s. Helping customers build a business case will help them solve problems and achieve more success within their business. IT vendors can draw on vast caches of experience and knowledge accrued over years of successful project delivery. Almost every customer needs help to build a business case that provides measurable justification for investing in technology. If the proposal lacks a compelling return on investment – ROI then it’s more than likely it will not be approved by the management team. We can help you document your business case and provide a framework to offer added value in every business proposal you put forward.
Goals
- Assert your market leadership
- Influence
- Change the status quo
Checklists and FAQ’s
It’s often the most innocuous information that carries the most value from a prospective customer’s perspective. Any way you can help them achieve an outcome more effectively adds value to your business relationship. The more traffic you attract to your website increases the chance of consummating a sale. It’s a numbers game! Sharing experience and knowledge – even information you consider of little value helps to build your credibility and create a bond with the client. Simple factual lists and snappy FAQ’s can help establish your reputation as a market leader. If you invest time producing the content you may be surprised at the longevity of the resources and the volume of traffic search engines will send. A useful webpage often hits the first search page in a Google lookup long after it was created because traffic and quality keep it there. Frequent updating helps to keep the visitors coming. Try out new ways of engaging with prospective clients and stop spending money on dated keywords and SEO strategies. Invest in your own credibility: the payoff is better.
Goals
- Present data in an easy to read format
- SEO is OK but good content is much better
- Make it easy for your audience to digest complex concepts
Executive Guide
Trying to explain why your product is worth more than those offered by the competition is a challenge if your prospect is uninformed. An executive guide is an ideal way to succinctly encapsulate what the technology does, why it’s important and how will it help your prospective client’s organisation. The content should focus on a non-technical audience and explain how the technology benefits deliver successful business outcomes. It’s often overlooked that fostering a relationship with “C” level executives can open many new doors for IT vendors. Influencers seldom sign the cheques or make the important approvals. A well written executive guide that targets an audience whose sole interest is delivering better business metrics can help increase your prospect to customer conversion rate.
Goals
- Assert your market leadership
- Influence decision makers
- Present complex information in a simple format
Editorial is not copywriting
The natural response from a sales team is to push the sales pitch when the intention should be to explain how the solution delivers customer value. Editorial informs while copywriting induces, seduces and exhorts the user with a call to action. Editorial must be nuanced, provide a value proposition supported with business justifications and balanced arguments. By establishing a cogent proposition supported with a valid pros versus cons argument, good editorial can often excel at influencing and ultimately leading to the closure of a sale. Why bother pitching the solution if the product sells itself? All you have to do is document the arguments for and against.
Goals
- Inform and influence
- Explain the value proposition
- Share knowledge
- Provide the framework for a robust business case
