Content marketing has been hailed as the ultimate marketing approach of the 21st century. But what if I told you that you could miss all of the benefit of that hard marketing graft, despite doing every single thing right from a content marketing perspective?
The boundaries of marketing
Marketing is a central business function, yet still it is often seen as a narrow sliver of lead generation activities that play a limited part in the overall sales cycle. This is symptomatic for many business sectors – but perhaps most notably in IT and high technology operations.
Marketing becomes reduced to the activity that feeds the funnel, without necessarily having the voice to provide valued, consistent contribution to the design, delivery, distribution and support of the product or service.
So, what does this mean for the modern marketer?
Well – it means that while you do everything in your power to create the right messaging and identify the right channels, you may still be swimming against the tide if the solution or its delivery is letting down the clients.
The marketing-shaped business
Let me tell you a secret: I have a little crush on my website domain provider.
Despite being just your average, run-of-the-mill domain broker and hosting service, they are absolutely awesome when it comes to customer service. In fact, they’re so good that I actually look forward to having a support question just so I can pick up the phone or start a web chat window with one of their consultants. The support is consistent, but it’s more than that – their attitude is consistent too. You call them up and they actually make you happy.
Whenever anyone tries to tell me that marketing is fundamentally detached from customer services – or any other part of a business operation for that matter – I think of the feeling I get when I speak to one of those wonderfully perky and helpful support reps. It brings a smile to my face. And I realise how that feeling sometimes arrives just from seeing their logo, or logging onto their system, or even thinking about hosting.
Consistency is key
Now, to be honest, that FEELING is possibly the best marketing tool on earth. But how do you recreate that? How do you bottle it up and splash it around? One thing’s for sure; it can’t be done with content marketing alone. It requires the entire business to take a completely customer-centric approach and pull the same levers to deliver the same customer experience across every single layer of engagement. And it needs marketing to be placed firmly at the centre of the business.
It’s not easy to build a business that people love to work for and buy from. But if you want a good measure of what your marketing messaging is, it could be an idea to start by popping your head into the customer support department.
Want to discover more about marketing’s role in the business? Take a look at www.theitcontentfactory.com/Companymals