Inbound Marketing Solutions to Replace Traditional Advertising and Cold Calling

Many salespeople have been critical of cold calling as a sales strategy for several decades. At the same time, marketing departments have been struggling with how to use traditional advertising techniques to reach current and potential customers.

It turns out that customers have always preferred being in charge of the sales process. Cold calls and ads were probably doomed to failure from the very beginning. But for at least 50 years, marketing and sales managers seemed dedicated to these losing sales strategies.

One successful replacement is commonly referred to as inbound marketing — providing educational content for potential customers with a customer-centric sales process rather than a marketer-centric process.

Educational Content for Inbound Marketing Success: 5 Strategies

For businesses and organizations of all sizes, the concept of inbound marketing is emerging as the successor to traditional sales and marketing techniques. Discerning consumers have largely dictated this outcome by rejecting old-fashioned cold calling and advertising campaigns. Today’s internet-savvy customers have increasingly made it clear that they are seeking high-quality educational content when making buying decisions rather than a controlled sales process that routinely withholds key information.

The challenge for C-Level executives and business owners is to deliver educational content that meets the high expectations of potential buyers for products and services. Here are five primary examples of content that can satisfy potential and current customers when the content is produced with relevant information and attention to detail:

• YouTube and SlideShare presentations — a video or slide presentation is preferred by many potential buyers during the decision-making process.
• Extended articles — the inbound marketing focus means little or no promotion while concentrating on helpful information.
• Press releases — not just any news release will do: the customer-centric focus is on concise, non-promotional and informative content.
• Case studies — to demonstrate how you solved a specific problem for a specific customer.
• White papers — a longer treatment designed for niche audiences that already understand the basics of a product or service.

If you want more details about how to improve business writing by avoiding common mistakes, here is a YouTube video that I produced:

Respecting Your Customer’s Time

Just as patients never enjoy spending excessive time in a doctor’s waiting room, customers want their time to be well-spent when reviewing educational content in any form — from extended articles to case studies, slide presentations, press releases and white papers. Time is always part of the equation when first-time visitors review educational content. Depending on first impressions, some potential buyers will leave the page or presentation within 30 seconds or less.

One of the most important factors in influencing how long internet visitors stay in the same place is the perception of high-quality content. As you might expect, low-quality content produced by the low bidder on a crowdsourcing site is not likely to be part of a winning content strategy. To keep your visitors engaged enough to make a favorable buying decision, high-quality educational content is routinely the common denominator.

But high-quality content and your customer’s time can also get in the way of each other. Very few consumers have an unlimited time budget — so don’t overlook the value of being concise. For example, a thoughtful 10-slide presentation will often succeed where a 25-slide approach falls short. In a similar vein, a 3000-word white paper might not be the “smart move” when a 750-word article can make a similar point much more efficiently. As another compelling illustration of how brevity can be remarkably effective, a one-page proposal often “works” better than longer business proposals.

The lesson to remember — longer is not always better, even when the expanded version represents the highest possible quality.

True or False: Thought Leaders

Thought leadership involves multiple strategies.

The concept of thought leadership appears to mean widely different things to companies that have decided to make it a primary corporate goal. One consensus definition involves answering the questions of consumers, buyers and readers on a consistent basis. But this approach should start with a critical question — what is the most effective way for thought leaders to do this?

One Practical Alternative: True or False Questions (and Explanations)

For a variety of reasons, a straightforward true-or-false format is often overlooked when publishing business content. Please keep in mind that using true or false statements in an extended business article is not the same thing as using T-F questions in an academic setting. With business writing (and thought leadership), the goal is to inform and educate — and T-F statements have the potential to do this effectively.

If you want an illustration, here is one that covers topics like zombie foreclosures and life after bankruptcy: Overcoming Personal Finance Challenges

Becoming an effective thought leader is a recurring challenge.

What Is Thinking Outside of the Blog?

Potential customers for products and services are increasingly seeking high-quality educational content that will help in making well-informed purchase decisions. To find this content, buyers are primarily relying on social media and search engines. Meanwhile, a high percentage of blogs are not showing up in search engine results and social media recommendations. Among the reasons for the dwindling popularity of blogs are two key factors — too many links and over-promotional content.

While a few blogs still provide stellar examples of excellence, that is proving to be the exception rather than the rule. Here are five major problems that have emerged in the blog universe during the past 15 years:

• Blog Networks — For example, BuildMyRank (BMR) went out of business when it was discovered by a leading search engine that BMR was creating hundreds of blogs simply to provide paid links to subscribers of their service.
• Links and More Links — While one or two links can be appropriate in a typical blog post, adding excessive links (5-10 is not unusual) becomes distracting (and annoying) to readers.
• Brief Content with Few Details — If a blog post contains only 50 to 250 words (as many blog posts do), the content is likely to fall short of what is required to fully educate a prospective buyer about a service or product.
• Content Spinning — In a rush to publish frequent blog posts, an ill-advised decision to spin content (by using algorithms that create many articles from one original) results in duplicate content rather than high-quality original content.
• Blogs Designed for Search Engines Instead of Readers — Too many blogs are primarily produced to enhance search engine optimization factors rather than communicate with a real audience.

A common outcome due to the multiple blog problems described above is that the impacted blogs (and perhaps blogs in general) lose readers as well as traffic generated by search engines. As I observed in a comprehensive 2017 overview of the problem, “Both business clients and search engines have devalued the use of published content that is not original, accurate and informative.” Nevertheless, many businesses continue to feature a blog as a primary tool for communicating with website visitors.


One Solution: Think Outside of the Blog

Perhaps it is time to think of the blog as a vintage relic that no longer deserves to be featured and promoted — much like 8-track audio tapes and videocassette recorders eventually reached a point of decreasing functionality compared to better alternatives. Today’s customers want to be in charge of the buying process and do not want a marketer-centric sales process like cold calling, advertising and promotional blogs. What is emerging as a viable solution is a customer-centric and inbound marketing sales process that emphasizes Thinking Outside of the Blog with educational and non-promotional content — examples include extended articles, case studies and white papers.

Common Themes in Thinking Outside of the Blog

The Bottom Line:

I consistently see several common themes in a successful transition to Thinking Outside of the Blog. Here are two of them:

• Providing high-quality educational content for consumers
• Replacing marketer-centric sales processes with customer-centric sales processes

Remember First Impressions — High-quality customer-centric content can provide a solid foundation for making positive first impressions when prospective consumers visit websites. Instead of publishing a promotional and short blog post, Think Outside of the Blog by supplying comprehensive educational content like white papers, extended articles and case studies. If you need another reason to do this, please remember the timeless wisdom offered by Will Rogers — “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”