Educate Your Customers with Content to Sell

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Content / Educate Your Customers with Content to Sell

A few weeks back, my wife and I were on the hunt for some new sneakers. She’s doing a 5K race in a few months and I’m doing the Tough Mudder. We both tend to wear out shoes and don’t buy them as often as we should.

I said we should go to one of the big-box shoe warehouses, but she suggested we go to City Sports, a store focused specifically on shoes and gear for runners and other athletes.

It’s a good idea I listened to her.

When we got to City Sports, the shoe salesman wasn’t there to sell us shoes – he helped educate us about the right types of shoes we should be wearing by taking a look at the arches of our feet, how we walked, and how we jogged. As a runner himself – I think he said he ran barefoot in the woods for fun – it was beyond obvious he was a trustworthy source of information.

He definitely showed us shoes that would be right for what we needed, but instead of pushing them on us, he gave us a card with information about our strides and the types of shoes we should get … even if we didn’t get them there.

We felt like he really educated us on what we needed to know about buying the right shoes – so of course we bought them there.

It was a great experience.

If you want to gain trust with your customers – especially online – you need to educate them. The easiest way to do that is with great content.

Help them understand how to better use your products (or your competitor’s, even). Help them solve a problem. Provide them value. Educate them. And do it in their best interest – if they think you’re just trying to sell them on something, they’ll sniff it out (you would, too).

With that, check out these links on how to create great content that gets your potential customers educated and ready to purchase from you.

Attract Customers to Your Community with Content
Building and growing a community around your business can be done with an investment in a good strategy, content, outreach, and a lot of hard work. But keep in mind that your content isn’t just meant to rank, it’s intended to serve a purpose. Draw people in with your community building content, and then pack your foundational content so full of value that making the sale is the natural next step.

Quick take: This is a must-read article. Just go read it.

3 Content Marketing Lessons From Big Brands
Your story is always about the people who use the thing you sell, not about the thing itself. In other words, cast your customer as the hero, rather than you or your product. Tell that bigger story relentlessly and unwaveringly.

Quick take: You may not have the resources of huge companies for your marketing and sales efforts, but if you focus on telling the right stories, you can have the same results for your business.