Does Your Marketing Content Focus On Your Customers?

Do you think pro golfers with a spare Sunday relax by hitting the links? Think a professional racecar driver can’t wait to jump in his car and head down the coast? Think a content creator spends some of his spare time reviewing mass quantities of other people’s content and collateral material? Guilty as charged.

But when you love what you do like I do, you tend to find yourself doing it in your spare time. These spare time activities have provided me with great insight into the vast amounts of marketing content out there, and as an avid researcher, I have discovered an epidemic plaguing the marketing content of most American companies, especially smaller businesses that really can’t afford or are not yet ready for a large marketing team. To put it bluntly, American enterprises, so much of your marketing content is not focused on your customers…it’s focused on you!

Now, don’t get me wrong, you have a role to play in your marketing story, and you definitely want to tell your customers about you, but you have to remember that when a customer is searching for a product or service, they are mostly interested in how you can address the challenges they are facing. 

I want you to do me a favor and pull out your most widely used piece of marketing content, then read it while keeping these key questions in mind:

• Is your customer the star of that piece, or are you?
• Does the first sentence of the piece start with your company name?
• Do a lot of the rest of the sentences in the piece also start with your company name?
• Do the main points of the piece talk first about how you do something and what you know, then address how you can solve a customer’s challenge only after you’ve talked about yourself first?
• Does the piece tell your customer which of their challenges you can help them solve and how you will do so, or does it tell them all about your company, your team, what your team knows, and how great it will be for the customer if they choose to work with you?
• Is your content riddled with all of the fancy product, team and department names you’ve so cleverly come up with over the years?

See, if I’m your customer, what I care about is how you can solve my challenges and how quickly, effectively and reasonably priced you can do that. I don’t care what you call your product, teams and departments, how many degrees your executives have, or where they worked before joining your team. I don’t care how many offices you have, that you can trace your company’s roots back to the 1960’s, or how much fun your employees have working there. All I want to see is content that tells me what you can do for me. 

So, if you read your marketing content and find your customer and how you can solve their challenges is not the true meat of the story you are telling, it might be time to re-write that content so it focuses on your customer and their needs, not you and your story. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes as they read your marketing content and ask, “Why should I care?” 

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