Here is a great top 10 listof the reasons why in an era of 140-character tweets and Facebook status updates organizations still have to focus on creating high-quality content compiled by the Alterra Group and members of the Thought Leadership Marketing Mastermind Group on Linked In.
Some of the key points we feel strongly about include:
- High quality thought leadeship content is critical to providing customers with compelling ideas, insights end education differentiates the sales experience – which is a key driver of loyalty.
- Tweets and real time updates are popular – but remain “top of the sales funnel” tools that do not generally drive measurable sales outcomes. Marketers need deeper content to support the bottom half of the sales funnel where conversations, consideration, advice, execution and relationships happen. There is very little focus here by most companies, plus at some point humans will need to be involved in that conversation which is another problem.
- Excellent thought leadership content is needed to drive quality conversations. Tweets generate interest, and are perhaps good conversation starters, but are not entirely effective at setting up human meetings or conversations that last more than two sentences.
- Quality thought leadership content is needed to support sales coaching, needs based selling, cross sell without product pushing and a whole range of high quality selling activity.
- Quality thought leadership content can make low cost selling channels (with humans like call centers, retail, or distributors or influencers) much more effective and valuable.