Leveraging Content to Pre-Sell Your Offer

Content is information you post online to attract your target audience into your content ecosystem and build authority, rapport and trust in you and your ability to help them. Its purpose is to influence your target audience to purchase from you when they are ready to buy.

The phrase “when they are ready to buy” is very important here, and it is a key factor that differentiates content writing from copywriting. Copywriting, which is the type of writing used in things like ads and landing pages, is focused on persuading someone to take immediate action, like clicking a link to buy something or perhaps signing up for a free e-book or newsletter so that their contact information can be collected and used to target them later.

But copywriting will only generate an immediate purchase if it connects with someone who recognizes they have a problem, and that problem is bothering them enough that they are ready and willing to take action at that particular moment in time. Now, if the product or service they require to fix their problem is relatively inexpensive, their purchase decision will be much easier compared to a solution that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Complexity Complicates the Sales Process

Typically, higher-priced products and services provide complex solutions to complex problems.

When problems and solutions are complex:

• People may not yet recognize they have a problem, or if they do, they might not know what their problem is, or they might be mistaken about what their problem is.

• They could be attributing their symptoms to something different than what’s really causing their problem because they either haven’t figured it out yet or they don’t have the knowledge or experience to figure it out on their own.

In these situations, copywriting isn’t going to work. There’s no reason for anyone to take action if they don’t think they have a problem, nor are they going take action if they don’t understand the true nature of their problem requires your solution to resolve it.

Pre-Selling Through Education and Thought Leadership

In these situations, you need to create content that helps your target audience realize they have a problem, understand what’s causing their problem, and recognize that your product or service is exactly what they need to fix it.

You can do this by providing educational information that informs, and in some cases, helps your audience self-diagnose their problem. You can also provide thought leadership insights that will shift your audience’s perspective, so they are more open to considering your solution.

As you educate your target audience through content, you’re also preselling them on your offer. This means that once your prospect is ready to buy, your pitch will be much easier because very little selling will be required. Much of the selling has already been done through your content.

So your goal with content is not necessarily to get someone to buy right away, it’s to nurture them along in their decision-making process so that when they are ready to make that purchase decision, they will choose to buy from you.

Attention Drives Action

When developing content, a great question to ask yourself is “what value am I providing that will contribute to building a long-term relationship with my audience?” If you’re not providing value, your target audience has no reason to pay attention to you.

But it’s attention that drives action. People act on what they pay attention to, and so there is a relentless amount of competition online focused on capturing and holding people’s attention – including the attention of your prospective buyers! Your job, therefore, must be to cut through the sea of competitive noise and deliver a clear and compelling reason to buy from you.

That can rarely be done with one email, one blog or one social post, which is why content is a long-term game.

People buy from people they know, like and trust, and one email or one social post will seldom provide enough information for someone to determine how they feel about you or your product or service. So once you’ve captured the attention of your ideal buyers, you need to introduce them to a variety of content that enables them to learn enough about you and your product to decide whether or not they like and trust you well enough to want to buy from you.

The challenge is to make your content so interesting and relevant to your audience’s situation that it compels them to consume your content over the gazillion other alternatives competing for their attention – from crazy cat videos to email notifications, social media feeds, online shopping temptations, competitors’ posts and so on.

A great place to start is by making the focus of your content all about your audience rather than all about you. In other words, be sure to address their problems and challenges so they feel heard and understood. Then present your solution and explain why and how it will solve their problem better than competing alternatives.

The Bottom Line…

When you’re offering a complex solution to a complex problem, it’s helpful to provide educational content that helps people better understand the nature of their problem, as well as thought leadership information that persuades people to see things from a new (i.e. your) perspective. 

Done right, educational and thought leadership content will function as a silent sales force that subtly guides, influences and nurtures your potential customers so that when it does come time to make your pitch, your audience is already presold on your offer.