Content and Connection
If you’ve ever seen the popular US version of ‘The Office’, you may well be familiar with the character of Robert California – an applicant for manager position so charismatic that he convinced the CEO to hand the whole business over to him.
He was famous for delivering bizarre insights with a terrifying, often hypnotic intensity. One of his more memorable lines is this:
“You see, I sit across from a man. I see his face. I see his eyes. Now, does It matter if he wants a hundred dollars of paper or a hundred million dollars of deep-sea drilling equipment? Don’t be a fool. He wants respect. He wants love. He wants to be younger. He wants to be attractive.” Robert California
Now we are not saying one should necessarily take management advice from Robert California. But he was onto something in his quote. Regardless of the product, industry or scale, at the heart of all business lies one thing: people. So regardless of what they value and need on a strategic or organisational level, what they want at a personal level will remain largely the same: respect, connection, meaning and value. They want to form relationships with people who understand them, respect them and share their values and humour. They want interactions to be easy, fluid, enjoyable and enriching.
What they definitely don’t want is to have their time wasted, or to engage with things that are boring, repetitive, irrelevant or contrived. To feel like they are being used in pursuit of a particular agenda.
The inherent truth of these human dimensions in business leads to two important C words to consider in any marketing and communications strategy; content and connection. Let’s dive into each one deeper in turn.
Good content is foundational to the development of brand loyalty
Above, we said that in general, all people seek interactions and experiences which are easy, fluid, enjoyable and enriching. So this is exactly what your content needs to deliver on. It needs to be well written, straightforward and easy-to-read, and it needs to carry some form of value – whether that be entertainment, information, or something thought-provoking and challenging.
For too many years marketing professionals focused on trying to create a formula for content: ‘make sure you end on a call to action’, ‘hammer home your marketing message’, ‘load your piece with key search terms’, ‘keep your voice neutral’. There are even online services which use AI to craft content for businesses, using exactly these kinds of rules.
But when we’re bombarded every day with so much information, anything stale, repetitive and bland simply won’t cut it. Gimmicks that are used to hook you in may work the first or second time, but they are quickly recognised by audiences, and resented. What audiences (who, remember, are your potential customers) crave is something real and meaningful.
All of this requires real, thoughtful and considered writing – writing that isn’t afraid to share ideas, express emotions and seek connection. Not every piece of content needs to be about your product – it doesn’t even need to be about your company. It needs to be about your audience – about what they need, want and value. It’s about setting a base of trust and connection – developing the start of an ongoing relationship.
The stats back this up. Marketing research has identified that 96% of businesses surveyed found content marketing was crucial to the development of credibility and trust, whilst from the buying side, 95% of B2B purchasers surveyed indicated they assessed content as a marker for how trustworthy they perceived a firm to be. They also indicated that good content was foundational to the development of brand loyalty. More significantly, all of these benefits are delivered at a cost which on average was found to be 62% less than traditional advertising strategies.
Crafting good content will keep eyes on your company
This is not to say that the ‘science’ of marketing doesn’t have a role to play. Crafting good, native content will keep eyes on your company and build the base of your brand and customer relationship, but the metrics still matter when it comes to reaching that audience in the first place. The goalposts for how that is achieved are constantly moving as search engines change their algorithms – how they assess the ‘quality’ of content. It goes far beyond mere search term frequency these days. At Xpresso we maintain a dynamic approach to dealing with this, creating a content ecosystem that becomes agile; which keeps alive and moving – meeting the shifting content ‘formalities’ commanded by Google, but always prioritising meaning and connection first and foremost.
Content supporting connection
In the paragraph above we mentioned how well-crafted content serves the purpose of forming the basis of connection. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Content is still going to be fundamentally hampered by two particular qualities: its digital nature, and its one-to-many format.
That’s why content creation has to be part of a long-term communications strategy that includes content delivery defining several factors such as planning, outreach, online channels etc. Communicating what your company is doing well is vital, because you want all of your stakeholders to share in your successes, to be invested in them, and to recognise that those successes are entirely down to their efforts and skills.
Connect with content marketing experts
Content has to come with a close, right? Whatever valuable content you’ve delivered to your customer base, the last thought you want to leave them with is one of your firm. That’s conventional wisdom. So logically, we need to end this post telling you why you need to outsource communications to Xpresso.
Well, we’re not going to do a hard-sell for Xpresso on the points that we raised above. Certainly, we hope this blog shows you that we’re aware of the challenges that face our potential clients, and yes, we think that the way we’ve structured our operations mean that we manage the balance between technical understanding and brand- building exceptionally well, and we make life easy, because we know what we’re doing – so we do it right, and we do it fast.
Representing technology firms across the globe in the field of Broadcast and electronic media technologies, Xpresso Communications maintains an international employee basis that excels in providing a complete B2B Marketing Communications strategy that integrates several disciplines, includes constant research to maintain a deep understanding of underpinning technologies, but which also includes the study of audiences and content delivery platforms to achieve the best outreach.
