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Your Prospects Don’t Care About You

Creating digital marketing success means addressing what your prospects do care about: what you can do for them. 

Your prospects don’t care about you. They don’t even care about what you do. 

If your digital marketing talks about you and what you do, not only will you have a great deal of trouble attracting your target audience, you’ll struggle to hold their attention. 

Contrast this with content marketing that focuses on two different things instead: 

  • The problem your prospect needs to solve
  • The benefits they’ll experience working with you

With that shift, you now stand a fighting chance of gaining not just attention, but even the beginnings of trust. With that trust, they may allow you to ask for their email address in exchange for a guide, white paper, or eBook that helps them in some way as they learn more about their options. 
For better or worse, the balance of power has shifted in most transactions today, whether B2B or B2C. It is now the buyer who holds the majority of the power. 

They not only have a thousand ways to keep you, the sales person or marketer, at bay — callerID, inbox filters, assistants adept at screening calls — but they also have the ability to gather all of the knowledge they need to make an informed decision. (When was the last time you walked into a car showroom and didn’t know as much or more about the car you were considering, and its pricing, than the salesperson?) 

In the end, what makes your prospects care about you is your willingness to educate them and your focus on their needs. The former allows you to gain their attention. The latter allows you to hold that attention far enough into their buying process that you can make it onto their short list once they’re armed and ready to interact with a sales team. 

Andrew Schulkind

Since 1996, Andrew Schulkind has asked clients one simple question: what does digital marketing success look like, and how can marketing progress be measured? A veteran content marketer, web developer, and digital strategist, Andrew founded Andigo New Media to help firms find a more strategic and productive mix of tools that genuinely support online brand goals over time. With a passion for true collaboration and meaningful consensus, his work touches social media, search-engine optimization, and email marketing, among other components. He views is primary goal as encouraging engagement. Getting an audience involved in your story requires solid information architecture, a great user experience, and compelling content. A dash of common sense doesn’t hurt, either. Andrew has presented at Social Media Week NY and WordCampNYC, among other events, on content marketing and web-development topics. His technology writing appears on the Andigo blog, in a monthly column on Biznology.com, and for print and online publications like The New York Enterprise Report, Social Media Today, and GSG Worldwide’s publications LinkedIn & Business, Facebook & Business, and Tweeting & Business. Andrew graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Bucknell University. He engages in a range of community volunteer work and is an avid fly fisherman and cyclist. He also loves collecting meaningless trivia. (Did you know the Lone Ranger made his mask from the cloth of his brother's vest after his brother was killed by "the bad guys?")

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