Altruistic content marketing: Give your audience what they want, not what you think they need.

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Let’s face it: It is becoming more and more difficult for lead generation teams to succeed today as they attempt to capture prospects’ attention and connect with them in a meaningful way.

Content can be a solution, but only if it’s done well. Unfortunately, high-quality content tends to be the exception, not the rule, and most content marketing approaches are not being used to their full potential.

In my first blog article, I tried to understand how we got here, and what is wrong with content marketing today. This view can be condensed to the following four points. They may seem obvious, but I think they’re important to illustrate the cause and effect of “content gone wrong.”

1. Pressure: Marketing teams are under a ton of pressure to deliver leads and nurture them through each step of the sales funnel.
2. “Not my job”: Everyone is moving fast – all the time! – and usually juggle many other responsibilities besides content.
3. No long-term planning: Many marketing teams don’t develop long-term content marketing strategies. Instead, they resort to producing blogs, social media posts, or email campaigns to meet daily/weekly digital marketing goals.
4. We’re fooling ourselves: Many companies simply don’t understand the concept of content marketing and believe their approach checks the box for this specialized marketing discipline.

As a result, we find ourselves in a sort of content spin cycle: feverishly churning out higher volumes of bad content that no one really wants – and doing it faster than ever before.

When you think about it this way, it’s hard to see why we all seem surprised such an approach doesn’t work.

A real-world look at content marketing done well

But no one likes a blog that focuses on a flaw but doesn’t present a solution. So we wanted to write an article to provide a closer look at a successful content marketing project.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to go far to find one.

Liveclicker is a Running Start client that provides advanced technology to help marketers personalize email campaigns in highly innovative new ways. As a company, Liveclicker faces the same challenges described above – specifically, how to cut through the clutter and capture prospects’ attention – yet much more acutely than most.

This is true because Liveclicker’s products and services are designed to help marketing teams overcome similar issues by developing innovative email experiences that stand out from the competition.

As you can imagine, it is in Liveclicker’s interests to help its customers and prospects since any success they have will make them happier, more loyal customers willing to spread the word about their positive experience with Liveclicker.

Actually, this is an important point, so let me emphasize it by expanding it a little:

As a company serving marketing teams, Liveclicker understands it’s in its best interests to give them content that helps them succeed, personally and professionally, no matter if they buy Liveclicker products or not.

This is a far cry from “send crappy content more frequently to meet our own lead generation goals.” It’s time for a change.

It’s time for altruistic content marketing

I call this concept “altruistic content marketing.” (In full disclosure, I thought I invented this phrase, but a quick Google search shows that others beat me to it. Bummer.) I won’t define altruism for you (improve your vocabulary!), but the idea is to generate content that serves the well-being of others. In other words, it’s not about you; it’s about your audience.

Liveclicker understood this and developed the perfect example of altruistic content. As many of you know too well, email marketing is an extremely difficult channel, and email marketing teams – particularly B2C retail brands – are constantly on the lookout for tips, tricks, and proven best practices.

To help, Liveclicker’s marketing team came up with the idea of a “LookBook,” a visual sample of many of the most effective real-world email campaigns and strategies. Even better, this ebook was organized in a way to help email marketers apply these examples to specific lifecycle phases, such as acquisition, growth, retention. It provided many different examples, so anyone reviewing it could easily pick and choose a strategy that might work best for them.

The Liveclicker LookBook provides many real-world examples to help email marketers achieve better results.

Liveclicker produced this piece to help customers and prospects, but quickly found that it also benefited. The LookBook generated more interest than Liveclicker expected, and recently, won Gold in MarCom’s 15th Annual Awards. You can download this ebook to see altruistic content marketing in action, learn many email best practices, or both.

At this point, you may have ideas about how you can start developing better content. But if you don’t, stay tuned for future blogs where we’ll provide a number of ideas and strategies to help any marketing organization capitalize on the potential content marketing offers.

Writing standards have gone down, yet prospects continue to be put off by content they don’t need or want. Running Start Communications is a content marketing studio focused on helping companies differentiate themselves through better strategies and execution. Visit our website to learn more.