How Charismatic Content Makes You a Leading Expert

Content marketing goes wrong when it’s all content (information) and no marketing (message).

Content is an almost deceptively powerful vehicle for transmitting marketing messages.

By this, I mean that offering prospects valuable information rather than just a blatant sales pitch is more likely to get your foot in the door to an eventual sale. 

Even though people want to buy things to solve our problems and satisfy our desires, we also have intrinsic filtering mechanisms that shift attention away from messages that are “selling” to us.

To avoid this powerful internal spam filter, you must lead with something enticing and valuable first. That’s why one of the core principles of the Leading Expert Way is: 

What you do before you sell is more important than your skill at “selling.”

This is what skilled copywriters call indirection. Rather than a direct benefit-oriented sales approach, an indirect method is used to spark interest, build trust, establish shared identity, and prove authority before the offer is made. 

You may have seen this on great sales pages that address the problem in some fascinating way. Maybe a story about a one-legged golfer that leads to an offer for a system that improves your swing.

Content marketing takes the art of indirection to an entirely new level. 

Rather than trying to establish trust, likeability, authority, unity, and other principles of influence with a single long sales page, you can do it over time with valuable content that solves an aspect of the prospect’s problem. And ultimately, it’s much more effective at getting your target audience to buy the rest of the solution.

One way content marketing goes wrong is when it’s all content (information) and no marketing (message). For example, in the realm of search engine optimization, the desire for rankings and traffic in service of the algorithmic Google gods often entirely forgets the actual goal — conversion.

In other words, you get traffic to your website, but there’s no connection with those visitors. No connection means no conversion into your sales process, and ultimately, that means no sales.

Educating your prospects with information is essential, but the marketing is in the message. And as you’ve seen, the message is the psychological and emotional connection you establish between you and the audience, not the content it’s wrapped up in.

The Four M Checklist for Effective Content Marketing

We’d all like to think that the inherent “quality” of our content is what matters, but what actually determines success are the four Ms: medium, messenger, multitude, and merger.

Let’s take a look at each. Rather than separate phenomena, each is interrelated and ultimately aimed at achieving the fourth and final “M.”