Review of “Seven Content Strategies to Build Trust with Today’s Savvy Consumers”

Seven Content Strategies to Build Trust with Today’s Savvy Consumers is a short e-book about how brands can use content to establish trust with customers. The e-book is free, but unlike many free information products I’ve seen, this one is worth reading and worth printing out and sticking on your bookshelf. The author, JoePulizzi, is founder and chief content officer of Junta42, president of Z Squared Media and co-author of Get Content. Get Customers. How to use content marketing to deliver relevant, valuable, and compelling information that turns prospects into buyers. After reading this e-book, I’ve put Pulizzi’s book on my Amazon wish list.

Though Seven Content Strategies is short, it manages to provide a lot of actionable information. It starts out by explaining why brands should use content. As brands seek to establish relationships online, Pulizzi argues, providing useful content can position those brands as trustworthy sources of information for customers. By doing that, brands create trust, and trust is required before customers will buy.

“If you want consumers to think of your brand as a trusted information provider, you must begin to think like an information provider, not just a provider of goods or services,”Pulizzi writes. He says the first step is to listen to customers, find out what their needs and wants are, and then tailor information to meet those needs. The information may be in the form of custom magazines, websites,webinars, blogging, social networking content efforts and more. Pulizzi warns against the traditional approach to marketing where brands only talk about themselves and don’t address the concerns of their customers. He also suggests establishing “listening outposts” online to hear what people are saying about, and suggests several free tools to do so.

Besides the mistake of producing content that’s not relevant customers’ needs, Pulizzi outlines several other landmines businesses should be aware of as they become information providers: being unclear or making it difficult for the audience to understand what the company does, providing poor quality content (either in design, the content itself, or by failing to keep content updated), inconsistency in providing content and failing to do anything at all.

Pulizzi argues, rightly in my mind, that with cutbacks in traditional media, companies have an opportunity to step into the void and provide some of the information that people used to get from more robust media outlets. I would add that bloggers and other new players in the media ecosystem are already moving to fill in the gap, so that if companies don’t act quickly they can risk losing an opportunity to become trusted information providers.

Pulizzi then goes into his seven strategies:

1. Assign a conversation champion.
2. Make sure you really know your customers.
3. Conduct a content audit.
4. Try new things.
5. Stick to a schedule.
6. Take care of your customers.
7. Get help to execute your content strategy.

Pulizzi goes into detail with each one of these. He provides a 10-point checklist to ask yourself before deciding whether your company should blog or not, and a 10-point questionnaire that can be used as part of a content audit.

Even if your company is not going to engage in a full-blown content strategy, Pulizzi’s e-book is still worth a read. Some of the suggestions, such as establishing listening outposts and conducting a content audit, are steps nearly all businesses should take. If you’re one of those people trying to make money via content online, say by blogging, the e-book offers some good ideas that can be applied to that process, as well.

Pulizzi wants an email address before you can download the e-book, but so far he has respected that and I haven’t been deluged with sales come-ons, so it seems a very small price to pay. Here’s the link: Seven Content Strategies to Build Trust with Today’s Savvy Consumers.

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Tagged as: Joe Pulizzi, Junta42