the content mint newsletter

The second stage of ​the buying cycle​, which comes between the first impression and commitment, is the longest stage. This is where the customer is learning more about what it is that you have to offer which might address a specific need they have.

While your ​first impression​ content should be easy to stumble upon and generally applicable, this second-stage learning content should be something of a guided discovery process into areas of particular interest for the customer. This can look a lot of different ways, but most likely this will involve some kind of repository of content to be explored by the customer.

If we return to our idea of ​ambience​, i.e. controlling the amount of repetitive information desired for either clarity or resonance respectively, we can start to decide what shape that repository might take. It could be a gallery of photos of an event space being used in different ways (repetition to create an experiential desire), or a static list of specs about a specialized tool that is unique to your process (low repetition but high clarity of information).

Whatever it looks like, keep in mind that there are two goals of this phase that your content ought to help achieve:

1. build confidence to advance to the buying stage
2. turn away those who will never advance to the buying stage, which avoids wasting either their time or yours with an unnecessary introduction

The content which details your offering should make it clear who it is for, and just as importantly, who it is not for. If this is done well, it makes the critical commitment decision in the next stage that much easier.

The first stage of the buying cycle is where your content will most likely be doing a lot of heavy lifting to quickly give prospective customers an idea of whether or not they might want to do business with you. While it is still very important, this early content will probably provide more extrinsic than intrinsic value, pointing to value that can be found in the offering or content to be discovered later.

At this point you want to convey the basic sense of who you are and what you do (a.k.a. your positioning).

While those things may be easily stated in various ways, also consider what it is that your current customers value about working with or buying from you that goes beyond the actual offering itself. (Hopefully this is something more than just price…)

Is it how skilled and effective you are at what you do, or some other technical detail of your craft? Or maybe it’s a feeling of a friendly working relationship or a cozy retail environment.

Now consider how you can match the form of the content you present at this stage to match the desired effect of this first impression?

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P.S. Depending on what content you are providing for customers in the later stages of buying, it is entirely possible that some customers will completely skip this stage and jump in at a later stage. However it is still useful to have some content that addresses this stage for those who do come in cold, or for those who jump in later and need to back up and reinforce an incomplete first impression.

The content you create will most likely serve different purposes for your audience depending on what stage of the buying cycle they are in.

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Depending on what you offer, some of these stages will be taken care of by actual in-person communication, but in general there is usually room for content communication in each phase. In fact, in many cases it can speed up the buying process if that communication can happen on the buyer’s own time via content before they ever reach out or walk in your door.

Since the form and context of your content will probably look different at the different stages, we’ll take some time in the next few days to consider each one in more detail.

Beyond the intrinsic or extrinsic value that your content ought to provide to your customers in some way, there is a third dimension of content value which we might call meta-value. This is the value that you the creator get out of the act of creating the content itself.

Whether it’s learning a niche topic in your field better to write a blog post, or reconsidering the aesthetic appeal of your storefront before taking a photo, intentional content creation should mean improving yourself, your understanding of your offering, or your ability to deliver it in some way.

Being in the target-market of your own content is a good litmus test for the value you are generating. After all, if you have gained something by the creating of the content, chances are that someone else can benefit from it as well.

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P.S. Being in the target market for your own content still doesn’t guarantee that your content will provide value to someone else. So to avoid creating entirely self-serving content, it’s still important to either verify its value another way, or else give the audience the opportunity to opt out.

All media has a time-cost. Anything we create will take some amount of time to consume. But not all media has the same time-cost.

For example:

• an image has almost no required time-cost. It can typically be instantly observed in its entirety; any remaining time spent is at the sole discretion of the audience
• the time-cost of written text is almost completely subjective. It is dependent on the reading speed of the audience, but it can also be skimmed and stopped or started from any point the reader wishes
• recorded audio has a semi-fixed time-cost. It can be sped up or slowed down, but with varying levels of detriment to the effect of the message (i.e. speech can be sped up to any point that the hearer can comprehend, but music will lose most of its intended impact if not heard at its original tempo)
• video has the most rigid time-cost. It can also be sped up or slowed down, but it is least desirable to do this with video because of the effect it has on both the audio and the natural movement of the visuals and pacing of the edit, etc.

In order to avoid wasting our audience’s time, it is necessary to at least make a basic assessment of how much time we are asking them to spend in the first place.

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P.S. Taking advantage of the tools in our publication platforms such as video or podcast chapters or a table of contents for a blog post are also courtesies we can extend that give the audience more agency over their time-spend with our content.

The way you create and, more importantly, publish your content should be consistent with your business’ offering.

First of all, when I say “offering,” I mean that at a very fundamental level. This is usually one of a small list of things, e.g.:

• products
• information
• services
• experience
• or transformation

The second thing to consider about your offering is: where does it fall on the scale from luxury to necessity?

Once you have paired those two qualities of your offering, you can start thinking about how to build the acoustic environment for your content.

For example, if you offer a service that people will only need once, or very infrequently—maybe in an emergency situation—the way you publish information about it should probably be more or less static and well organized. Something like a searchable, categorized library which is easy to navigate even in an agitated state.

What would not be useful is a scrolling feed designed to be subscribed to. Subscribing is not necessary if your service is only needed once, and it means that relevant information probably has to be aimlessly dug out of a sea of click-bait headlines.

On the other hand, if you provide a transformation of some sort, such as coaching or education, then ongoing, subscription-style content which gives prospects encouragement or information on a regular basis might be just the thing.

Recently, I was on the website of a local small business and as I poked around I stumbled on the “About Us” page. What struck me as strange about this page is that it was written in the first person, but there was no face or name of the owner, or any staff, or any other way to connect the “I” in the writing to a person.

As a small business, you have a choice to make when you start communicating to your audience:

“Am I saying this, or is the organization saying this?”

There are of course pros and cons of each.

If you are going to be working directly with customers and need to establish credibility as an authority on a topic to give customers confidence in your ability to get the job done, then communicating as a person is probably the best way to go.

On the other hand, if you want to convey a feeling that puts the customer in the right frame of mind to desire your product/experience, associating that feeling with your brand or product may be more appropriate than attaching it to a person.

Whatever you choose, make it clear to the audience where the signal is coming from.

As I stated in ​yesterday’s message​, people generally don’t like to be sold to. If you have any kind of ad-blocker installed on your browser, or if you have declined a site cookies popup, or paid for Spotify, you’re probably one of those people.

But . . . people do like to go shopping. And when you’re shopping you are naturally taking in a lot of sales messages at once, comparing them, and making value judgements between them. On purpose.

So what’s the difference?

The difference is who is in control of the experience.

Selling to non-shoppers can potentially be a ​waste of time​ for both parties, but if we have our content and messaging organized, ​clarified​, and easily accessible to a shopper already prepared to spend money, we won’t need to do much selling in the first place.

Marketing is not a verb. At least not anymore.

There was a day, under the old regime of one-way legacy media, when audiences were captive to marketers who “targeted” them—like fauna grazing in the wild forests of content—in order to collect them like trophies in bundles called “market share.”

But in the internet age of continual two-way communication, community, and choices, those old methods of selling seem cruel and unusual. (If you need proof, just visit the YouTube page of pretty much any major global brand and notice how alien and disconnected from reality the content seems, even when they try to be “authentic.”)

While megacorps may be able to afford to create billions of dollars worth of weird advertisements designed to brainwash entire swaths of culture, not everyone has that luxury. The good news is that people hate to be sold to anyway, what people want is to be talked to, and that’s what the internet does best.

Ultimately, marketing ought to be the natural outcome of communication.

Put another way, marketing is what happens when you effectively communicate something of value.

As a small business, you are more personally connected with your audience than the megacorps will ever be. You already speak their language and you know what they need to hear, all you have to do is speak up.

There are two ways that any piece of content can create value: intrinsically and extrinsically.

Extrinsic value is like a treasure map. It is not very valuable in itself, but rather it points you to where something of value can be found.

For example, an advertisement letting you know about a deal at a restaurant, or a customer testimonial that gives you more confidence that a particular business can deliver on their claims.

Intrinsic value is like the treasure chest. It contains something valuable within itself.

Think of an informative how-to video that helps you solve a problem or learn a skill, or a film which gives you a sense of nostalgia or changes your perspective in some way.

When it comes to your business, the more intrinsic value your customers or prospects feel that they have gained from your content, the more they already feel a debt of gratitude when it comes to their purchasing decisions.

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P.S. These forms of value are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And, since value is subjective, it’s also possible for a piece of content to contain neither form of value for a particular person.

But we want to avoid that as much as possible, because that’s wasting time.