Part of my schtick when I’m attempting to explain content marketing to my clients is that ‘it’s not about selling this product at this moment; it’s about being part of the conversation.’ If you sell snow shovels but no one needs a snow shovel at the very moment you run an ad, you’ve lost them forever. But if you’re continually engaging potential clients with an ongoing dialogue, when they do in fact need a snow shovel, they’ll think of you first.
I went to Geek Girl Boot Camp this past weekend – eight solid hours of tech seminars, most pertaining to various social media platforms. I took a class with a Pinterest guru. She was explaining the concept of content marketing and someone said; ‘But I don’t care about that. All I want to do is sell my line of T-shirts.’
The instructor stopped what she was doing and acted out approaching someone at an actual networking event. She ‘introduced’ herself and then said ‘Wanna buy my social media package?’ The delivery fell flat. If you wouldn’t push such a hard sell in person (and I hope you wouldn’t), why would you do it on Facebook?
