Your job is to educate people so that they want to buy from you, they trust you and therefore trust what it is you are offering them!

In the first instance they don't necessarily want to hear about what you have for them by way of products or services, what they want and need is to better understand the WHY!

This is how Content Marketing works, at the same time that you are making your Brand the expert, you are supplying you customers with what they want. You aren't interrupting them and telling them that they need it, you are allowing them to have sufficient knowledge to see that they can't progress without it.

It's axiomatic that people want to work and do business with the best, the experts. If they have taken the advice of the experts, they feel better because they don't want to be wrong, they feel as though they have made the right choice.

Even though your product and you competitors' are much the same, in terms of features and potential benefits, because yours comes from the 'acknowledged experts' it minimises the risk for them of having made a bad choice.

By virtue of the service and value of your content, you have established yourself as an 'Authority ' and as such, "Authority Rules'.

The value and the service you supply to your prospects, taken together, are an important source of psychological influence and are worth paying for in and of themselves. This is strictly counter intuitive, instead of simply paying for advertising you are creating content and giving it away! When your prospects are empowered by your content, they follow their own trail, and it works!

Google uses authority as a measure to determine which page ranks ahead of the others because people want to learn before they buy these days. When they factor in signals based on the authority of the actual writers with such things as AuthorRank, it is easy to see how search engine domination can be achieved. That's not to say that it is easy to do, a very strong content stream is necessary and needs to be maintained for a very long time!

Content + Social + Search = Content Marketing

That looks a fairly simple equation. The trouble is that many see the process as existing in separate 'boxes' instead of seeing the equation as a whole, single, entity. This can result in a mess of Galactic proportions and can result in the abandonment of online marketing due to poor ROI figures.

In order for Content Marketing to be successful, and to minimise the risk of being zapped by Google, the three components must be used as parts of the whole, all centred around Content!

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