Content marketing from scratch

This article was originally published in the " Uncle F's Hardcore Marketing School " e-newsletter, welcome to subscribe .

Tonight took a student for over an hour on Getting Started with Content Marketing. The student asked:

I read and understood your previous article " Content Marketing Must Start with the Right Thinking ", but I really don't know where to start.

I have given a few tips for your reference:

• Ideally, your product is good enough, or at least has one or two areas where it is better than the competition; if there are, start talking about those areas. It is inevitable that some places are weaker than competing products, and it is good not to talk about it; but it is best to prepare a set of statements in advance when it is questioned.
• If there are really no strong points, create some. A better way is to participate in product development, reflect market demand, and let the development team implement these functions; if there is no way (many marketers cannot influence product design), it is to make a fuss about the argument (for example, "The price is more expensive than others." = Designed for Pyramid Top Users").
• If you can't create it, it's a breakthrough in the way you tell a story or express your product. For example, many clothes are not necessarily outstanding, but you can find beautiful models to show them, and let customers create their own imagination (“I should be as beautiful as him when I wear them”); if it is a soft and hard product, it is Designing a (perhaps non-existent) ideal use case or use case makes the customer feel “better than the competition” when comparing, which is especially effective when the competition doesn’t.
• Marketers must understand their own products in depth, even better than developers or business people, to understand the context of use, and the actual advantages and disadvantages. If you can't tell what's good about your product, sometimes it's because you don't know enough.
• The last is good writing ability; in addition to the ability to choose words and subscripts, the most important thing is to make the copywriting so that the target customers are willing to read and understand. In addition, it is best to let readers who "just look at the main points" get to the main points quickly.

Of course, these "creations" are best based on facts. In the process of in-depth understanding and creation, because you understand market requirements and usage scenarios better than developers, and design logic and functional applications better than business personnel, it is actually easy to find shortcomings in the product itself or in marketing strategies.

(This is basically the same as a product manager, but you're responsible for turning it into a story; a marketer who doesn't know the product has a hard time getting the job done.)

At this time, it is a very important task to reflect the shortcomings to the design team and inform the business personnel to avoid stepping on the thunder; and the improvement of the product itself is often born in such a virtuous circle.

A product that can survive in the market for a period of time and has a certain operating performance must have its advantages to some extent; and as a marketer, we must avoid "I don't understand the product, just help it with grease and powder". idea.

Get a deep understanding of your own and competing products, discover their strengths and weaknesses, and enter a virtuous cycle of improvement, I'm sure you'll have endless material, and no "don't know where to start" or "don't know what to write about" question.