At Hail we are big believers in Content Marketing as a way to provide value to customers outside of your products and services, in order to build a loyal audience which can be monetised down the line. Or as the Content Marketing Institute defines it:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

This customer-centric approach is building serious traction in other marketing circles also, and The Marketing Journal has recently published an insightful interview with entrepreneur John Hagel titled “Scaling Trust: Marketing in a New Key”. This article is essential reading for any marketer looking to flip the traditional relationship and move over to the customer's side...

In this context, I’m intrigued by the growing potential to scale a business model that’s been around for centuries, but only for the very wealthy and successful. It’s what I call the “trusted advisor.” What’s that? It’s someone who, rather than sitting on the other side trying to push more and more products and services to me, crosses the table to sit next to me and gets to know me so well that he/she can proactively recommend things to me that I had not even asked about, but that turn out to be extremely relevant to my context, needs and aspirations.
So if you’re a marketer, you’re going to have to do some fundamental rethinking of your approach to marketing. The shift is from affluent niches to mass market.

Here are some early steps you might want to consider taking:

• Assess the customer data you might already have and determine where and how you might be able to proactively help customers (and resist the temptation to use this data for narrow cross-sell and up-sell purposes)

• Determine how you might be able to harness the Internet of Things and other technology to gain even more insight into who your customers are, how they are actually using the products and services you have sold them and their broader context

• Seek out and mobilize third parties that can help add value to the customers you are serving and connect them to your customers in ways that help them and provide you with more data and insight regarding their needs

• Find ways to engage in short term value exchanges that will demonstrate to customers that you are using their data to increase the value that they derive from your products and services and that will motivate them to share even more data with you

Read the full interview by Christian Sarkar here.