If anyone doubts the value of good content, you only have to start looking at the modern customer journey and how it operates to see the importance.
People no longer expect to meet, greet and chat to you to make up their minds.
They effectively start their buying decision process in cyberspace, clicking around and forming an opinion about your brand. 70% of the decision is made before they meet your first actual agent.
This has huge implications for content.
The obvious one being that if you do it well, you can bring someone into an appreciation of your brand and offering in a more automated way and with fewer sales agents.
But there’s a flip side, too: you can’t really afford to do it badly. If you do, what starts as a customer journey set for a sale with you, could spin of into a sale with someone else.
And where average or adequate content that ticked a few boxes would suffice a few years ago, now that content has to be good enough that people seek it out.
Or that Google seeks it out.
Effectively what Google and the modern consumer is asking every company to become is its own broadcasting channel and or newspaper.
And that doesn’t always come easily to many corporations.
It requires mining into the organization to find the genuinely interesting things to say, and sharing knowledge that helps the consumer make up their own minds.
It requires generating fresh material with fresh insights and points of view.
And it requires treating your customers as equals.
And it involves sharing knowledge and information with the outside world, information that sometimes seems hard enough to share internally. But then that is what the sharing economy is really about.