Use the Obvious in Your Content Marketing for More Leads

The other day I was listening to a psychologist discuss how children learn, and she said a child’s willingness to ask obvious questions was the key.  She went on to say most adults might assume everyone else knows the answer and therefore we don’t dare ask the obvious questions. It got me thinking. How many times in your business do you stop talking about the obvious because you assume everyone already knows it? What if there are potential customers out there who want to know the obvious about your business? This is the basis for great content marketing!

Thankfully we feel no shame in asking Google the obvious questions. “What does URL stand for?” “What does the word BLOG really mean?” “How much does the human head weigh?” See, I can ask Google the obvious AND the random. No shame. Google will take me to the answers that I seek.

The obvious question for you is, are you answering your customers' obvious questions in a straightforward manner on your website, blog and social posts so Google will take those inquisitive customers to you?

Have you ever had someone that you’ve known for a long time (like your mom), or someone you've been connected with on a social media platform for quite awhile, ask, “What is it that you do?” Of course we all have. There are people who dare to ask us what we consider to be …the obvious!

There are two reasons we may not be stating the obvious any more:

We’ve said it already. Perhaps you wrote a blog post five years ago answering this exact question, or you tweeted about this last year. You don’t want to be redundant. Here is a newsflash: People are not sitting at their computers waiting for your next post to drop. Aside from your mother, most people do not see every post you write. (I apologize if this is hard to take.) In your mix of content, you will need to write the same points over and over, changing up how you might say them, to get a fraction of your contacts to read and then remember them. We have evolved beyond that point. Sometimes I find myself tempted to write, not for my target audience, but for the other “experts” out there who might read my content. After all, what if they read my obvious post and think I am simple? Oh sure, if I am publishing an article for others in marketing or social media, I might want to provide more technical expertise and discuss tools that only someone working full time in digital marketing would care to take the time to look at (and they would probably still say I was simple.) If, however, I want to answer the questions that a potential customer might have, I would need to get into their 8-pound heads and go back to the beginning.

My husband often reminds me that not everyone is a freak like me, with 230 apps on their mobile phones and accounts set up on every social media site known (and unknown) to mankind! It’s hard to fathom, but we all fall victim to the curse of knowledge at some point. We have stored up a wealth of knowledge over the duration of our career and assume that our customers, team members and family, all have the same level of knowledge, or desire to have this same level of knowledge. Another shocker here…they don’t.

It may be time to go back to the beginning. Take some time to ask obvious questions of your customers like, “Do you know what we do?” “What are you spending time doing that we might be able to help you with?” Tell them you would like to answer the most obvious questions they have as well. No shame. Once you have gathered some of this information, write a series of blog posts or create some short videos answering these obvious questions. This will be great content for your inbound marketing and content marketing.

Do you need help with your content marketing or inbound strategy? Did you know we do that? What’s an obvious question YOU have? Come on….ask us.No shame.

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