How Much Content Should You Share Before A Prospect Buys?
The case for not holding anything back
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Content marketing is a powerful tool for building trust between your business and your potential customers. Many business owners and marketers worry about oversharing. What if you give all of your best stuff away, and people just take your content to solve their own problems?
Who is Your Ideal Customer?
When thinking about your content marketing strategy, before you worry about what kind of content you need and how much of your secret sauce you should share, you need to get clear on who you are serving.
People who are looking to do things for themselves are not your target buyers. You are selling a solution. Your ideal customers want a full solution, not a blueprint for solving their problems on their own. The freebie seekers and the do-it-yourselfers are not your ideal customers. You don’t need to worry about them.
If none of your target buyers convert into paying customers, this means that you have a problem with your business model, not that you overshared. It means you are not solving a sufficiently painful problem. You may want to change your business model to focus on advertising or affiliate commissions instead of direct product or service sales.
Self-Help and Lawyers
I fell into copywriting after burning out as an attorney. Most of my early clients were lawyers. The most successful lawyers had tons of content that took readers step-by-step through complicated legal issues.
The law firms that struggled to make content marketing to work were also afraid of oversharing. These firms worried people wouldn’t want a lawyer if they could use content to solve problems on their own.
Why did the oversharing lawyers prosper?
When a potential client comes across an article that describes their exact situation and details exactly how to resolve the problem, one of three things tended to happen.
One, the reader would bookmark the site and move on. Most of the time, they never came back to the article.
