Don’t you get tired of fretting about content marketing? Don’t you envy businesses that can somehow do without it?

I’ve spent a decade or more in content marketing, helping clients refine and tell their story with case studies, white papers, newsletter articles and Web content. I’ve been helping them demonstrate that they understand their customers’ problems and can be trusted to help solve them.

For that matter, I’ve put out acres of my own content to build trust with my prospects.

For that matter, you have, too. We’ve published jillions of words to attract prospects and help move them down the sales funnel.

Doesn’t it get tiring sometimes? What if we didn’t have to work that hard at it?

Some businesses don’t need content marketing

I spent 24 years looking for a decent barber and finally found one in Bruce, the husband of one of my wife’s friends.

You want to hear the sum total of Bruce’s content marketing?

“Hi. This is Bruce. At 281-5026. Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you.”

Bruce’s shop has been reviewed twice on Yelp, but he isn’t named in the reviews and I doubt he even knows the reviews are there. He has no website, no blog, doesn’t know what a white paper is, has no use for case studies or a newsletter.

But he’s made a successful living cutting hair for ages, and he has a steady flow of new and returning customers.

Obviously, Bruce’s business depends on referrals and word of mouth, not on his ability to land high on the SERPs. In the world of business-to-consumer (B2C), sometimes you can get away with that.

Referrals and word of mouth are important to your business as well, but it’s only part of the mix. That’s why you, as marketing manager, spend your day pumping out audio, video and text to create conversations with prospects and preserve relationships with customers.

Bruce manages to create those conversations and preserve those relationships one-on-one, and the sum total of his marketing presence is a cell phone greeting.

Must be nice…

Of course, business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is a long way from B2C content marketing. But still, it must be nice to compress it into “leave a message at the tone.”

By the way, what do people hear when they phone your organization? What kind of relationships are you building while your callers are on hold or navigating your directory?

photo credit:Brian Evans