Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.
A simple marketing model goes something like this: We have a product that solves a problem; a buyer who has that problem finds us, decides it’s a fit and a sale happens. Right? Sounds great! But it puts some big expectations on a buyer:
- that they can feel their unmet need, their problem
- That there’s a well-known product category for out there and that they can find the vendors
- That they can predict the success they’d get from buying our product
It’s a stretch to imagine a buyer could independently do all these. That’s what content marketing is meant for, to educate the prospects, informing them of the solution’s value and elevating us, the content’s author, in the process. Relax marketers everywhere, Content is the answer to your prayers. Content is all you need. What’s that you say? You don’t have enough Content? Or You don’t know how to deploy it externally to its maximum effect?
Well, our guest has good news for you, he feels content can be found internally in our companies. And, for those who sell technology products, he’s also full of ideas on how content draw in prospects, getting them to use and come onside with our products.
My guest is Paul Schneider, came to using content for marketing by using content for a different purpose: training & education. Content has posed the same challenges in their field as ours, as they tried to modernize training content, letting people take it in at their own pace, no matter how distant they were from a classroom.
He got into this field by studying in education and psychology, which led him to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for a PhD. Illinois is practically the American epicenter of large-scale computing, which onto the internet through tools like Telnet, Eudora, the Mosaic browser. Companies built by U of Illinois alumnus include Netscape, Siebel Systems, PayPal and YouTube.
Being at this school while all this was going on, he witnessed efforts to take learning onto the internet, built on top of browsers. He got in on the ground-floor and a decade and a half later is SVP of business development at a company that makes eLearning authoring software Dominknow.
Paul spoke to me from Colorado; he shares how his company, Dominknow Learning Systems use content to market their SaaS-based software.