Exploring Go-To Marketing Strategies That Deliver Success in Marketing Programs

About the Guest

Amit Vaish has extensive experience in B2B global technology marketing and management. He has expertise in building and driving high-performing, agile marketing teams that deliver integrated campaigns focused on creating top-of-the-mind awareness, generating demand, and improving market leadership. He has worked across commercial, financial services, and public sector companies. His 20 years of experience in the IT industry helps bring unique perspectives to the go-to-market strategy that delivers successful marketing programs.

Connect with Amit Vaish

Key takeaways

• Content marketing has the power to shape culture by changing people’s perspectives and enabling them to express the facts.
• To achieve the end goal of assisting individuals in making the best choices through the information provided, many aspects of content creation must be recognized.
• Learn how to leverage a brand or an infrastructure using various techniques and channels as a marketing tool.

Quote

“Marketing is not about selling. You really need to make that emotional connection. Have that relationship built up.”

Highlights from the interview

Why content marketing?

If you look at the past decade or two, the way the overall economy and the business climate have changed, and the way things are changing with a world moving towards more being digital. Number one, the way things have become complex, both on the business problems or business challenges and the solution side. The second is the changing buyer behavior. Customers today are much more empowered versus what they were 15 or 20 years back. And that’s primarily driven by the digital technologies and the different channels they have at hand to do their research. They want to be in control. They want to understand a solution before they buy. The third thing is the market is crowded.

What makes it so passionate about content marketing?

One is there are many definitions of content marketing. One of them is creating content or distributing it and engaging and attracting a customer in simple terms. The other way is if you look at the oral buyer’s cycle, whether it’s three-phase awareness, consideration, or decision, or a bit more extended phase, which is awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, or decision grade, either way, whatever you look at it from one stage to the other, when a customer is traveling right across the buyer journey, some triggers happen, which you would have heard of as moments of truth. In simple terms, content marketing is truly about seizing those moments of truth. Marketing is not about selling. You really need to make that emotional connection. Have that relationship built up. That’s the core element of content marketing. It can change perceptions. It can change behaviors.

Framework/Methodology that you would like to share in general about when you are doing this.

I’m very much a process-oriented and framework-oriented person, but at the same time, what everybody also needs to realize is frameworks and processes are in place to achieve an objective, but you should never overdo it. A framework is nothing but a process that you’re going to follow.

The three critical elements of creating the messages are context, contrast, and concrete. The other model that I’ve used for a long time is by Mandel. It’s a sitemap situation, complication, implication, proposal or position action, and benefit. These frameworks have a certain level of similarities because all the frameworks’ end objective is to take your audience through that sine curve. Help customers move through their buyer journey and enable them to make the right decision.

What are the underlying reasons and missions that you should drive your companies?

Look at content marketing more holistically, end to end, with the whole single objective of helping our prospects and customers make the right decision. One of the things that I drive, number one, is much research around understanding your customers. And I think this is the most time-consuming and effort-intensive task for a content writer to understand their target audience. Only then can you speak to them or speak their language.

There are different buyer personas in the organization. One is executive or functional. It could be a line of the business head or could be the head of that function. The function is going to use that solution. A technical buyer will focus more on the customer or the infrastructure or the cost associated with it, innovation, or even security.