Recessions are a good time to re-assess your communication skills. I don’t mean verbal, although that never hurts either. I mean what are you putting out there into the world as a business?

Are you offering sage advice to your customers and prospects that help them? Or are you leaving it up to Wikipedia and your competition to educate them?

It’s been fairly common knowledge that senior managers prefer to talk to you after they’ve done their own research. And in 2022, Gartner confirmed this in a report: 72% of decision-makers prefer a ‘rep-free’ experience. This means they are able to educate themselves about you, without you.

What does this look like in real life? In short, it means there are people out there right now looking for solutions you can provide. If content marketing is a foreign concept for you then they are likely not to find you or your company and as a result… go elsewhere. If only they knew you can do it so well!

Now is the time to understand and embrace content marketing. For some that might mean that you need to start from the very bottom and work your way up. Imagine your customers know nothing about your product, that is the lowest level you need to start with.

FAIR WARNING:

for every highly technical industry, please stop thinking your company is well-known or that your customers understand all your technical jargon. First of all, the market is pretty ignorant and most companies are a lot less known than they think they are. Second, often times the decision is made by a senior manager or the company owner who might be not as technically minded as you would expect them to be.

A pretty classic example: digital transformation. Senior management can’t even start thinking let alone make a decision unless they understand some digital fundamentals. When I mention Senior Management, that includes their IT department. Hard to believe this? I’ve spoken to hundreds of companies in this exact position, and more often than not senior managers have a knowledge gap.