Are you really communicating with your customers?

Take a look at the content your business is putting out - newsletters, blogs, LinkedIn posts, emails and whatever else sits within your marketing.

Now ask yourself a slightly uncomfortable question:

Is it genuinely useful or interesting to the people you're trying to reach - or is it simply what you want to tell them?

There's an important difference.

Your customers don't need to become experts in what you do

I used to use accountants as an example of this.

Some accountancy marketing content seemed to be written for other accountants. It was technically knowledgeable, but full of terminology and detail that meant very little to the business owner reading it.

The business owner doesn't need to know how to produce their year-end accounts. That's why they employ an accountant.

They might, however, be very interested in understanding what their accounts are telling them about the business, what they should be watching as they grow, or which numbers ought to be making them ask questions.

The same applies in a technical business. Your team may care deeply about the differences between product models and specifications - and rightly so. But your customer may simply want confidence that the solution will work reliably, solve their problem and make their life easier.

The expertise is still there. It's simply being applied to something the customer actually cares about.

AI has made this problem worse, not better

It's never been easier to produce content.

Give an AI tool a subject and within seconds you can have a blog post, newsletter or collection of LinkedIn posts ready to go.

But being able to produce more content doesn't mean you should.

Generic content that says exactly the same thing as everybody else isn't going to give a prospective customer much reason to remember you, let alone choose you.

The question isn't “What can we write about?”

It's “What do the people we want to reach actually need from us?”

That might be a different perspective on a problem they're facing, something that challenges an assumption, useful evidence, an explanation that makes a complicated subject easier to understand, or an answer to a question they haven't quite worked out how to ask yet.

Start with who you're trying to influence

Good marketing communication starts with understanding the audience.

Who are you trying to reach? What matters to them? What pressures are they under? What do they already understand and where are the gaps? What might stop them buying? What would give them confidence in you?

And importantly, what can you say that is genuinely useful coming from you?

You don't need to give away everything you know. In fact, explaining every technical detail can obscure the very expertise you're trying to demonstrate.

Instead, use what you know to help your prospective customer think better about their problem.

Would you read it?

Before publishing another piece of content, forget for a moment that your company wrote it.

Imagine it arriving in your inbox or appearing in your LinkedIn feed.

Would you stop?

Would you read it?

Would you learn anything?

Would it make you think?

And would you have any idea why this particular business was worth listening to?

If the answer is no, producing more of the same probably isn't the solution.

If you're producing plenty of marketing content but aren't convinced it's helping the business move forward, let's have a conversation.