Buyers Don’t Want Your Content

Something struck me the other night as I was creating some new content for an upcoming event I’m facilitating. So, I’m building content, and actually thinking about content itself as a topic area we have been thinking and talking about a lot lately as a research team. And here’s what struck me:

Buyers don’t want content. Buyers want information. 

Content is a vehicle for information, and until we start thinking about it and treating it in this way, it will fall flat. Organizations of all sizes are struggling to make internal changes so they can meet the “content requirements” of today’s buyers. But buyers don’t want more content! They actually want less content, and more information.

Content is something a buyer has to weed through in order to get the information he or she needs. Nobody opens a Web browser looking for content. We open our browsers looking for information. As an information seeker, the last thing I want is something that has been conceived as a piece of content but doesn’t provide the information I need. I’m looking for trustworthy information to clarify, validate, inform.

Thinking about content as a vehicle for information shifts the focus of the conversation from who owns content strategy or content marketing, or content creation vs. content curation, to considering the journey of information from within the organization to outside audiences. While content strategy is important, it needs to be based on information that buyers are actually looking for, instead of thinking about content as an end in itself.