Content is King | Agency Sales Magazine

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This issue of Agency Sales magazine discusses rep best practices for social media. One way to learn the rules of social media is to visit a high-end supermarket on a Saturday morning. Cheerful folk will greet you with free bite-sized samples of the store’s tastiest products, and although the products you sampled are strategically placed to encourage your impulse purchases, the sample almost never comes with a sales pitch.

Why give out free samples? Because the more people try an appealing product, the more people will buy it.

Why no sales pitch? Because a sales pitch accompanying the samples in aisle #1 will prompt customers to scurry past the samples in aisle #2 in order to avoid the sales pitch expected to accompany those samples. And the fewer people who try, the fewer people will buy. So a hard-core sales pitch in aisle #1 undermines the sampling program in every other aisle in the store.

That’s a lesson you can translate into social media success. Social media is all about content, and you have to give free, tasty samples of your content to tantalize customers into buying more of your content or product. And your social media campaign has to be like the cheerful supermarket folk — no sales pitches allowed. Social media is all about tasty samples that entice a customer to learn more about your product, never a hard sell.

And while we’re talking about content, this issue of Agency Sales also features details about the content-rich Association of Independent Manufacturers’ Reps (AIM/R) conference in Boston, September 19-22, 2012, which includes (at press time) seminars such as:

Strategies for Difficult Territories
Introduction to Rep Contracts
Rep Profiles
Legacy to Leader
Private Equity — Friend or Foe
The Future of the Manufacturer/Wholesaler/Rep Relationship
Utilizing the American Supply Association Educational Foundation Employee Training Program at Your Firm
The Rep Entrepreneur
Rep B2B Marketing & Social Media Strategy
Make Sure Your Customer Service Isn’t a Joke!
12 Talents of a Game-Changing Leader
Adding Tablet Computers & “The Cloud” to Your Agency
Succession Planning — A Blueprint For Rep Ownership Transitions
Keynote Jeffrey Dietrich from the Institute for Trend Research: Make Your Move!

So whether it’s a social media campaign or a rep conference, learn a lesson from high-end supermarkets and AIM/R: “Content is King,” and paying close attention to great content will be the key to your success.