It seems every bit of communication we see coming out of Sage these days has some sort of plug push promotion for Zift syndicated content.
So, what is syndicated content?
In a nutshell, it’s ready-made blocks of content that you plug in to your website.
But here’s the problem …
The Sage Connected Services Strategy has been getting a lot of attention lately … and for good reason. In fact, there was quite a bit of focus on Connected Services and “The Cloud” at the recent Sage Summit conference in Washington, DC.
Below is a 5-page article that describes the Sage web strategy as it relates to Connected Services and other online business solutions (click image to download).
So the other day, I was on a Sage partner website and signed up to receive an email newsletter … I do that sometimes just to see what partners are saying to their prospects and how they’re saying it.
Anyway, I get the first piece of “newsletter” communication and … wait for it … wait for it … it’s a discounted product pitch. Save XX% on Sage product. And I say to myself “Self, this is why so many businesses think that email marketing doesn’t work.”
Let’s think about this. Say I’m a prospect and I’m on their website to learn more about what they do and how they do it. I’m interested enough to sign up for the newsletter. To them, I’m just a nameless, faceless prospect …
Yet, based on the content of the first issue I receive, they assume I’m shopping for product and looking for a discount. When in reality, I’m in the early stages of educating myself about what’s out there to help me solve a business challenge. Needless to say, they’ve lost credibility and I’m either gonna opt out or mark it as Spam and not read another issue.
By now, you’ve probably felt the need to start blogging because everyone is doing it and experts say it’s good for business. But if you’ve dipped your toe in only to discover that blogging can be quite a bit of work (especially if you’re not much of a writer), you might be asking yourself, “Remind me again why this is good for business?”
Here’s why …