TL;DR: If your content gets engagement but doesn’t sell your offer, it’s sharing value without shifting what people believe about what will solve their problem. Buyer-readiness fixes that by sharing value while also shifting beliefs that prepare the right people to buy.
A quick disclaimer:
I used Claude to help me write this post, but there are no AI-generated “thoughts” and very few AI-generated words. I’ve been on a mission to improve the way I use AI for content creation so it takes the not-fun parts and helps me show up as a unique human (only faster and more strategically) instead.
Full transparency, because it’s relevant to this topic:
For this post, I used one of our new Prime & Presell AI-guided frameworks in the process. It’s launching this week at a special discount for our audience (that’s you!) and I want you to buy it. Before you click away because I’ve just gone all “salesy” on you, I think you should stick around to pay attention to the way this post is structured because it demonstrates what buyer-readiness content is in practice.
Pretend you didn’t just read that last paragraph and notice while you’re reading it whether you feel you’re being pitched to, if I’m being “salesy” along the way, or whether you find it to be helpful whether you buy it or not.
Right then, here we go…
Creating content is a lot of work, especially when you’re running a business. Every hour you spend on content is an hour you’re not spending on what brings in revenue.
We want our content to count; we want it to do something for our business. So naturally, we look for signs that it’s working:
Did people like it?
Did they leave a comment?
Did they sign up for something?
Did they share it?
When we get positive feedback, it feels great. A comment on your blog post, a reply to your email saying it was really helpful, a new subscriber … these are all signs that we’re visible and making an impact.
But the signal that matters most is … did it move sales? That’s what we really care about.
When you’re creating content but don’t see your bottom line moving, it’s easy to question whether any of this is actually worth it. Are you just helping people on the internet for free but not doing anything to help your business?
In this post, we’re going to talk about why helpful content doesn’t always lead to sales and how to create content that gets people ready to buy without sounding salesy.
Coming up…
- Why Your Content Gets Engagement but Doesn’t Sell Your Offer
- Why We Share Helpful Content That Doesn’t Sell in the First Place
- What Is Buyer-Readiness Content?
- How Content Primes People to Buy
- Why Buyer-Readiness Content Doesn’t Feel Salesy
- How to Find What Your Audience Needs to Believe Before They Buy
- This Post Is an Example of Buyer-Readiness Content
Why Your Content Gets Engagement but Doesn’t Sell Your Offer
If your content gets engagement but doesn’t sell your offer, it means you’re sharing lots of genuine value but you’re not shifting what people believe about what will solve their problem. Engagement tells you people like it, but it doesn’t tell you they’re any closer to buying.
Before someone buys, they have to believe your solution is what their problem needs. Tips, tutorials, motivational posts, and stories all build visibility, and they can be genuinely helpful both to you and your audience, but on their own they don’t change what buyers believe.
Most people take the value, thank you for it, and keep handling their problem the way they already were.
Why We Share Helpful Content That Doesn’t Sell in the First Place
The gurus told us to “share value” 80% of the time and mention your offers the other 20%.
But what does sharing value actually mean? They don’t really say. So most of us just follow what everybody else is doing: sharing tips, helpful advice, and tutorials.
These types of posts attract the largest audience because they answer beginner questions – and most people are beginners. The theory goes that this visibility eventually trickles down into converting customers and making sales.
And for a long time, it did – it worked! That was when the internet was more open, though.
Google used to send lots of traffic to your blog posts if they were helpful, and social media and platforms like Pinterest used to let you link out to your website where the journey can continue and transactions can take place.
Today, the internet is more closed and traffic is harder to achieve at volume. The tech overlords want to keep people on their platform, not send them to yours.
Under those conditions, the strategy behind the content we share becomes more important and requires a bit of a rethink.
That means asking ourselves, “Is this content sharing something helpful? Or is it sharing something helpful that also prepares someone to buy?”
It turns out that content that sells is “sharing value” too, it just helps in a different way.
Enter: buyer-readiness content.
What Is Buyer-Readiness Content?
Buyer-readiness content is content that helps people understand their problem and what they believe will solve it. And that’s important because…
Every purchasing decision is a belief decision.
Underneath it someone is thinking, “I believe this is the right solution for me.” And buyer-readiness content is built to get them to that point.
Sharing value doesn’t just mean taking your expertise and giving it away as a self-contained tip or explaining how to do things. It can also mean changing the way people think about their current approach and making good decisions that are right for them.
How Content Primes People to Buy
Before someone buys, they need to see the problem clearly, see a path to solving it, trust you as the person to help, and then make the decision.
This is the customer journey and you prime your audience to buy when you map your content to it and guide them through it.
Say you sell a pricing workshop for service providers, here’s what that looks like…
1: Help them see the problem
Content here names the problem they can feel but haven’t put into words, or shows them a cost they didn’t know they were paying. Their questions sound like “why am I this busy and still not making more money?”
For the pricing workshop, that’s a post showing how undercharging caps what you can earn even when you’re fully booked out.
2: Show them the path
Content here hands them the idea your offer is built on, or lays out the steps to the result, so getting there stops feeling like one big leap.
Their questions at this stage sound like, “Can this be fixed, and how?”
For the pricing workshop, that’s a post walking through the stages of raising your prices without losing clients.
3: Build their trust in you
Now they know a solution exists and they’re deciding whose to trust. Content here shows how you work and what you’ve learned, including what went wrong.
As they become aware of you and your brand, the questions are “why you?” and “have you actually done this?”
For the pricing workshop, that’s the story of how you raised your own prices and what you’d do differently.
4: Help them make the decision
Close to buying, the questions get practical. Is this right for me? What if it doesn’t work? What happens after I buy? Even the simple ones: where’s the sales page, and where do I click?
Content here takes those questions and objections seriously and answers them honestly, so people can make the right call for them, yes or no.
Selling isn’t about convincing people to buy, it’s about giving people the information they need to decide for themselves. And you can do that in some way with every single piece of content you create.
Note: The customer journey isn’t a straight line
People find your content when they’re ready for it, so the goal isn’t to march everyone through these four types of content in order. It’s to map out the journey and make sure there’s content waiting at every stage. If it’s for them, they’ll notice it. If they need it, they’ll look for it.
Why Buyer-Readiness Content Doesn’t Feel Salesy
Buyer-readiness content doesn’t feel salesy because it isn’t built like a sales pitch. Traditional sales structures like problem-agitate-solution (“PAS”) name a problem, make it hurt, and present your offer as the fix.
Buyer-readiness content shifts how people think about their problem and what it takes to solve it, and it’s useful whether or not they ever buy.
It’s about changing what people understand and believe, not pushing them toward the checkout.
That means the people who don’t buy still walk away with something they can use, so in a way, you get the 80/20 rule inside every piece: it’s genuinely helpful, and it prepares the right people to buy at the same time.
How to Find What Your Audience Needs to Believe Before They Buy
The belief your content needs to shift is usually hiding in what your audience is doing right now to solve their problem and the approach that keeps failing them.
You don’t have to guess at that, AI is very good at finding it for you. Using AI for research and getting customer intel is one of my favorite ways to use it.
Here are three prompts you can run in Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT, one after the other, in the same chat.
1. Find the words they use
“Research what people are saying online about [the problem your offer solves]. Show me the words they use to describe it, what frustrates them, and what they’ve already tried. Quote real phrasing wherever you can, and tell me where you found it.”
Pay attention to their language. Those are the words you can use in your content to speak directly to them.
2. Find what isn’t working
“Based on that research, what are these people doing right now to solve this problem that isn’t working? For each one, what do they believe that keeps them doing it?”
This is where the belief shows up. It’s rarely “they haven’t heard of my offer.” It’s usually something like “if I just post consistently, the sales will follow.”
3. Connect it to your offer
“My offer is [one line on what it does and who it’s for]. Which of those beliefs would have to change before someone sees my offer as the right way to solve this? Rank them by how much each one is standing in the way.”
The belief at the top of that list is a great candidate for your next piece of content.
A quick test after you create content:
It’s very easy to slip back into “teaching” mode. Before you publish anything, check the idea. Does it shift a belief, or does it just hand over a quick win? Does it take someone from where they are now to a new way of seeing their problem? And is that new place closer to your offer?
If the answer to any of those is no, it’s a helpful tip. Helpful tips are fine, but that post won’t get anyone ready to buy.
This Post Is an Example of Buyer-Readiness Content
I’ve connected this piece of content to something we sell, Prime & Presell. It’s a system for your AI to help you create buyer-readiness content. We started with some assumptions about what our audience might be thinking about content and sales and then validated this topic by going out on the web and figuring out how people are actually thinking talking about this.
If everything we’ve talked about here makes sense, you could take it and apply it without buying anything.
What I hope you take with you either way is that selling isn’t saying “here’s my thing, buy my thing…” it’s helping people think about a new way forward, one that’s aligned with your solutions, and making the decisions that are right for them.
