Many overstretched B2B marketing professionals are being tasked with implementing a content marketing strategy but are unsure where to begin. It all starts with a systematic understanding of your prospects’ information needs. Once you have this, it’s much easier to generate quality content quickly and speedily.
B2B firms across all industry sectors are recognising the importance of content marketing. For many brand and product managers, it’s something of a new area – an additional task that has been added to their To-Do list. Understandably, they just want to know how to write content quickly and easily.
Whilst it’s possible to get to a stage where you can churn out quality content that gets results, time after time, you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of your customers first.
According to Peter O’Neill at Forrester, B2B firms are only finding content marketing useful for the lead nurturing stage of the sales process. This may be because that’s where most content creation is currently targeted. What Peter goes on to talk about is the tendency for many B2B organisations to remain internally focussed. It’s a problem that many firms suffer from, particularly in larger organisations.
It’s understandable that everyone within an organisation orients towards accelerating opportunities through the sales funnel. However, for professional marketers to succeed, they have to become empathetic, look externally, and really understand what’s motivating prospects and customers.
An effective content marketing strategy will look at each stage of the buying cycle and prompt the creation of material that meets the information needs of the participants involved. The buying cycle model may be broadly the same for each industry, but your company needs to develop content that’s unique, not only to counter competitor activity, but also to play to your strengths.
The sequence of steps involved in a typical B2B buying process might look like this, reading from left to right:
You need to understand, for each industry sector you target, who is involved at each stage and what they are looking for.
So, for example, if you’re selling a software product that solves a problem in call centres, it’s likely that the first person involved will be responsible for operational management in some way. In the “Need” stage, you should aim to understand not only what problems they are likely to be experiencing, but what the consequences of those pain points are.
For the “Technical Requirements” stage, the operational manager may start to involve an IT decision maker. Between them, evidence suggests they will be looking for blogs and case studies that appear to align with their own problem, as well as articles and whitepapers on related trends. By the time your prospect has advanced to the “Short-List Selection” stage, they may well have included department heads, budget holders, technical specialists and even someone from the procurement team in the process too.
This highlights the importance of understanding the different types of target audiences, or “Personas” you need to address. Each will have different information needs at each separate stage in the buying process. That’s not to say you need an individual item of content for each persona in each step; you just need to ensure their information needs are met at each point in the process.
You should take a structured approach. Aim to create what amounts to a stakeholder matrix that identifies, by industry and by stage, the job description and title of each person involved, their information needs, and any known constraints, motivations or preferences. You could start with a simple template like the one below and adapt it to suit your needs as you gather a more detailed understanding of your prospects.
To capture this information, you’ll need to gather input from Sales and Service Desk teams, personal interviews, research, as well as your own experience from testing and analytics.
This will identify who is involved and what information needs they have. You can then use this as the basis of the brief to create unique and relevant content that aligns with the needs of your prospects. It’s at this content crafting stage that you’ll need to interweave your key messages and competitive positioning.
Once you have this detailed level of understanding about your prospects/customers, you’ll be in a better position to generate a continuous stream of compelling content. And you should see dividends quickly. Adam Sutton highlights in his blog an impressive example of a B2B firm that adopted a similar approach and increased lead volumes by 124%.
Having established some core content for each stage/persona, you’ll then be in a position to test different variants and discover how subtle changes to content will accelerate prospects along the buying cycle faster.
The challenge for marketing professionals is finding the time to dedicate to the task of content marketing and building-up the archive of content. Brand and product managers not only have to administer the content marketing strategy, but the majority are also expected to create quality content too. Forrester indicates that 58% of B2B firms still generate their content using in-house resources.
If you consider that it takes on average three hours to create an effective blog post, let alone a compelling article, the scale of the content creation challenge starts to become apparent. What’s more, the time you make available for content marketing also has to compete with your normal day-to-day routine of meetings and interruptions.
That’s why, with content marketing increasing in importance, it’s likely that many marketing and product managers will look to professional copywriters in the future to help them generate the content they need to succeed. After all, it’s content that drives leads and ultimately sales orders, so getting it wrong could be a career inhibitor!
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Freelance copywriting and ghost blogging for overstretched marketing professionals
No comments:
Post a Comment