Create a consistent messaging platform and storyline to create compelling experiences that turn prospects into buyers and convince customers to stay.
Strategy is the key to successful content marketing.
Random, one-off acts of content are not going to improve marketing performance. One-off content is not content marketing. Content marketing is connected storytelling that pulls prospects forward in their quest to solve a problem or achieve an objective.
In B2B complex sales, content marketing takes a concerted effort. It’s an orchestration of relevant ideas and concepts that resonate with all the different perspectives on the buying committee to help them reach consensus that you’re the partner they want to work with. Yes, it really is more about you than your solution or service—when all other things are equal.
B2B marketers say that engaging prospects is harder and getting harder. That’s because buyers have changed. They’re evaluating their experience with you against all other digital experiences they have—whether business or as consumers.
B2B Buyers are self-educating. Most of them think they can learn everything they need to know to create a vendor shortlist on their own. But they’re spending more time trying to deconflict the information everyone on the buying committee brings back. Put a variety of perspectives in the room and your content has a big job to do.
Your buyers’ context changes with every step and stage of their buying process. New information can confirm assumptions or introduce new ideas. You want your company’s expertise and ideas to be their anchor for how best to solve the problem. Your content needs to grab their attention, provide new insights, calm the chaos and overwhelm of “too much information,” and keep them engaged and gaining momentum toward purchase.
Even more important; your content must serve as an enticement to engagement with your sales reps. Getting prospects in sales conversations is a primary objective of digital content strategy.
Content is what sets you apart from everyone else. Content must be a fluid representation of your B2B brand. That’s why you want a digital content strategy. When your strategy is aligned with your company’s business objectives, you’ve got a winning situation.
Put your digital content strategy to work
Once you have your personas and foundational strategy, you need tactical application and execution to put digital content strategy in play.
Content Experiences: The New Nurturing Programs that Drive Sales
Campaigns that stop and start and quarterly themes are no longer effective. If your buyers take 6 months or more to make a decision and your campaign runs for one quarter, how many sales will you make? Rather than pushing out marketing programs on your timeline, high-performance content marketing must be aligned to the buyers journey.
Instead, create content experiences across time. Tell a serial story that orchestrates momentum. Nurturing is business storytelling at its finest—from generating awareness of the problem through to choosing a solution.
Customer Experiences: From Onboarding to Advocacy
As buyers’ expectations and business models shift, marketers must also focus on the entirety of the customer lifecycle. Once you’ve acquired a new customer, you must onboard them, help them find increasing value with your solution, and delight them so much they rave about you to their network.
But once your buyer has become a customer, things shift. The buyer may not be the user. You must look at how your audience shifts with implementation—what do they need once their original problem is solved? These are now the people you need to nurture. The story changes, and so must your content and approach.
Content experiences are your biggest equalizer
Consistency of experience is hugely important. This means whether your buyer or customer is in a nurture stream, visits your website, reads your blog, listens to your podcast, or attends your webinars or user events, the story must resonate with every touch. If it doesn’t, they’ll be gone in a click.
This doesn’t mean saying the same thing, in the same way repeatedly. When your digital content strategy gives you the foundation for the buyer-to-customer story, you have what you need to create “chapters” in infinite ways that resonate powerfully. Your brand will be strong and recognizable no matter where in the customer lifecycle or on which channel your buyers and customers engage with you.
Get in touch today, and let’s get strategic about your content marketing.
