Using Content Marketing to Understand Your B2B Audience
Wed, Feb 9, 2011
Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales, Social Media 101, Social Networks
What do you really know about your B2B audience? Are they mostly early stage prospects or are they close to purchase? What topics generate leads and drive conversions? If you aren’t using content marketing to better understand your B2B audience, you’re missing an opportunity to discover what interests visitors and leads them to purchase.
As you develop your content strategy, you should create content that falls into various areas of the sales cycle. Here are some types of content that you can utilize at each stage:
1. Awareness
For visitors that are just being introduced to your products and services, providing educational content will be of value. Create content (tweets, blog posts, webinars, white papers, etc.) that educates and informs, and make sure it is free and without registration required.
2. Consideration
During the consideration phase, customers are interested in how you stack up against your competition. Consider providing product comparisons, case studies and other content that shows why your product or service is the better option. Then share that content over your social channels. Collect a small amount of information, like name and email address, in exchange for the content.
3. Evaluation
Once your audience understands your brand and the competition, they’ll want to better understand the solutions that you provide. Provide content to help them evaluate your product or service and how it’ll benefit their business. As prospects are much further along in the process, they should be willing to share even more information about themselves.
4. Purchase
Use your social channels to broadcast promotions, new products, upgrades, special offers, etc. that provide incentive and lead to purchase.
As you create your content, determine which stage it falls into. Make sure you generate content that covers all stages, and do so on a regular basis. Then set up your tracking so you can gauge audience response to each type of content. You can use whatever reporting metrics you have available to help you gauge interest, such as:
1. Page Views
2. Comments
3. Tweets
4. ReTweets
5. Facebook Likes
6. Shares (LinkedIn, Facebook, Email, etc.)
After collecting and analyzing this data over time, it will offer clues to where your target audience is in the sales cycle, and you’ll be able to see if you’re moving them towards purchase. You’ll also learn what kind of content is most likely to push your potential buyers from one stage to the next, and eventually result in revenue for your organization.
What other ways are you using content marketing for you B2B business? Share your ideas and content marketing tactics in the comments!
Adam Q. Holden-Bache is the CEO/Managing Director of Mass Transmit, an Internet Marketing Agency specializing in email marketing, web development and social media marketing. Follow Adam on Twitter @adamholdenbache.
Tags: B2B, B2B marketing, B2B Online Marketing, Content Marketing, sales cycle, target audience
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Thanks for another great article Adam. I am finding a lot of your content quite useful.
You touched on this a little, but do you find different mediums better for different stages? For example, your Facebook fans are likely in the “Purchase” phase. Or can you use a single medium to effectively provide content across all the stages of the buying cycle?
Great article Adam and I wholly agree with your comments about matching content to the stages of the buyer’s journey, its so important and assists in speeding up the sales cycle as well.
My comment is regarding leverage. I find my clients are often really daunted by the prospect of generating a significant amount of content required. However when I am working on the content calendar with them we always try to come up with 4 or 5 pieces of content leveraged from the main core content piece. So a long 20 page whitepaper on industry best practices might lend itself to breaking up into 2 or 3 shorter article style pieces or even better blog articles. Tweet those shorter articles, post them in your status on LinkedIn, post a question about the topic on a relevant LinkedIn group snd so on.
Suddenly a 4 core pieces of content have spawned 20…its not so daunting any more…or so expensive.
Jeff-
Thanks for your feedback and very happy to hear you find the posts useful.
To answer your question, yes, I do find different mediums better for different stages, but those can vary by client. Blogs and Twitter seem to be the best platforms to cover the entire cycle, as your readers and followers could be in any stage of the sales cycle. I’ve found those linked to brands on Facebook are typically past the Awareness stage and are closer to purchase (or are already customers).
What I’ve found by doing this exercise is that a lot of brands are not providing content in the middle of the cycle. We tend to be decent at raising awareness and converting a good lead, but we’re not good at helping people through the consideration/evaluation phases. Generating more content to show how you compare to others in your industry and what problems you can solve is sometimes more difficult, or at least not the first idea that comes to mind when you pick topics for content generation. I think if more brands concentrate on those areas they’ll see prospects move through the sales cycle more easily. Hope this helps.
Adam
Chris-
Thanks for your insightful feedback. I totally agree with you on your approach to content generation. Re-purposing your content in multiple forms and channels is a great way to maximize the use of the content you have generated.
As a next step try to determine if the shorter content is all targeting your audience at the same point in the sales cycle or if its spanning the entire cycle. If you have 20 pieces of content that’s all educational in nature, then see if you can supplement that with content to help your audience through the Consideration and Evaluation phases. That way not only will you have a lot of great content in multiple channels, but you’ll be progressing your audience towards your business goals.
Sounds like you’re already doing a lot of great work- let us know if this helps you with your process.
- Adam
Hi, Adam…
I notice you asked questions — really good ones — but didn’t answer them. Rather, didn’t tell readers how to find these answers:
“Are they mostly early stage prospects or are they close to purchase? What topics generate leads and drive conversions?”
I appreciate your tips on creating content. But what about process around the content — as a means to get at the answers you pose?
At the heart of the questions you lead with is the real opportunity in my humble opinion: To design processes around content (ie. distribute it) in ways that produce outcomes like leads and sales.
Otherwise we’re just broadcasting content and hoping customers figure out the rest. Right?
Jeff-
It’s not an exact science- just because someone reacts to an article, post or tweet that’s intended for those in the awareness stage or in the evaluation stage it doesn’t mean that they are, but it will give you an idea as to where in the sales cycle your audience resides. In order to find out if your readers are early stage prospects or closer to purchase, write your content with those readers in mind and then review as much data as you can on the response of that content. If 80% of your comments, clicks or retweets are coming from Awareness focused content, then you need to concentrate on writing more content that focuses on other areas of the sales cycle.
That kind of learning is what I was trying to demonstrate through this post. If marketers can identify where they may be coming up short, they can likely fix that in their content generation process. So yes, I agree that designing process around content is hugely important, and this kind of content organization and review can assist in creating a better process. And that should ultimately result in more leads and sales.
- Adam
Thanks for the consideration, Adam.
We might agree overall but I think the disconnect between us is this: I see a lot of really smart marketers (ie. you) using mass media metrics to determine where an audience is. Rather, what I support/preach is to actually *capture* the demand through creating an exchange — the content/info/knowledge for insights. Implicitly. This is far more powerful because it gives you the ability to nurture leads — rather than rely on influence.
I’m not saying “your style” is bad. I’m simply questioning its effectiveness versus a direct response model that discovers, nurtures and captures demand.
One of my favorite examples is AnchorBank. http://bit.ly/h3D268
Thanks for considering.
Excellent debate Jeff Molander & Adam, and I think you both make valid points.
Adam, I especially like your first reply to Jeff Kryger:
“We tend to be decent at raising awareness and converting a good lead, but we’re not good at helping people through the consideration/evaluation phases. Generating more content to show how you compare to others in your industry and what problems you can solve is sometimes more difficult, or at least not the first idea that comes to mind when you pick topics for content generation. I think if more brands concentrate on those areas they’ll see prospects move through the sales cycle more easily.”
Great example of the power of blogs, enabling writers & readers to exchange ideas and encourage deeper thinking.
Jeff-
I agree with you that “capturing the demand” is a positive goal for marketers. I feel that using content marketing and evaluating audience response can give you insight as to what content may lead to creating that exchange.
My goal for this post was to address a shortcoming that I see consistently with marketers- they continually generate content that addresses a limited portion of their audience and the don’t consider how their content can move the audience towards engagement (whether that’s a direct exchange, providing data, creating a sale, etc.)
Thanks for sharing the AnchorBank example- plenty of great food for thought there, and very applicable towards a B2B audience.
If you’d like to discuss in more detail find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I’d be happy to carry on the conversation outside of the comments here. And if you’d ever like to provide a guest post on this topic feel free- I think our readers would enjoy hearing more about your approach.
Thanks-
Adam
It’s worth emphasizing the obvious: to be effective, content-based marketing has to offer content that is genuinely interesting and mind-expanding, involving the target in a process of self-motivated discovery. Sadly, content that is in fact simplistic, packaged bait for a marketing pitch is all too common.