How do you ensure that your content cuts through? Ian shares some useful ideas.
Where do you start with content marketing?
As we know, buyers care about their problems, not our solutions. So, using that as a guide, in this extended blog post, I'd like to share some ideas on how you can create ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) by being useful.
Deciding where to start with content marketing is a challenge for growing businesses and sometimes established ones, too.
We must be very focused on defining our products, their features, and the benefits they offer to the market. It is the reason we are in business, to offer something a customer can buy. As necessary as this is, of course, as we all know - buyers don’t care about our products; they care about their problems.
So, a good place to start, and it’s the best kind of content marketing, is to think about how you can be helpful and show empathy for the problem your potential buyer is facing through useful content.
Especially when they are at the “I don’t know, like or trust you” stage of awareness in the much-discussed “dark funnel”, when buyers are searching for a solution to their problem.
Being helpful builds trust, and also providing something useful taps into the behavioral psychology of reciprocity, in that when you give something, the receiver feels an urge to give something in return.
To be useful, we need to focus on a persona; this is usually not your direct buyer, the budget holder, or decision-maker, but rather your champion or sponsor - the practitioner who is experiencing the pain that your product or service will alleviate.
And we need to understand those pains and needs, aside from the obvious that their world would be a better place if they purchased your product, how else can you help address those needs?
It’s also not necessarily related to your product; it could be an adjacent need. I once worked with an excellent salesperson who specialised in selling to government, and as a result, he had significantly more experience in government procurement than his buyers. This made him particularly useful, as he could help guide them.
Why address the practitioners and not the C-suite buyers? It’s the same reason video games are marketed to kids, not parents, which is a mistake we often make in B2B when we market over their heads to the C-suite.
How dull would a video game commercial aimed at parents be if it just addressed the objection of a kid spending time on video games? Rather than showing the kid (our sponsor) how they can blow shit up with their friends.
When I was CMO at Spotler, we published an annual email marketing report based on the millions of emails sent by our clients through the various email products in our portfolio, across a wide range of verticals and company sizes.
It was extremely useful to email marketing practitioners, as it addressed their needs regarding the big questions in that category and business discipline, such as when to send, what kind of subject lines work, and what works in a specific vertical compared to another, etc. etc.
(BTW - I loved it, but I am not claiming any credit for this, it was in place when I joined)
Marketing analytics platform Dreamdata is doing a similar thing, creating content based on the aggregated and anonymized data of what their clients are using their platform for.
If you are a SaaS company, you will likely have a lot of information about how your clients are serving their clients and how that insight could help the category in general.
However, it’s not just insight derived from data on your platforms; it could also come from consumer research.
A good example of this is the intent data platform 6Sense, which invests in research into the B2B buying journey and then shares this content (often ungated). And, it’s the same with LinkedIn, and their B2B Institute, and you can’t throw a rock into the B2B blogosphere right now without hitting someone quoting the work from them or 6Sense right now.
There is also another way: maybe you don’t have the data or the resources to run research that is large enough to be credible and demonstrate an industry trend, and therefore create something useful to the market.
You can partner with an industry body or sponsor a larger study. Back to my email example, the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) creates a similar email marketing trends report, and a vendor (Marigold) sponsors that work.
All of this is not just for the big guys; I did this at Dodona Analytics, a small start-up with a limited marketing budget in a very niche category (software that helps companies determine the best locations for installing EV chargers).
The category needed to be defined, even if only for us to better understand the market. We sponsored an industry analyst to conduct this independently and turned it into an asset that we shared for the category, not just for our own use.
Another path to usefulness and therefore the hearts and minds of our practitioners is through free education, either as courses or just content. And what professional practitioner, your target audience, doesn’t love a badge or a certification?
For example, Moz, the SEO tools vendor, shares tips through its whiteboard Friday blog, but also offers a free SEO training course (some of its other courses are paid), its competitor, Semrush, has its Semrush academy. Of course, the Daddy of providing helpful content marketing, Hubspot, has its academy and has always had an educational element to its blog output.
Whichever route you take for providing helpful content, it really is the gift that keeps on giving, as a chunky bit of research, an educational course can be turned into multiple content assets, like webinars, presentations, talk tracks for events, and podcasts (etc. etc.).
Plus, if you really do offer the market something truly useful, as 6Sense and LinkedIn have found, you’ll find that the market will do the repurposing for you, with influencers, analysts and thought leaders sharing your insights as part of their own content.
Even the smallest companies, with the tightest budgets, can offer something useful to their ideal customer and persona.
The simplest is to have a bloody good blog, that generously shares hints and tips and doesn’t constantly bang on about the company, its products, features, news, people, and financial results.
Perhaps you can get more creative than that, such as creating simple cheat sheets or how-to guides. For instance, if we revisit my example of my sales chum having a knack for government procurement, we could codify that into a downloadable document. Or maybe it’s an online calculator or tool.
We have our own little thing we are working on. We call it the Velocity Assessment, which is free, allowing growing B2B businesses to tap into our experience and assess their sales and marketing capabilities. Based on this assessment, we provide tips on where to focus and improve, through a short report and an optional 30-minute call.
As I mentioned at the beginning, an extended blog post this week, but in the spirit of the topic, I hope you found it useful. And, if you are wondering where to start with your content marketing or looking to inject a bit of relevance and improve engagement, start with your practitioner persona.
Ask what would help them right now? And how can you do that?