Does your marketing content promote unsupervised thinking?

I was reading this post about landing page optimization on the Marketing Experiments blog today and came across the term "unsupervised thinking."

I started thinking about marketing content on B2B websites and nurturing content for complex sales used over a longer-term cycle. With that in mind, here are some characteristics I see that promote unsupervised thinking:

• One-off, monologue content that's presented in a stand-alone fashion. 


• Content presented with randomly without an obvious storyline to extend engagement.


• Content focused on the company and their products and solutions that provides no "thinking" for the prospect.


• Open-ended content without an obvious conclusion or call to action perceived as beneficial by the reader.


• Web pages with too many choices not framed for the user perspective.


• Siloed website structure where "like" content is displayed together without context - like here's all our case studies or click here for all our product data sheets.

When prospects act upon an interest, they're telling you what attracted them to your company. Marketing content needs to honor that expressed interest, put it in context and guide the prospect's thinking to enable further exploration and engagement with the topic.

This is why developing a content strategy is essential to building higher levels of engagement. We all know that time is scarce. By incorporating a contextual path for prospects the opportunity exists to pull them farther into your world. [In lieu of them clicking over to a competitor's site in search of relevance.]

A few tips for creating guided thinking with marketing content:

• Create a contextual experience on your website.
  For example, if your article discusses the benefits of solving X problem, display sidebar content to a related white paper download, a webinar registration, a related customer success story, other related articles, etc.
  
  Include hyperlinks that use wording to indicate where your readers may find more information of interest to them. If there are several different next steps, use all three in your hyperlinks to learn how that prospect's orientation to the issue. Same for differing roles.


• Answer What, How and Why.
  What is the problem.
  How is the solution.
  Why is what happens if they do, or they don't solve it.
  
  If you develop this information to flow, you can guide your prospect's thinking by showing them you understand their pain, you have expertise in solving it and educate them on the reasons why they should do so, or what it will cost them if they don't. Make it about them, not your products. Use customer examples to help them relate and visualize themselves solving the problem.


• Unfold a Story over time.
  Map your content to buying stages and deliver a piece at a time. With a content strategy, you've scripted the buyer scenario and designed your content to answer questions, reduce risky assumptions and continue to engage over time. A complex sale isn't made with 3 emails with links to articles.
  
  The more trusted your company becomes as a source of information, the more credibility and trust you build. Make sure you refer to the last piece to generate familiarity and hint about the next to create a "serial" type of involvement and anticipation for what's next.


• Use segmentation techniques.
  Using the same marketing content for everyone is not effective. If it's for everyone it's too general to be useful and leads to unsupervised thinking. Instead develop content on the same topic oriented for each segment you sell to.
  
  Segmentation doesn't have to be overly difficult. It can be done by roles, industry or personas. The point is that it's difficult to guide their thinking if you're treating everyone as if they're the same. Different perspectives process and assign importance to ideas, well, differently. You're a specialist at what you do for each market you serve, right? Present your content with that orientation.


• Highlight next steps.
  Make what they should do next obvious. No, this doesn't mean buy now. This means, now that you've explored X, see how this customer dealt with it - or whatever makes reasonable sense for the prospect to want to know after reading what they read. Make it obvious. Make it helpful. Make it human. Don't make them work for it...because they won't. They don't have time. They're expecting you to be the expert.

Those are just a few thoughts about how to use marketing content to guide the thinking of your prospects over the longer term of a complex sale. I'm sure you can come up with others...

Comments

[SEO Betty]

Great tips! Especially the idea of unfolding a story over time.

It would be sweet to be able to use segmentation techniques, but that's going to take some client education first, I think.