Create Content to Engage Early-stage Leads

Most B2B companies have lots of content for late-stage buyers. This includes data sheets, solution briefs, technical white papers, online demos, etc. If you evaluate your website content, you’ll likely see most of your content oriented around your product offerings and solutions.

The gap I see most often is a lack of early stage content that develops a relationship from the start of the buying process and primes your prospects for that later-stage interest. B2B buyers of complex solutions need a lot of education before product-oriented content is useful to them.

Early stage content is not about your product. Your company is the only entity that truly cares about your product. What people care about is what your product enables them to achieve. But, at the early stage, prospects don’t even care about that. Whatever their situation, they’re dealing with it. It may not be ideal, but it hasn’t stopped them in their tracks, so it’s sufficient.

This means that we need to reach farther back from what our product enables people to achieve in order to create content relevant enough to gain the attention of early stage leads. Before you can talk to them about change, you’ve got to show them you understand their current circumstances.

Start by answering the following questions:

• What situation(s) cause people to want to achieve the outcome your products deliver?


• What caused that situation to exist in the first place?


• What circumstances made the situation so untenable that it motivated your customers to take action to change it?

The answers to those questions should point you toward the subject matter for content development. Think of it as meeting on common ground.

When you address the situation your prospects are living with everyday, they can instantly relate. They’ll look farther to see what else they may not know about their situation. They’ll engage with your content because they can see themselves in the storyline.

Beyond that, by creating early stage content, you gain credibility. You show your prospects that you understand their business, roles and responsibilities, as well as how difficult it can be to figure out how to go about changing their situation—or even why they should.

Considering that prospects are demanding that companies they choose to partner with come to the table prepared, you’re already showing them the depth of knowledge and consideration your company extends to customers.

With longer buying cycles, it’s critical that marketers position their companies to become the anchor prospects seek out to help form their thinking about their situations—and the possibilities for change—by starting from common ground.

When you can engage at this level, prospects will take next steps with you to move forward. This means you need a progressive content strategy for how you’ll motivate them to take action. By starting with a focus on status quo, you’ll have a solid foundation on which to build it.

Just remember that early-stage content needs to help prospects move from “So what?” to “Now what?”

Comments

[Keith Bossey]

From what I've seen, much B2B content is created by a team that never sets foot in front of the customer. This is not their fault, it is just that marketing only ventures outside the office when there is a tradeshow (a terrible place to understand customers). Unless there is strong integration between marketing and sales (and operations, for that matter), the best you are going to get is product literature.

[Colleen Copple]

I'd like to respond to Keith's comment. Yes, it's sometimes challenging to get all of the content creators across the organization in front of customers on a regular basis, however you do have wonderful gatekeepers to customers within your company - your salespeople. And if you're not creating content for early stage sales conversations, they are. Today's most competitive companies are finding ways to tap into the knowledge of front line sales reps to understand the problems customers are trying to solve and how successful sales reps "go to market" so to speak. We've held sales and marketing messaging sessions in the past to craft conversation-ready messaging, and we use our technology, SAVO, internally on a daily basis to stay tuned to the field. Often, they're providing us little nuggets of info that help us to nuance our content - and more importantly - share those nuggets with reps across the company. I encourage you to begin a dialogue with sales. I can say from experience that it will be eye-opening and time well-spent. Also, a colleague of mine wrote an article on "tribal knowledge" from the sales rep's perspective. Perhaps this will give you some ideas. The article can be accessed here: http://blog.savogroup.com/2009/09/a-sellers-perspective-on-the-value-of-tribal-knowledge/.

[twitter.com/FYIndOut]

Great post Ardath. Many times in B2B, prospects are looking for educational information and may not have even heard of your company yet. By providing great content like blog posts, presentations, videos and more that speak to the general issues and possible resolutions (No, not your product), it helps educate them and they see you more as a great reference then an educator. Plus adding this content to various sites builds up your SEO and allows prospects in different places to find you.

Suggestion: Never put your early phase content behind a web form. Put a call to action somewhere towards the end of your content. This allows many more people to read it and share it with others. If the content is good, the prospect will follow the call to action when they're ready.

[Keith Bossey]

Colleen makes excellent points. The key to the effective approach that she lays out is integration. Sales must become an extension of marketing (or marketing an extension of sales).

[Michael Selissen]

Prospective customers typically come searching for vendors that can answer three basic questions: Do you have a solution to my problem? Can you prove it? And, how much will it cost? Even while asking these questions, prospects are often still wrangling over just what problem they are trying to solve. And that’s where the type of content you are talking about comes in – something that helps them frame, articulate and quantify the problem; demonstrate why current solutions are inadequate; and rationalize an investment in a something new. So absolutely, vendors that neglect this aspect of the purchase cycle are leaving money on the table.

However, I take exception with the notion of early-stage versus late-stage positioning. The pipeline for content consumption isn’t quite as orderly as that because prospects often try to understand what is available by analyzing it from multiple levels simultaneously. It’s akin to buying a car. Even before deciding on a class of car, consumers will often look at features, price, styling, performance, safety and reliability, and product reviews across a variety of classes before narrowing down what they want. The same holds for complex purchases where multiple decision makers and influencers are involved. They may download a strategic white paper one day and a data sheet the next. It’s really about making the right content available and being attuned to what prospects want, when they want it.

[Ardath Albee]

You guys are all doing a great job of talking amongst yourselves :-) I just want to pop in with a couple of comments.

Colleen and Keith - you both have good points and the alignment of marketing and sales (or extension) is one of the keys to creating messaging that resonates with prospects.

FYIndOut - I agree with you about gating content. I listened to Joe Pulizzi give a webinar today and he shared statistics from his latest eBook launch. He gave the eBook away freely but also had other "gated" content on related topics available as well as a newsletter sign up.

I'm hoping I remember the numbers correctly - Joe, correct me if I'm wrong. The eBook was freely downloaded over 3,500 times in a couple of weeks. He received 300 form-completed downloads on the gated resources and another 100 newsletter subscribers.

Pretty interesting, don't you think? Lead gen and nurturing all at the same time. Not to mention the number of inquiries for project work, speaking and such that I don't recall off the top.

Michael - I'm sorry you took exception. I agree that prospects may access your content in an order that suits them, but as for development, you need a plan and a strategy to ensure you create content that provides what people need as they need it during the process.

Anyone who is just creating content for content's sake, isn't likely to end up with coverage that answers needs across all the buying stages. Hence the proliferation of sales content that counts on prospects understanding just exactly why they need what companies sell, without any help from those companies to help frame their thinking. Just saying :-)

[Clara James]

The content is very important". It's true that this line has become monotonous, but you would still hear it more often from all the marketing icons. I really appreciated the content that the write make available for us...

[Promotional Items]

Personally I think there is WAYYY too much content for content's sake on the internet in particular.
While a lot of good thought goes into Blogs like this, on the other side of the coin are "Article sites" full of poor quality articles written not to communicate a message but mostly just to build incoming links. The way Google operates I think is to blame - in order to get ranked well and make a living people have to focus on unnatural tasks such as "link building". It's a pity this is the case, but it's the way of the world on the net unfortunately.

[Ardath Albee]

Hey Matt,

I hear what you're saying but find it interesting that you're here, doing "link building" from my blog to your site. And, instead of using your name, you're actually treating it like an an ad for your company.

So did that help your Google ranking? Is that why you chose to do the same thing on some of my other posts, as well?

You're welcome to comment but try not to justify bad behavior and then display it here.

[Crofts]

Wonderful Post. Thanks for sharing...I’ll wait for more.