Marketing Interactions

Is Your Content Marketing the Conversation?

B2B marketers are focused on getting response to their content and outreach initiatives. They want click throughs and replies and inquiries to result from the calls to action they flow through their marketing programs.

But, what B2B marketers of complex sales need to focus on—in addition—is marketing the conversation.

There are a variety of conversations we need to influence and enable:

• Sales conversations - Yes, this is the big one that all marketers are focused on achieving. This is the one your sales team expects you to generate. A lot of them.


• Prospect conversations - As inside sales plays a bigger role, these are the conversations that help achieve the interest in participating in that big one above. They should be adding value to the content your prospects are exposed to during your nurturing programs.


• Influencer conversations - This is the one marketers overlook. An influencer conversation happens when our content floats ideas in prospects' minds that they feel compelled to go discuss with project stakeholders who have the capability to approve or derail a purchase decision with a two-letter word. "No."

Yes, that's all they have to say. They may not be able to make that final purchase decision on their own, but by saying "no" they can derail the possibility of any further conversation.

As marketers, we must develop content designed to enable the prospects we know about—and whose interest we've cultivated—to be motivated and prepared to take the discussion behind the walls to those we don't know about, or can't reach.

This means that the more you know about everyone involved in the purchase decision, the better able you'll be to design content that inspires a variety of conversations.

So let's talk about what that takes. Marketing the conversation means:

• Sharing information about how the problem impacts the decision maker and the company overall, but also providing them with insights about other impacts to stakeholders involved in or affected by the project.


• Creating content that helps your audience visualize the ideas and internalize them. When prospects can actually picture themselves in the scenarios your content provides, they can then grasp the ideas in a way that naturally inspires conversations. It's about context and storytelling.


• Designing resources for the express purpose of pass along and making them available to the audience you have. Pass along means that you help your prospects see the value in helping others involved in the project (and purchase decision) see the value of your expertise and solutions in relation to the impact from their vantage point.

It's ridiculous to think that your company will be involved in all the crucial conversations that take place during the course of a complex purchase. This means it's up to you to proactively create content designed to enable conversations that address the needs of all the other stakeholders.

Marketing Sherpa research shows that the number of people involved in a buying decision can reach up to 21. That's a lot of people to influence. It's also a really good reason why we need to step back and do the research that helps you get to know your buyers as Jerry, Sam and Debbie instead of the demographic qualifiers marketers seem to rely upon as indicators of interest.

Get To Know Your B2B Prospects

View more presentations from Ardath Albee.

We've got to work on expanding our depth of reach within our prospect companies. That only happens when we've got something relevant to say to each of them. The better we can do this, the more conversations—at different levels—our marketing content will help to inspire.

Answer Questions with Content

Questions are a staple of our lives. They are what inspire us to explore, learn, achieve, challenge and wonder. Imagine your life for just one day without asking a question — whether out loud or in your head. What the heck would you do all day long? (See, I can't do it.)

Well, neither can your prospects and customers. Each challenge that arises is a question generator. What, where, when, how and why is a thought-process structure we've embraced since childhood.

We're demanding. We want proof, knowledge and evidence before we believe. (Well, most of us do.)

The trick to marketing that creates extremely high degrees of relevance for buyers is to answer their questions.

Problem solved. Just go do that.

If only it were that easy. In order to do that productively, we've got to know our buyers really well. We've also got to be able to erase what we know about our products and solutions to put ourselves into our buyers' heads and come up with the questions they'd have when facing particular situations.

The problem with questions is that once you know the answers, they're no longer questions. Which is precisely why marketers have difficulty in matching their content to buyers' needs.

This is why buyer personas are a great tool to use. They help you embrace the role and situations of specific customer types. Incorporating actual customer intelligence and experiences into them gives you a frame of reference. Including feedback from salespeople and customer service reps can help flesh out the composite. Try to find out what questions they're being asked.

Now, try to step into that persona and choose a situation.

Begin asking questions. Make a list. Check yourself to make sure you're not coloring the process with your product knowledge, that you're staying in character. This is easier if you try to answer the questions without talking about your product at all. Talk about what it enables (or what your buyers need it to do) instead.

What you'll find is that one question will spawn others. In short order, you'll have a long list of questions that can be representative of the answers your prospects need across each step of their buying process. Use that to drive your content development.

Answering questions with content is most effective when you choose only one at at time. Explore it from different angles, apply different contributing factors and go for depth. You'll build engagement as a result of the increase in relevance.

What Nuances Differentiate Your Company?

B2B marketers are so used to talking about their products that they forget about what makes them unique to specific markets. You've got to get your marketing content refined down to nuances to attract prospects who will become buyers.

Why?

Because, unless you do this, you sound like every other vendor selling the same product or solution that you sell.

Seriously. Think about it.

Do you want to do battle based on feeds and speeds? Companies can spin numbers to say the same things—or better—than you do. Numbers, usually used without enough context for clarity, are funny that way.

Or, do you want to attract attention because your IP (read, expertise) knocks your competitors on their butts?

We've gotten to the point that products are a commodity. If nobody else has a product or solution that can compete with yours, you can move on to something else. But really, we all have competitors.

To stand apart, to distance yourselves from others, what's your secret sauce?

Each and every one of you has it or you wouldn't be in business. So what is it? Distill it down to its core and get it out there with your content. That's what attracts buyers.

They want to know why the value you provide is different—and better—than what anyone else they may consider will provide.

If you sound the same as everyone else, you're done.

So, what are the nuances you can claim?

It doesn't take much more than that. Focus on the nuances. Get specific, aim for those target audiences whose business results you can change.

I hear a lot that "we don't want to leave ourselves out."

Get over it. Right now.

Focus on your expertise. Share it. Help people think about what it means, how it can impact them—professionally and personally. With everything else under consideration, that's the draw.

Create a plan for how you evolve that story over time. Share it with the specific target market you can transform.

If you do this, do you know what will happen?

Others will reach out and say, "Hey, can you do this for me?"

And isn't that just where you want to be?

As a totally self-promtional plug, my book - eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale - talks about this topic in depth.

Is Your Marketing Content Ready for Step Backs?

As B2B marketers of complex sales gain traction in developing content across buying stages, they've got to remember that answering objections and correcting reversals is not just a sales activity. With sales conversations pushed farther back in the buying process, you can lose prospects before they ever speak with your sales reps if you don't remove any doubts that arise for them along the way.

Step Backs cause stalls to pipeline momentum. They tend to happen when your prospects have determined your company has a viable solution to their problem, but something pops up that causes hesitation. This can be a competitor's claim, a new ripple effect your prospect has uncovered that the solution will impact or something they've heard from a colleague or peer. There are a ton of things that can happen to cause hesitation.

Obviously, you can only address Step Backs if you learn what causes them to happen.

Some ways to do this include:

• win/loss reviews with your sales force
• customer interviews
• past customer surveys
• listening to and monitoring social networks

I've seen a number of questions asked on social networks lately about solutions. Someone posts a question asking for recommendations for a type of solution or what they should know about a specific solution before they choose to buy it or even why one solution might be better than another.

The amount of information being shared is extensive—some factual, but much that's based on opinion more than fact. Nevertheless, what's being said about your solutions on social networks needs to be listened to and, sometimes, responded to.

What marketers may struggle with is even admitting there are concerns about buying a type of product. They seem to have trouble talking about anything that's not evangelizing their products. Even though we all know that complex purchases are evaluated based on risk assessment as well as benefits. That's a part of the process. So, meet it head-on and be authentic while you're doing it.

I'm not talking about writing a piece about why buyers have chosen not to buy your solution. I'm talking about addressing concerns directly. For example; if your sales reps are reporting that you're losing deals because a certain type of influencer isn't buying in, find out why and develop content to address that concern to help eliminate that obstacle.

One of the best ways to identify Step Backs is with marketing automation. Here's one scenario made possible by the technology:

A prospect has been engaged by all your nurturing touches for the past five months and suddenly ceases to click through. Take a look at the prospect's individual profile and see if they've returned to some previously viewed content. If so, perhaps something in that content hasn't fully answered their needs and they've gone back to look for reassurance that their assumptions are correct. This is the perfect time to reach out to them personally and ask if they're looking for specific information you can provide. 

Most marketing automation solutions have a rules or work flow process that allows you to automatically send a message if your prospects do or don't do something. If you uncover certain patterns of behavior, you can develop content and distribution processes to address Step Backs as they occur, keeping prospects moving forward.

Or it could be that their priorities changed. You won't know until you ask. There's never a cut-and-dried rule for prospect behavior, but there are ways to try to address it helpfully.

Addressing Step Backs with content is a proactive way to show the depth of your understanding about your buyers' needs. By engaging with them about concerns that cause hesitation, you gain the ability to get them moving forward again, rather than losing them to a competitor or even to a decision to do nothing.

Marketing Content for Next Steps

In response to the blog post I wrote about the Return on YES, I was asked on Twitter to give some examples of what I mean by "show your prospects the next steps."

Think for a moment about the user experience at your website. You plan for how you'll get your website visitors to click on something to learn more after they arrive - to dive deeper into your content.

You construct navigational paths designed to lead them to the information they need (at least I hope you do). This means that once they click on something and move to that web page, you provide what you promised and then offer other related choices. And on, and on.

If all you ever wanted was for them to visit your homepage, none of this would be necessary. All of us would have single-page websites that read like executive summaries. Boring, right? Helpful, not so much.

Think about your content from this perspective.

Do you only want your prospects to read that one piece of marketing content?

Of course not. In a complex sale, that won't get you very far.

Each content resource is designed to do one thing. Some examples may include:

• Educate prospects about an issue that could be an obstacle to achieving an objective.
• Offer evidence that solving the problem delivers tangible outcomes.
• Provide thought leadership about an industry trend.

The examples can go on for miles, but you get the idea. So let's take the first one and dive in.

Once your prospect has read an educational piece to learn about why they might not be achieving an objective they want, is that the end?

Nope. You've left them hanging.

If you were them, what would you want to know next?

• What are others doing about this?
• If I solve it, what will happen?
• How hard is it going to be to solve?
• What if I do nothing?
• Prove that you can fix it.
• What will I have to risk to do so?

There are a multitude of thoughts and questions that occur to people after they've learned something relevant to them. To show your prospects the next step means to answer the questions that the content they've just read may have provoked.

This is why I continuously talk about content strategy, editorial calendars, storylines, buyer personas and problem-to-solution scenarios.

Showing your prospects the next steps doesn't just happen by accident. It takes planning.

It was pointed out to me the other day that no matter how I think a prospect will work through answering all their questions, they'll do it however it works for them. This is a valid point - the way people think is not as predictable as we'd like.

The crux is that if you don't plan for and develop content to show next steps, you won't have it available for whenever the time comes to provide an answer they're seeking.

The other factor is that if you develop your content to continuously evolve the concepts and ideas you're sharing in a progressive manner, you have a better shot at keeping your prospects engaged with your story. And that level of engagement is what will eventually cause them to raise their hands and reach out to get more answers - the ones they need right now that they expect you to have.

And that's exactly what you want them to do.

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?”

Articles are Food for Lead Nurturing Programs

One of the things that's very cool about content marketing is that there are so many different kinds of content to create. You've got white papers, eBooks, customer success stories, how-to guides, videos, podcasts, Tweets, blog posts...and more.

What I fail to understand is why the article gets so few kudos. Research reports on collateral use focus on white papers, solution briefs, data sheets, video and case studies. No mention of the article.

Content articles should be a staple in B2B marketing programs. An article of 750 to 800 words allows marketers to focus on one aspect of a problem-to-solution scenario. They only ask for a few minutes of your prospects' attention at a time, but can leave valuable takeaways that build momentum across the buying process.

A series of articles enables you to tell a "story" over time. Each one can build on the last, creating more credibility for your company with every "touch." With sales cycles lengthening we all need to build more trust over the long haul, right?

There's a lot of talk about the difficulty of producing the volume of content needed to keep meat on the bones of nurturing programs. Articles can help.

A white paper provides one touch for your nurturing database. It may do a great job of generating leads for months, but in the nurturing sense it's one touch. However, consider that you can likely extract 5 good articles from a solid white paper. 

You do the math.

Articles are more likely to get read because they require less effort and time commitment than a white paper. Think about the last time you downloaded a white paper. Did you actually have time to read it from beginning to end, or did you skim it and save it thinking you'll go back to it later? If so, did you ever go finish reading it?

A few good reasons to use articles:

• The limited topic focus of a well written article allows you to pinpoint prospects' interests.


• Articles provide lead-ins for follow-on conversations based on something specific and relevant to your prospects. The fact that they probably read them helps.


• Articles pull prospects farther into a relationship with your company by doling out valuable information a bit at a time. 


• Your company's credibility increases with each relevant article your prospects experience. 


• Articles take less resources to produce than many other types of content.


• Articles provide a continuous source of fresh content for your website, giving your prospects more reasons to return and spend time with your company online.

When it's critical to keep the attention of your prospects over the course of a lengthening buying process, give articles a chance. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the response, the insights and the growing level of engagement your content marketing will produce.

Content Marketing for Product Customization

I was reading the AMA's Journal of Marketing and came across an article, Testing the Value of Customization [Sep '09]. Several insights presented through the research had me thinking about how marketing custom and unique solutions plays out in the B2B marketplace.

Although the research was based on two consumer studies, several insights can help B2B marketers improve the way customization is marketed:

• "...the magnitude of [customization] benefits increases in line with the person's insight into his or her own preferences and ability to express them."


• "...product involvement affects the benefits obtained from customization..."


• "...true customer preferences may differ from expressed preferences..."


• "...preferences are often constructed on the basis of how the options are framed when the consumer needs to make a decision."

With the high level of commoditization across B2B products and solutions, often what differentiates a company is how they help their customers use them to gain the best business outcomes. In other words, B2B marketers of a considered purchase nearly all offer a flavor of customization based on their company's methodologies and expertise.

What marketers and companies fail to realize is that buyers—who are solving a specific problem for the first time—may not actually know their preferences. But even if they do, they often won't understand the ramifications of those preferences once they're put into action.

Marketers tend to focus on engaging decision makers, but this research may be a true indication that end users and influencers should become more of a focus for content marketing efforts. It's also another reason that marketers and salespeople need to create the ability for prospects to have internal conversations about preferences in order to make the best decisions.

From thought leadership content about the pros and cons of preferences to customer stories that expose the reality of those preferences in action, content can help frame and initiate the conversations among stakeholders to help buyers make better decisions. By striving to provide clarity around underlying issues that create confusion, content can be designed to add more value to the decision process.

Let's take a look at how each of the insights above can be addressed by content marketing.

Insight into preferences: Although personal preferences will also sway decisions, assess what you know about how your customer's organizational culture influences the decisions they make. Are they innovative or conservative? Fast movers or slow and steady? Growing or contracting? Global or regional? If your content doesn't take these factors into account, your content may not be resonating as it should.

Ability to express preferences: When presented with information about something new, we can often visualize the meaning, but have difficulty verbalizing our thoughts and reactions. The increasing use of audio, video (even webinars) can help prospects learn to articulate and discuss preferences with more confidence. 

Product involvement as benefit driver: This is one of the insights that indicates inclusion of end users has value. People who have used similar systems in the past or will see their work styles affected by a new solution will have definite ideas about what they prefer and what will have limited benefit. Showcasing the changes and outcomes can provide a foundation for preferences that's helpful to removing obstacles to the sale.

True vs. expressed preferences: In a B2B sale, the buying committee has a number of members that must come to consensus before a purchase decision is made. When stakeholders are unsure of the importance of certain preferences, they tend to move toward uniformity with the majority.

Often all companies care about is getting that consensus to go their way. However, customer loyalty and retention is a key value. Therefore we'd be better served to help our prospects dig deeper to reveal their true preferences. Depending on the gap between what's true vs. expressed, your customer's willingness to switch to get to "true" can be costly.

Framing preferences: Essentially, all marketing content and sales collateral is a frame for creating preferences. The company who does this the best from the prospects' perspective is likely the one they'll buy from.

When the difference between a decision in your company's favor or losing the deal swings in the balance, your content marketing and sales enablement strategies can provide the competitive differentiation that sets your company above all other choices.

How you market customization is worth considering, don't you think?

23 Reasons Why Content Marketing Fails

I've seen some strange things happen to content. In an effort to help you get the most out of your B2B content marketing efforts, I thought I'd shed some light on the kind of stuff that can derail your attempts to gain the attention of your prospects.

In no particular order of importance, here's the top 23 that come to mind: (plus additions submitted by others)

1. Hiring an expert to develop content and then revising it to insert all those "me, me, me" terms and phrases that are noticeably absent.
2. Only use a content resource once and then archive it somewhere offline.
3. Sending out whatever content is at hand to your entire list every month.
4. Not creating a content strategy BEFORE you develop content.
5. Following up a great early-stage content offer with a pushy sales offer.
6. Creating great content but lousy email messaging that fails to get prospects to click.
7. Sending a great email message linked to lousy content.
8. Deluging your database with too many emails, too often.
9. Not measuring response beyond opens and clicks so you have no clue which content is working, or why.
10. When your website content is NOT in alignment with your nurturing content - hence confusing your prospects when they do click through.
11. Landing pages that bear no resemblance to the message in your email.
12. Promising a deep topic dive and delivering a surface skim.
13. Customer success stories that are all about your company, not your customers.
14. Changing focus with every nurturing touch so your prospects are totally confused about what's in it for them.
15. Covering too much because you aren't sure what's relevant to your audience and want to make sure something sticks.
16. Stopping prospects who want your content with lengthy forms that keep them from getting it - do you really need to know all that stuff right now?
17. Launching a blog to talk about your products.
18. Tweeting only about your content and company.
19. Using pre-sales marketing content for your customer base.
20. Giving salespeople early-stage content for use with sales-ready leads - even worse when it's stuff the leads have seen during nurturing.
21. Sending the same email with alarming frequency and repetition to train your prospects to ignore you because you obviously have nothing new to add to the conversation.
22. Disappointing your prospects with a great white paper offer because it's outdated. Just because it was good 3 years ago doesn't mean it shouldn't be updated before it's reused.
23. Only using 3rd party content so your prospects have no clue whether or not YOU know what you're talking about.
    
    Updates and additions to the list:
24. Burying your content in a complex web navigation scheme where visitors have to WORK to find it. (via Jonathan Kranz)
25. Favoring impressive-sounding, abstract jargon over precise, detail-rich stories. (via Jonathan Kranz)
26. Taking a "goody two-shoes" Pollyanna approach that never acknowledges the problems/challenges customers/prospects really face. (via Jonathan Kranz)
27. Failing to provide an easy way for readers to share your online content. (via Caroline)
28. Forgoing new media content--video, podcasts, webinars, etc. (via Caroline)
29. Thinking compelling content must be long and complex and forgetting that simple, interactive content can provide high value when executed well. (via Susan Fantle)
30. Only publishing content in one format. (via Sarah Mitchell)
31. Employing great content without well-planned follow-up. (via Sima Dahl)
32. Lack of unique content written with a conversational tone. (via Dennis)
33. Assuming you know what buyers want to know better than they do (via Melissa)
34. Following great content with company focused pablum (via Melissa)
35. Calling even when I've checked the box that said, just curious (via Melissa)
36. Thinking your content job is done with 4 or 5 pieces! (via Melissa)
    

Thanks to Jonathan, Caroline and Susan, Sarah, Sima, Dennis and Melissa for your contributions! Love it!

The list is growing...come on, what else?

What have I forgotten? Leave a comment and I'll add yours to the list.

Marketing Content Needs a Business Reason

Marketers who embrace demand generation and lead nurturing programs must generate a lot of content to keep those programs running. Just any old content won't get the job done. Regardless of the role (audience / segment) your content is designed to engage, it must lead with a business reason that resonates with your prospects and customers in order to get their attention.

This has been said again and again. It's something we all know, but it's sometimes not easy to define when developing marketing content. 

The business reason should be up front and obvious. Without one, people won't engage with you over the cycle of a complex sale, nor will they buy from you.

To be clear, a business reason should:

• have movement - increase, decrease, accelerate, grow
• add value - improve, simplify, drive, eliminate, connect
• integrate - merge, pull, push, combine
• align with objectives - match, parallel, cooperate

A business reason is not:

• a sales offer
• discounted pricing
• a free iPod, tshirt or Starbucks gift card
• your product or solution
• based on a request for information

Every complex purchase decision today must be supported by a business case. This means our content, communications and conversations must revolve around the desirable outcomes, obstacles to goal achievement, and the attainment of strategic objectives.

You may get a lot of response from that iPod offer, but how many of those leads actually turn into sales opportunities with a high propensity to buy?

We've got to change our mindset from hitting the numbers to attracting the quality with our demand generation programs. Otherwise we're just feeding our funnels full of activity that fills our already maxed-out days instead of interactions that drive revenues and value for our companies.

The next time you want to tell everyone about the great new feature your product development folks just rolled out, STOP.

Ask yourself what impact that feature delivers to your customers.

Find out how it delivered that impact.

Collect the evidence available to support your claims.

Got the deets?

Great! Now, write your marketing content based on the business reason.