The prevalent consensus about the evolution of B2B marketing is that we need to motivate two-way interactions. But I say that's stopping short. If you're only focused on designing your marketing content to make an isolated connection with a specific persona, you're not stretching your content strategy far enough.
In a B2B complex sales process, buying committees involve a number of people. People your company may never meet. It's not enough to just focus on creating a two-way dialogue between a prospect and your company. You've got to get your ideas into the conversations that happen between the prospect and other stakeholders involved in the decision.
Marketing content needs to be designed to broaden your reach.
We see mounting evidence that shows buyers have taken control over the ways in which they buy. Salespeople are getting pushed much farther out in the buying process. Buyers are searching for and accessing a variety of content to help them learn why they should solve problems and just how to do so.
If you think that the buying committee is sitting in isolation, waiting to discuss all this until they invite your company into the conversation, you're kidding yourself. The biggest disconnect for many companies is that they don't think about what precedes their invitation to the party. All they focus on is getting prospects into a sales conversation.
Well, it's not enough. These companies are overlooking a critical opportunity to get "in the room" sooner.
Content design.
Let's take a look at a possible scenario:
David, a prospect, enters a search term into Google and finds an article your company wrote about why it's critical to solve a problem he's facing.
David clicks on the link and reads the article where he discovers the information he needs to persuade Joe in product development that he can actually get something he's been wanting for a long time, but didn't know could be solved as part of the deal.
David hunts Joe down, shares the insight and the article.
Joe calls Susie and discusses the implications with her. She's excited about the potential for process shift that would also play into her needs.
Susie goes out to your website and does a bit of research, finding another article you designed to answer the questions people like her (persona) have about impact to areas they're responsible for managing.
Susie gets David and Joe on a conference call, shares what she's learned and the three of them create a list of further questions they need to get answered.
Keith shows up to a project meeting with content from another vendor that answers some of the new questions. But David has done a bit more research on your solution and shows how your content helps to connect the dots putting your solution back in the preferred position.
And on they go.
This scenario is being played out in many a complex purchasing process. All of the interactions happening are without a salesperson in the room. But, your ideas can be there. Your ideas and expertise can be shared by your prospects with their buying committees if your content is designed to inspire conversations.
Some tips for designing content that inspires conversations include:
- Develop content to match your buyers' perspective.
- Address obstacles they may face in relation to people - not just technology, integration, or features.
- Enable them to visualize how their situation will change if they solve the problem.
- Remove the risk of failure with customer success stories that go beyond the boring versions all about products. Think user adoption, process change and other things that can lead to failure even if your product works perfectly on its own. Those are the things that really scare people.
- Help them build a realistic business case with tangible evidence they can apply to their own situations.
This is why doing the research and learning as much as you can about the people involved and the specific situations they're each facing is the key. The level of relevance prescribed to your content by your prospects will determine whether or not your ideas put your company "in the room" even before you ever speak with them personally.
Having your ideas represented during the pre-sales conversation stage can also be the key factor that determines your company's odds of ever getting that sales conversation most companies are devoted to securing.
