Given the immense noise in today’s overly crowded digital marketplace, most seasoned content marketers are now moving towards newer content strategies and content formats that can help initiate the right interest from the right people at the right time.
For content marketers who are still at the stage of streamlining these efforts; these four crucial quick-tips may help.
A Deeper Understanding of your Audience
Who is your target audience? What type of content do they like consuming? Or, do they like consuming content at all?
While most marketers may create the ideal persona based on their product and service, within this lies a need to uncover a deeper understanding of your target prospect and not just the target account in your list. If for instance, your aim is to create buzz and interest for someone who leads a B2B SaaS product’s marketing team: the type of triggers and content that resonates with this profile and persona will be very different from a target prospect who leads a B2B SaaS sales team.
Using AI powered tools on your brand website to deliver and showcase content based on each person or customizing your brand landing pages accordingly to portray persona based content can actually help cut through the noise and generate interest earlier on in the buying cycle.
Content To Suit The Typical Stages of the B2B Buying Journey
The B2B SaaS buying journey has often been considered to be long winded and complex. With the growth of self-serve models though and the fact that most B2B buyers don’t want to interact with a salesperson when making a buying decision today, the onus now shifts to marketing and content teams to build content flows and campaigns that address each stage of their target account’s and target prospect’s buying journey.
A prospect at the awareness stage might find it useful to read more about a feature in a SaaS product that can enable their own end goals while a prospect at the decision making stage might convert faster if the content leans towards case studies and validations on how key competitors use the product to achieve growth goals.
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Also catch: Episode 200 Of The SalesStar Podcast: B2B buying and selling habits with Raul Murguia, Sr Dir of Integrated Marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions
Creating the Right Content to Captivate your Audience
Put yourself in your target prospect’s and target reader’s shoes. Assuming they get hundreds of personal marketing emails as well as several business promotional emails on a daily basis, they are likely not going to consume and read through everything in their inbox, including your content marketing email.
While certain fundamentals like creative email subject lines can be used to drive opens and responses, in a tough marketplace, email content, social media content, marketing campaigns, landing pages, ebooks, webinars: all of these elements need to be captivating enough for a prospect to sit up and take notice.
This is where a combination of creative content formats (Gifs, videos, humor) can be used to get your content to stand out.
Using other digital mediums and channels (including OTT if at all!) to be more creative and reach your target audience where they are at can also enable better output down the line. Secret tip: break away from the traditional to initiate interest faster in the buying cycle.
Quality Versus Quantity
Spray and pray doesn’t work. Some of the known voices in B2B marketing, ABM, ABX and even modern go-to-market experts have validated this time and again.
Content and marketing efforts need to be more focused, narrow and as precise as possible to deliver the right interest to the right audience at the right time. Understanding who your audience is and what piques their interest basis the most sensitive part of their role is what can boost those triggers and interest in your brand.
A simple example: if you are promoting or driving brand interest for a new B2B fintech product: your target buyer would ideally involve the finance team or CRO and revenue team in a particular B2B tech company in most cases. Building fewer but quality focused content based on how B2B financiers consume content is what can help a content marketing team narrow down their efforts and generate the right results along earlier in the long winded B2B buying journey.
There is no right and wrong content strategy in today’s digital and offline marketplace. What works for a particular industry or persona needs to be tweaked to be reused or repurposed for another target industry and persona.
What should lie at the heart of this maze is a thorough breakdown of who your target audience is, where they are most active across today’s multi-channel online world and then using that data to get your brand in front of them with the most relevant type of content.
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