Recently, we’ve been speaking to a fair few B2B marketers implementing strategies with the aim of generating sales with content marketing. At first glance, it seems that these businesses are doing everything right:
With dedicated marketing teams in place, their websites have been upgraded with customer-centric content and active corporate blogs are in place.
Social media activity is being used to support all content posts and each is effectively sticking to the golden rules of content marketing:
1) Don’t talk incessantly about yourself
2) Provide useful information that offers value to your customers
3) Avoid product-focused content at all costs
What’s more, each marketer we spoke to was experiencing a certain level of “success” with their content efforts. Their videos were being shared on Twitter, images were being pinned on Pinterest and blog posts were re-appearing on Facebook timelines.
Yet with aforementioned best practice in place, even the most stellar content can still fail to gain traction and translate into sales. Without a coherent strategy, marketers risk creating superb standalone pieces of content that people read, enjoy and share without ever being motivated to go on to purchase.
So, here we have numerous excellent individual content assets. Each is well-written, keyword-rich and fully delivers on its promise as per its title. Alone, they each stand their ground as effective pieces of content. Yet they don’t connect to each other to create the problem-to-solution story that customers so need. With no progressing storyline, the efforts fail to guide the customer along a journey to buying.
Let’s return to the progressing storyline idea. To apply this, consider that each customer, or potential customer, is on a journey delineated by different buying stages. One’s job as content marketer is to help them make the small decisions that propel them to progress to the stage. Progress – we all need it. Your buyer needs it…your sales team need it…you need it.
The challenge then is to create content that is bespoke to each buying stage, creating the momentum required to fuel the journey along to that coveted purchase decision. Key to this is tending to buyers’ differing informational needs along the pathway to purchase.
So here it is, the big one, the secret to generating sales; content marketing requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Rethink your strategy to cater to the needs of your primary target persona, mapping content onto specific buying stages for maximum success.
To discuss how your content strategy could generate quality leads and actual sales, call us on 0845 555 9264.
