WHAT’S THE VALUE OF CONTENT TO YOUR SALES PROCESS?
These days, the champions of content and content marketing are everywhere you look. But at the early stage of a business, is content a nice-to-have or a need-to-have?
On average, North American b2b businesses allocate 26% of their total marketing budget to content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2018 survey. Some 91% of them make use of content marketing, and 75% say they have a content marketing strategy (albeit verbal rather than documented in about half these cases).
Does it work for them, more to the point? Well, more than 70% say they can demonstrate, with metrics, how content marketing has increased audience engagement and number of leads, and many say they can also show content marketing has increased sales (51%) or decreased the cost of customer acquisition (25%). Another index of success: 38% of all respondents expect their content marketing budget to increase in the next 12 months.
So content is a big thing, and it works for a lot of people. But do you need to be worrying about it yet? Haven’t you got enough on your plate already, what with looking for funding, building a team and all the hundred other priorities an ambitious entrepreneur faces?
What is content? Why do it?
To begin by answering that question, let’s remember that content is a very elastic term that means many things. According to the CMI survey, the most effective types of content used by b2bers are ebooks/white papers, case studies and social media posts such as pins and tweets. But other types cited include research reports, infographics, video, tools such as quizzes and calculators and even VR experiences.
So much of what we mean by content marketing these days is in one sense just the creation of marketing assets. But those top 3 types are instructive. ‘Content’ marketing’ may be an over-hyped phrase, probably overdone and possibly not even really a new thing at all, but it reflects some important Google-age facts:
These days, your potential audience expects to be able to access lots of valuable, expert info -- for free. If you provide it, they will look more kindly on you. If you don’t, someone else will. Ebooks and white papers are editorial rather than promotional in feel.
By the time you come to interact with your targets, they will already have researched and self-educated their way a long way down your funnel. The best way you can help them is to be a useful part of that research process. Content marketing is where PR and SEO intersect.
What really sells, persuades and influences people in today’s online world is not interruption but information, not promotion but peer recommendation. If you provide valuable answers to your targets’ questions, they’ll take you into their network and show you off to others.
In our context, then, content marketing offers you the chance to show via relevant, expert thought leadership that you have a genuine interest in your prospects and their pain points. And being of use to your prospects is, of course, the core of agile selling.
3 great reasons to start producing content
It helps you understand your audience(s).
Only by thinking about who you are trying to reach and how you can make their day better will you be able to produce relevant, effective blog posts, videos, white papers and more. But of course, you should be doing this thinking anyway...
It helps you understand your offering.
The sweet spot in content marketing is that niche where your expertise and your audience’s interests overlap. For Red Bull, it’s adrenaline. For Regus, it’s ‘imagination at work’. WeWork celebrates start-up culture and creativity. Get your niche right, and you’ll have a story engine you can return to again and again for more ideas and material.
It helps your people to educate each other.
In a good content marketing operation, the marketers will work hard to unlock the knowledge and experience of your experts (eg your developers or researchers) and find ways to package it in interesting ways for your audience. This process also helps your sales and marketing people to deepen their own technical understanding of your offering.
How to do content right?
This is a very big question, but to get you started here are some tips from Dan Brotzel, director and co-founder of content agency Sticky Content:
Start by answering questions people ask. A good place to start is to think about the kind of people you want to reach, and the questions and concerns they have that you can help address. Then simply start creating content that answers those questions.
Match your content to your business needs. The kind of content you create also needs to be shaped by where you are at as a business, your offering and your profile. If you are doing something genuinely new and disruptive, for instance, your content may need to focus on educating users about who you are and what you do; on the other hand, if you are targeting a gap in a well-known and already crowded market, you may want to create more of a splash, perhaps with an interactive quiz or a powerful survey. If you are a strong public speaker, you might want to use video to make the most of that asset too.
Start small, but commit. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small but commit to a regular rhythm, say a LinkedIn post every week, a longer blog post every fortnight, and a simple email newsletter rounding it all up every month. Better to do a few things well and build from there.
Let people get on with it. Find someone in your team who’s interested in creating content and has an aptitude for it, or consider an affordable outsourced partner, who can do everything for you from brainstorming ideas to managing your social media accounts. Brief them well -- and let them get on with it. Encourage them to seek contributions and input from others. Resist the temptation to micro-manage -- if you have someone in place you trust, you don’t need to proof-read every single tweet.
Distribution is more than half the battle. There’s no point creating great content if no one finds it. So make sure you promote and distribute and amplify your content wherever you can. Point to it via your social channels, ask for email newsletter sign-ups everywhere, place your pieces on third-party sites -- anything you can do to increase its reach. The most popular b2b content distribution platforms include email, social media (especially Twitter and LinkedIn), blogs and webinars, according to the CMI.
Sweat the assets. Time and resources are limited, so make everything you create work as hard for you as possible. Write your post intros so they work as tweets too. Turn your industry talk into a series of blog posts, or a think-piece for an industry website. Write your LinkedIn posts so they can be easily compiled into an e-book. Think ‘turkey content’ -- a roast on Xmas Day, then sandwiches, then soup, then a fricassee…
Be generous. The best content marketing feels useful, interesting, informative -- no strings attached. Once you start to introduce salesy language or heavy calls to action, once editorial turns too obviously advertorial, readers will quickly switch off.
Manage your expectations. Don’t expect content to bring you sales or hordes of fans overnight. But done right, it can help raise awareness, establish your credentials, promote positive sentiment, educate your prospects and add value to their day.
Ready to dive in? There you have it. From an agile sales perspective, taking the time to create content that is useful to your customers and prospects is time well spent. But don’t expect it to close the deal for you, it’s part of a sales process that you have to commit to.
Find a cadence that works for you, stick to it and don’t sweat it being 100% perfect from the start -- this is part of the journey and like anything, your ability and confidence will grow the more you practise.
