Why Your Content Strategy Isn’t Working and 9 Ways to Fix It
If it’s not tied to your business goals, driven by customer needs, and informed by metadata, it’s guaranteed to fail.
Today’s marketers seek cost-effective ways to impact the bottom line despite decreasing budgets. Meanwhile, B2B consumers are making most of their purchasing decisions online. That’s why having a solid content strategy that informs and builds trust with your customer is one of the most effective ways to increase interest in your product or service and move prospects through your pipeline faster.
But how can you ensure that your current content outputs are best optimized for your customer? Start with these four questions for every piece of content:
What business goal does this piece of content drive the customer toward?
What question or need does this piece of content answer for the customer?
What will this piece move the customer to do after reading this content?
If the customer is not ready to buy yet, what useful alternative does this piece of content offer?
While it seems simple enough, I am often surprised at how many marketers cannot answer these questions about the content they post. Every piece of content, from your site to sales materials, should start with these four questions and be a part of an overarching customer journey.
You should be able to map how each piece of content moves the customer to the next, providing off-ramps to your ultimate business goal (their purchase). They should also have alternatives to continue their research and evaluation within your ecosystem.
A well-mapped content strategy, executed with a tightly-aligned content engine and continually informed and optimized by behavior and performance data will drive improved results over time. Eventually, that strategy will increase the pipeline and lower acquisition costs.
Know the B2B buyer journey
The best way to close sales is to understand the buyer’s journey. In B2B markets, here’s some recent research that should inform your content strategy.
When B2B buyers contact sales, they are 57% - 70% through their buying research.
Nine out of ten B2B buyers say that online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions.
Digital research and engagement accounts for 67% of the buyer’s journey.
Social media influences the purchasing decisions of 84% of CEOs and VPs.
Web search ranks in the top three resources 62% of B2B buyers use to find a solution.
Articles are preferred to advertisements for 80% of business decision makers who want more information about a company.
9 tips for resetting your strategy
If you’ve continued to see poor results with your digital content and want a better ROI for your marketing efforts, there are a few ways you can do a hard reset. These best practices are tied to the questions we discussed earlier, and are actionable goals you can implement to drive your strategy moving forward.
1. Outline the business goals you want to achieve.
This is an important first step we see often skipped. As you move through development, every content piece should be assigned a job that contributes to at least one of your business goals. As you begin to plan your content, make sure that every piece has a CTA that drives to your goals. Each piece should also have an alternative action–such as follow-up content or a resource library–that keeps the reader in your ecosystem as they continue to evaluate.
2. Look at your content through the POV of your audience.
Up-to-date and highly informed audience personas and journeys are essential to a good content strategy. Your audience journeys and personas should be updated continually by the metadata and performance data available to you. This data tells you what your audience is looking for and what ways they find your content valuable. If you can, involve your sales teams in regular check-ins to understand where prospects fall out of the sales funnel and why they go elsewhere. And don’t forget about your existing customers. As budgets tighten, new purchasing decisions tend to slow, making retention and expansion an important and efficient way to meet your goals.
3. Define your brand voice and POV.
In order to have impact, your content needs to be unique and authentic. With 95% of B2B customers not yet ready to make a purchase, their experience with you must be memorable. A consistent voice and unique point of view will help you to build trust with your audience and keep you top of mind when they are ready to return.
4. Provide the answers that your audience seeks.
Your audience will decide to land on and engage with your content based on whether they think it will have the answers they want. Continuous publishing and optimization will help your presence grow on the channels where they look, while content that provides value will solidify your authority with that audience and keep them in your ecosystem.
A strong SEO program will help customers find your ecosystem when they are actively seeking a product or service like yours. According to MediaPost, organic search drives 51% of all visitors to B2B and B2C websites, along with paid search (10%) and social (5%).
SEO research is a great way to understand what information your customers are looking for online and how they are looking for it. Your content should answer these questions, using the language your customers use, and guide them to the information they need to make the right purchase and to make it with you.
5. Design their path to learning.
The metadata will tell you what information they want, but ultimately deals are closed when customers get the information they need. This is where your expertise comes in. Answer your customer’s questions to bring them in, but once you have them in your ecosystem, this is where the real work begins.
Some of the biggest mistakes I see in the digital ecosystem are pages that are a part of the journey, with no next step for the customer except to contact. I can’t say it enough – close your journey loops!
Yes, ask for the sale, but keep in mind for B2B, your future customer is not likely ready to buy today. And the more competition and costs involved, the longer the process will take. The goal is to provide not just the information to sell your product, but also the information your user needs to decide.
The more helpful and robust information you can give, the more likely it is that they will stay within your ecosystem to make their decision. In the SaaS sector, for example, According to IDG, 74% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) are more likely to consider a vendor who educates them through each stage of their journey.
I love Folloze for an easy way to serve personalized next-in-journey recommendations in closed journey loops. The platform is easily managed by marketing teams (no code required!) and leverages artificial intelligence to recommend content in real-time. This enables you to automatically deliver the most relevant and highest-performing content, along with dynamic messaging, to keep the customer in your loop.
6. Don’t forget the buying committee.
B2B buyers are rarely in the purchasing journey alone. At a minimum, there is likely an approving stakeholder involved who looks at the ROI in a different way, as well as other potential users who need to know how the product or system will affect their roles or budget.
In the SaaS space, IDG says that the buying committee now includes an average of 20 stakeholders, split evenly between IT and line of business (LOB) leaders. The ITDM themselves typically download an average of five pieces of content during the process, often to be shared with the rest of the committee. Providing content that specifically addresses the needs of financial leaders and other stakeholders while speaking their language will make the difference in closing the deal.
7. Use performance data to continually improve your reach and efficiency.
When done correctly, over time, your content should increase in reach, engagement, and results, which lowers costs. A monthly review of performance data will tell you what topics, channels, and content types truly work best for your audience. Use this information to focus on the strategies that produce the best results to continue improving.
8. Refresh, repurpose, and reuse.
Behavioral and performance data can also help you strategize how to repurpose the content you already have to increase reach and engagement. Every long form piece of content should anchor at least five snackable posts and pieces derived from the same content. This will reinforce the messages that have proven to be most valuable to your audience and give them multiple options for how they prefer to consume the information. It also gives your content team a highly efficient way to keep your posting fresh, which pleases the algorithm.
9. Never trust that your development is done.
In today’s pace of business, updating your audience journeys once a year is no longer enough. A monthly review of the available metadata will tell you what trends arise among your audience. This can include trending searches, resources, communities, and channels that can help you get ahead of the curve, which helps you lock in spending value.
It’s chess, not checkers
Old marketing moves involved getting as much attention as you can from a lot of people. It’s much the same as checkers, and barreling through to take as many as possible. Modern strategies are like chess, and involve getting into the heads of your buyers and learning the process they prefer for making important decisions.
A content strategy that does exactly that involves learning the channels your B2B customers prefer and creating the content that makes their jobs easier. Informative, data-driven, engaging content on those channels is the way to win the game.
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