The barriers to publishing online are low. The information floodgates are open and competition is fierce. 

Savvy content marketers have long since realised they need to aim higher to meet their B2B buyers' expectations of a more personalised, self-guided and digital first customer experience. However, investing your resources in producing high-quality, engaging content is showing diminishing returns.

The problem is a glut of information. On the one hand, digital marketers are empowering the customer with all the information their target audience needs to find the products and services best suited to their needs. On the other, buyers struggle to filter through it all and make confident decisions.

So, how do B2B businesses cut through the noise to reach hesitant, overwhelmed buyers?

What Is Sensemaking?  

Have you ever noticed how most often, the best or most innovative solution isn't the first one you came to? That's because how you frame a situation determines how you make sense of it. Sometimes the best solution can only occur when you reframe the problem.

The most compelling brands aren't always the ones with the cleverest solution, they're the ones with the smartest insight into the problem.

Sensemaking is helping your customers see the world as you see it so that they can find value in what you have to offer. Once they start to think differently about the market and making sense of it in a new way, your competitors immediately seem old-fashioned. Make your brand a eureka moment for your customers.

Sensemaking should seek to get your audience thinking outside the box. By using your marketing plan to challenge your audience's thinking about their situation, you can create an original framing and open them up to alternative possibilities.

Sensemaking takes your audience through a strategic battle plan — with all the options and contingencies laid out so they can make the bold choices and draw their own conclusions. You help them to reconcile conflicting information and possibilities and guide them through the process of clarifying their objectives and purpose as a foundation for understanding their purchase criteria.

Ultimately, it is about focusing on building a collaborative and consultative sales process, not pushing your products or services. As you help your customer to solve their problems, you create space for them to see that you have an intimate understanding of their needs and a ready-made solution carefully created for them. 

Benefits of Sensemaking  

Sensemaking is a marketing strategy that provides the antidote to the information overload and analysis paralysis that can lead buyers to stall in the purchasing process. 

Although sensemaking seems like a common-sense approach, only 24% of B2B companies consistently apply it. By helping your buyers to weigh the options, consider the facts, and frame their decisions in new ways you separate yourself from the crowd and you position yourself both as an industry expert and inside guide.

This allows you to present your solution in the context of being a trusted advisor and creates customer confidence from a foundation of trust. Sensemaking aligns your services with the customer needs and provides them with a preview of your value. 

From here you can nurture collaborative partnerships, using good sales practices that remove pushiness from the process. It is the difference between asking for a sale and doing the work to make sure you win it. Best of all, sensemaking wins more high-quality, low-regret deals by drawing in your best-fit clients, reducing customer churn and increasing your number of valuable long-term relationships. 

Sensemaking Feels Good

Sensemaking delivers an emotional impact for customers. An ‘Aha’ moment is generally a positive experience. It’s inspirational. The chance to see things differently, or to have your issues framed in such a way that shows that your have been understood, is a good feeling and a strong basis for a valued relationship.

Sensemaking therefore delivers a lot of brand value for businesses. It’s highly relevant to an issue. It’s differentiated if it frames it differently. It has rational appeal if solves a problem with elegance and innovation. It’s inherently interesting, and it’s emotionally engaging. It gets you noticed, and it’s a strong reason to want to learn more.

How To Be A Sensemaker

We’ve talked about helping your clients to reframe their problems, but seeking to become a sensemaker might require a reframe on your end too when it comes to content strategy. 

Understand the Buyers’ Journey

Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and think about the jobs they need to do at each stage as they complete a complex purchasing decision. Whether it’s identifying the problem, exploring solutions, defining requirements or gaining consensus with their colleagues, design your content and campaigns from a customer-centric perspective. 

Continually ask yourself if you are helping your customer to synthesise the abundance of information available so they can make the best decisions. 

Listen to their Questions

You can craft content and campaigns that are designed to present answers to your customers’ problems by listening to their burning questions. Keep your ear to the ground – what questions are people asking online, by email, via chat bots? Keyword research can also help you to see what questions people are asking of search engines. Now consider the needs of the people asking those questions and what format would be best to provide useful analysis and answers.

Anticipate Their Needs 

Strategically plan a roadmap for the information you are going to provide, and when and how it will be most useful to provide it.

Remember that anything you deliver should have the purpose of making your prospect’s job easier. Don’t bombard them unnecessarily or add to the problem of information overwhelm. Instead, use your content to provide targeted relief.

Aim to use your content to give them your analysis, expertise tools and to create clarity. Use this new framing to revamp your marketing goals and increase your brand awareness. 

Be On Their Side

Sensemaking isn’t just dumping information and leaving your reader to make sense of it on their own. Neither is it telling them what you think they need to know. 

Instead, be on the customer’s side. Become a guide who can connect them with the information they need, help them identify questions they didn’t think to ask and work through complexity. You can filter and process conflicting information and proactively provide information about the issues they are likely to face. The aim is to collaborate with customer so they can find clarity and arrive at their own understanding of difficult issues.

Verify They Have Everything They Need

Verify that your buyers are comfortable and confident with the information they have received at each stage before providing more or moving them forward. Do they understand or have additional questions? Is the information useful? Make it easy for them to reach a human being when they have questions and invite them to reach out and engage in conversation.

Automate Parts of the Process

Use automated tools like email sequences to drip-feed information. Branching sequences can help you to validate customers’ understanding and provide more relevant information. However, don’t automate everything. Use lead scoring and trigger notifications to let your team know when customers have reached stages in the buyers’ journey that need human intervention. 

Get Sales On Board

Don’t forget that sales also needs to be on board with the sensemaking mindset. Familiarise your sales team with your content strategy and train them to identify the information customers are missing so they can signpost relevant sources. Create an emphasis on them guide the purchasing decision in a way that builds the buyer’s confidence in their decision and helping buyers to make sense of the information they have. Use a soft touch and a consultative sales approach to bring it all home. 

Final Thoughts On Sensemaking 

A customer’s journey online starts with a question. From that point, buyers are trying to navigate a non-linear buyers’ journey and cope with information overload. It’s our job to help guide them through and simplify the process. We can do that by building our marketing and sales strategies around sensemaking.

As content marketers, be totally clear about the questions your content is answering. Think of your B2B marketing content and customer journey as a sensemaking service, framed by your brand.

1827 Marketing streamlines B2B marketing with some of the best and brightest businesses. Reach out to see how our armada of marketing tools and creative content approach can help you and your customers experience higher levels of success.