As more organisations embrace content as a means of reaching their target audience, are they being led astray by the notion of ‘content marketing’?

Today’s B2B buyer demands a customer experience that is level pegging with those they get as consumers. Studies show that 73% of buyers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties, with 86% willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

With so much of the B2B buying journey now self-led and digital, content is foundational to our customer relationships. But what if the focus on ‘content marketing’ is creating an experience that leaves people cold?

An SEMRush survey shows that 91% of marketers use content marketing. However, only 9% of respondents rated their performance as excellent. With 48% basking in the glow of an average to poor rating, it’s clear there’s a lot of improvement to be made.

None of us want our efforts to receive a lukewarm reception or get mediocre results. We all want the top position in Google, likes and follows on social media, 10x website traffic and leads. However, it is perhaps approaching content creation with these narrow remits in mind that is the root of the problem. While these top-of-funnel functions are important, they aren’t the whole picture.

Is our over-familiarity with using content to create brand presence and awareness holding us back from creating brand building content that creates value?

Strategic Content is More Than Content Marketing

Instead of content marketing, the output of content strategy should be strategic content. We should be committed to making content for every stage of the customer journey and to delivering a co-ordinated and comprehensive content experience.

Viewed this way, marketing is only one of many outputs. Content becomes an essential part of the offer, not just the way we make more sales or a nice to have add-on.

For content to become more than a marketing strategy, we need a broader discussion. The disciplines we use in developing content for marketing - tone, persona, journey, messaging etc – will still be highly relevant is this new paradigm, but we cannot allow that lens to distort our view of our content’s true purpose.

Content is Customer Experience

Think about the customer relationship end to end and it is apparent that content is the key to unlocking the rich customer experience B2B buyers are looking for.

Done correctly, content can be an important part of the brand’s value proposition and the thing that differentiates you from the rest of the marketplace. It is the engine powering your online platform, creating value-laden opportunities for connection, innovation and participation. It provides a solid foundation for exceptional customer service and is integral to your onboarding and learning processes.

In short, content should be central to how you build relationships and retain them. It’s about putting service before sales.

Caring Promotes Sharing

The first question you should be asking yourself at every touchpoint isn’t ‘how can we convert this lead to a sale?’ but:

What does this person need at this point in their relationship with us?

And

What additional value can we provide that will strengthen and deepen that relationship?

It’s this shift from a marketing-first, sales-driven mindset to a customer-centric, experience-first one that creates opportunities.

A Simplified Strategic Content Marketing Flywheel

Instead of your using your content to push prospects through your sales funnel, aim to engage and delight the people in your orbit in a process known as a flywheel.

Put simply, people want to spend their time, attention and money with people who understand them and consider their needs. The flywheel concept focuses on creating a set of repeatable, improvable practices to create those meaningful, organic connections.

One of the aims of the flywheel is to make buying from you feel like a natural, almost inevitable, outcome of the relationship. But it recognises that, while sales are important, monetary value isn’t the only value in our customer relationships.

By linking the disciplines of marketing, sales and service to create a holistic customer relationship, the flywheel seeks to turn strangers into prospects, prospects into customers, and satisfied customers into people who are so delighted with their experience, they can’t help but promote your brand.

Attract

In the attract stage of the relationship, your potential customers aren’t aware of your brand or the solution you offer to the problem they’re encountering. It’s also possible that they don’t have a complete definition of the problem they’re trying to solve.

To reach them, your content needs to be optimised so it is found and able to grab their attention. As well as an organic search strategy, you might also be paying for targeted ads on social platforms.

Visually engaging, short form content helps arrest the attention of busy B2B buyers searching online. It's also great at communicating a lot of information in a short amount of time. Infographics, video content and ad copy all need to concentrate on engaging people’s curiosity based on their search intent.

Posting and promoting your content on social media encourages the small commitment you’re looking for at this stage. Providing value on social encourages people to follow so you can remain in their orbit and continue deepening the relationship.

People are more likely to follow accounts that provide a steady stream of share-worthy content. Think about the accounts you follow on social media. Most likely, they’re not selling to you 24-7. Instead, they’re providing you with both original and curated content that first, answers your needs and second, makes you want to share it with your own network.

An even better way to encourage people to make that small commitment to your brand is giving them a reason to opt-in to your mailing list. The entry point to your list might look like:

A downloadable resource in exchange for your information.
A short course delivered by an email drip campaign.
An incredibly valuable, must-have newsletter.
An interactive quiz on your website with the results and actionable next steps delivered by email.

Engage

After attracting their attention and creating an initial point of engagement, it's time to develop and deepen the relationship.

Trust, relevance and quality are all key to customers at this stage. Blog posts and video content that answer questions, provide an interesting point of view or actionable information are all useful here. In addition to being optimised for search, your content must be well researched, comprehensive and authoritative to answer the requirements of both your reader and Google.

Providing longer form content such as white papers, case studies and webinars can also demonstrate your expertise. This type of in-depth content is sometimes the entry point to your email list. It can also be the mechanism you use to gather additional information using dynamic form fields to flesh out your CRM.

A marketing automation platform will help you to keep track of each person’s interactions with your company across your website, social and email. This allows you to follow up on any interest they have shown in specific products or services. Targeted and personalised nurturing email campaigns direct them to highly relevant indepth content and the answers they need.

B2B buyers are often part of a buying committee evaluating suppliers. While your initial contact might be convinced about your brand, they will need your help to bring their colleagues on board. Think outside your target audience to the needs of their colleagues and create content they can forward on.

Social media is obviously the natural forum for creating a sense of community engagement around your brand. Posting a variety of content and answering questions on your own profile is step one. AI social creation, scheduling and amplification tools can help you to post regularly, freeing your team up to go further and reward your community’s engagement.

For example, after encouraging people to leave reviews or ratings, it never hurts to say thank you. Ignoring or removing negative reviews, on the other hand, can only hurt your brand. Instead, take the opportunity to reply and rectify in public. Never forget, future customers will be looking on for evidence of after-sales care.

Social media also allows you to create opportunities for people to get involved. Share other people’s content, and make sure to always boost user generated content created specifically for your brand.

Delight

Making the sale is the end of the line in a traditional funnel. However, the flywheel sees this point in the customer journey as an opportunity to turn a purchaser into a loyal, evangelically happy, brand advocate.

It not only pays in repeat sales to hold on to the customers you’ve spent time and money on nurturing and converting. The value of a delighted customer is also in the referrals and recommendations they make and their continued participation with your brand.

Customer feedback and surveys can be used to produce case studies and original research. They can also help the brand to innovate, create new products and services and optimise the customer experience.

Automated emails can be used to set up onboarding and upskilling sequences. A library of knowledgebase articles, video tutorials and on-demand events can draw customers deeper into your brand experience and help them feel vindicated in their purchase decision. The same marketing automation tools used to engage are those that create the conditions to delight.

We’ve all had the experience of appreciating the post-sales emails we’ve received from a supplier, even if we do feel slightly worried that they can read our mind! When content anticipates a customer’s needs, it feels like the brand cares about our outcomes. For example, when they direct people on how to make the most of their investment, check in on their progress and suggest new ways to use a product.

Customers treated like this are happy to recommend you to colleagues, strangers on the internet… anyone who will listen. Your livestream tutorials and challenges are not only appointment viewing for them, they’ll share them with others. They’ll also talk about the things they’re learning thanks to you; share the things they’ve created based on your content and talk up the networking potential of being involved with your brand because of the new contacts in they’ve made on your platform.

Content Reimagined

The whole point of strategic content is it is honed to produce maximum effects at every stage.

In order to cut through the cacophony created by marketers focused solely on creating presence, we need to do better.

We need to be more strategic, more empathetic and more creative.

Tune in to what is creating the maximum benefit for both you and your customers. Focus on creating value in the most productive way possible. It’s time to reimagine content and how we use it to relate to our customers.

If you’d like to find out more about our approach, let’s have a chat. We’ll show you how to reinvent your customer experience with technology, strategy and creativity.

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