Creating Relevant Content for Your Buyer's Decision Stages
by Brainrider Knowledge Marketing Group
- 3,221 views
How hard is your content working for your marketing and sales team? How much does it contribute to your ability to connect with and convert more customers? ...
How hard is your content working for your marketing and sales team? How much does it contribute to your ability to connect with and convert more customers?
This presentation gives you practical, actionable guidance on how to re-organize and re-purpose your existing content in the framework of your buyer's decision-making process.
Originally presented at Pardot Elevate 2010 by Nolin LeChasseur.
Accessibility
Categories
Upload Details
Uploaded via SlideShare as Apple Keynote
Usage Rights
© All Rights Reserved
Statistics
- Likes
- 2
- Downloads
- 85
- Comments
- 0
- Embed Views
- Views on SlideShare
- 3,029
- Total Views
- 3,221
ggcoach
For those who like to know up front how the story ends, I’m going to tell you how to:
1. make smarter content
2. sequence your content to align with your buyer’s decision-making process
3. always dangle carrots
corporate video
corporate brochures translated into multiple languages
product brochures and datasheets for every product
monthly press releases
product demo video archive
customer success stories
all available on the website in digital format, as well as printed on expensive stock in all of their sales and marketing offices.
Sounds familiar right? The majority of B2B companies today have this stuff.
stacks of printed collateral gathering dust
boxes of materials being shipped back from trade shows
not many website PDF downloads
hardly any YouTube views
sales reps creating their own sell sheets and presentations
Bottom line?
(This is a real screen capture from a real client.)
And what’s the most visible result of that?
You need to understand a couple of things:
How do your buyers buy?
What information can you provide to help them make their decision?
How big is it?
How common is it?
How do others describe it?
What does it entail?
How significant is it?
Investigating options
What approaches are being used?
What has been tried before?
Which approach best suits our company’s strengths, weaknesses, resources?
Which vendors offer suitable solutions?
How do those vendors compare?
Which solution best meets our company’s needs?
Making the final decision
Securing internal buy-in
Committing required resources
Negotiation/acceptance of terms
Marketing Sherpa has some great content about types of content too.
(similar to Scott Moore’s “Content Closet” concept from yesterday)
what are the obvious gaps?
what content consumption patterns can you see?
how do you make your existing content more useful?
Different types of content will be relevant or irrelevant to your buyer depending on where in the process they are.
So, once you feel like you have a better handle on how your content will be engaged with once it’s optimized, how do you actually make it happen?
We challenge the “more whitepapers” mentality and test a variety of formats and styles to maximize engagement.
shorter and more focused
turn one long content asset (like a 20-page whitepaper) into a series of shorter assets
use embedded links to other trackable content
This will help you learn not only what topics are of interest to a given prospect, but also where they are in their buying process.
We challenge the “more whitepapers” mentality and test a variety of formats and styles to maximize engagement.
shorter and more focused
turn one long content asset (like a 20-page whitepaper) into a series of shorter assets
use embedded links to other trackable content
This will help you learn not only what topics are of interest to a given prospect, but also where they are in their buying process.
We challenge the “more whitepapers” mentality and test a variety of formats and styles to maximize engagement.
shorter and more focused
turn one long content asset (like a 20-page whitepaper) into a series of shorter assets
use embedded links to other trackable content
This will help you learn not only what topics are of interest to a given prospect, but also where they are in their buying process.
We challenge the “more whitepapers” mentality and test a variety of formats and styles to maximize engagement.
shorter and more focused
turn one long content asset (like a 20-page whitepaper) into a series of shorter assets
use embedded links to other trackable content
This will help you learn not only what topics are of interest to a given prospect, but also where they are in their buying process.
Make it easy for your prospect to find additional content relevant to their current decision stage and topics of interest.
Don’t worry too much about guessing right about what the next piece should be. Let them choose from a set of relevant options.
This will ensure you’re adding value and building a stronger relationship at every stage of their decision-making process.
But doesn’t this slow down sales cycles, you ask?
Make it easy for your prospect to find additional content relevant to their current decision stage and topics of interest.
Don’t worry too much about guessing right about what the next piece should be. Let them choose from a set of relevant options.
This will ensure you’re adding value and building a stronger relationship at every stage of their decision-making process.
But doesn’t this slow down sales cycles, you ask?
Make it easy for your prospect to find additional content relevant to their current decision stage and topics of interest.
Don’t worry too much about guessing right about what the next piece should be. Let them choose from a set of relevant options.
This will ensure you’re adding value and building a stronger relationship at every stage of their decision-making process.
But doesn’t this slow down sales cycles, you ask?
Make it easy for your prospect to find additional content relevant to their current decision stage and topics of interest.
Don’t worry too much about guessing right about what the next piece should be. Let them choose from a set of relevant options.
This will ensure you’re adding value and building a stronger relationship at every stage of their decision-making process.
But doesn’t this slow down sales cycles, you ask?
Make it easy for your prospect to find additional content relevant to their current decision stage and topics of interest.
Don’t worry too much about guessing right about what the next piece should be. Let them choose from a set of relevant options.
This will ensure you’re adding value and building a stronger relationship at every stage of their decision-making process.
But doesn’t this slow down sales cycles, you ask?
Make it easy for your prospect to find additional content relevant to their current decision stage and topics of interest.
Don’t worry too much about guessing right about what the next piece should be. Let them choose from a set of relevant options.
This will ensure you’re adding value and building a stronger relationship at every stage of their decision-making process.
But doesn’t this slow down sales cycles, you ask?
Make it easy to advance when they’re ready.
This is how marketers can tangibly accelerate/shorten sales cycles.
Sales and marketing are now on the same page.
Engagement with your content is telling you what they want to know, and where they are in their buying decision.
That informs your marketing AND sales plans for that prospect.
Map out your buyer’s decision stages
Hang your existing content on the framework to see where the gaps are
Then kick it up a notch