There is plenty of advice out there about engaging B2B and industrial buyers with relevant marketing content at every stage of the buying cycle. That is pretty much the mantra of B2B content marketing.
Transforming that concept into an actionable reality is a very different story. Nothing happens until your site visitors and blog readers take some kind of an action after reading your content. In other words, it is time to walk the talk!
Personas do matter in B2B content marketing
You would be wasting your scarce resources if you pumped out marketing content without first having a clear and complete understanding of the personas of your B2B buyers. Even if you have carefully segmented your target audience by demographics, different people within the same company can and do react differently to your content. And they use different sources to get their information. The chart below from a research study done by Forrester illustrates this point very clearly.
Understanding and building accurate profiles of different personas requires a close alignment between sales and marketing. The sales team has a much better understanding of the needs of various stakeholders because of their customer-facing role. They have the insight on pain points and issues surrounding the customer.
Creating engaging marketing content is NOT clever wordsmithing
B2B marketing content that will truly engage you audience and nurture them until they are ready to make the purchase decision, requires more than just copywriting and/or hiring someone who can put a clever spin on words.
Creating effective marketing content requires a well-rounded skill set that includes researching, interviewing subject matter experts (SME), customers, and internal stakeholders, compiling all that information into cohesive content and a basic understanding of any existing content management system (CMS) to update your online content library.
What marketing content you serve at each phase of the buying cycle also matters. Here’s a chart from Enquiro’s white paper, “Building Business Online: Your Digital Persuasion Portfolio” that shows how specific content from your website plays a role at different stages.
The two key points to remember when it comes to creating relevant B2B marketing content are:
Planning and executing well on both these points will help you deliver marketing content that is relevant to your audience, engage them, nurture them throughout the buying cycle and convert more of them into sales ready leads for your sales team.
Industrial Marketing Today is an integral part of Tiecas, Inc., a Houston-based industrial marketing agency. We’ve been in business since 1987, serving the marketing needs of manufacturers, distributors, and engineering companies from various industries.