While the percentage of B2B content marketing usage has risen in the past year, companies are still struggling to find ways to reach their audience and fulfill conversion goals. The reason often surrounds the fact that through their marketing efforts they fail to answer the 3 core questions of B2B content marketing: Who are you? Why should I care? And, why should I believe you? The answer to these questions is part of your key growth. One unsatisfactory answer to any one of those questions and well, that’s it. With little room for error, it is pertinent that any business or organization has clear, effective and powerful answers to these three core questions. The best way of achieving results is through your business’ content marketing strategy. Through content marketing your business can drastically improve its conversion rates and generate solid B2B leads.
Who are you?
You may have a great product or service that fulfills a need but if your audience doesn’t know about you then you are at a clear disadvantage. The first thing most people do when trying to get information about a topic, product, or service, they use their favorite search engine. It’s crucial that when they search that not only your website appear at the top of the results, but also that whatever links related your to site also have rich, crafted content that will generate awareness and ultimately, build trust. There are undeniable SEO benefits of constantly talking about the same topics creating strong keyword use.
But it is at the human interaction level, rather than technical level, where the benefits of content marketing are the most profound. Talking often and in detail about particular topics creates credibility, which leads to you being trusted. Furthermore, by becoming an active participant in conversations on topics and subjects relative to your product or service, you’re able to showcase your industry knowledge and further solidify yourself as a leader in your industry. With an abundant of carefully crafted content about your services or products, the answer to ‘who are you’ becomes clear, right on target, and compelling.
Why should I care?
At this point, your audience has a clear idea of who you are, but you are still a stranger and must make your answer relevant, personal, and possible. The answer to this question is all about making your business interesting in the eyes of the prospect. When developing content it is imperative that this be at the forefront of your message. You want to be able to create content that will bridge the gap from generating awareness to your business’ end-conversion. What is your prospect looking for? Your answer must be relevant to your prospect’s request or search. What is important to your prospect? Your answer must be tailored to your prospects reality, needs, worries and benefits. How can I help my prospect? This answer must be tangible. Something you can deliver on, something true, and most importantly, something you can prove.
Why should I believe you?
This question shouldn’t be taken lightly; it’s a sprint against suspicion. You need to showcase as much evidence of credibility as possible, as quickly as possible, to stay in the game. You may have your prospects attention, but most of your prospects have been burned before and are no longer as easy to convince. To create trust, you can infuse your content with credibility builders such as: statistics, media attention and endorsements, accreditations, case studies, the credentials of your team, your speech and look, awards, testimonials, list of customers and your portfolio and resources, among much more. If you explain why what you do will work, then you’ve got a fighting chance to have your content effectively generate quality leads for your business. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean you don’t need to showcase other credibility-builders. But if you’ve got a great story to tell, invest in telling it. This your secret weapon.
Creating content built around answering these three questions can drastically improve your target audience’s reaction to your B2B content marketing strategy. An effective B2B content marketing strategy with these three core questions in mind, will entice prospects and customers to click into your site without a sales pitch being the driving force. Leading your prospects and customers from rich content to product pages or contact pages to effectively move forward in the stages of your conversion process. With well thought out content riddled with your business’ keywords, you just may even find your website owning additional search real estate and pushing your competition out of the neighborhood.
However, forget trying to communicate any of these critical 3 points if you don’t get your prospect’s attention. And we’re regret to imform you, your message is one of 10,000 they will be hit with a day.
The fact is most B2B marketing is dull, boring “nuts and bolts” communications. To stand out and get your prospect’s attention B2B marketers need to understand they are talking to a human beings with emotions, and these humans respond to business marketing for the same emotional reasons they respond to consumer marketing. It’s important to communicate your benefit/message in a manner that touches emotions and makes them laugh, smile, think and feel.
