J Christine Feeley

Content Without a Strategic Purpose Has no Purpose in B2B Marketing Author: J. Christine Feeley 7 Steps: Creating Content Designed to Convert Leads to Sales Opportunities Most marketers understand content is a critical component to any demand or lead generation plan. There are companies that will hire many talented writers/producers and allocate a large percentage of budget to writing and building an arsenal of content – assuming the content is regularly posted, you’re most likely seeing a traffic lift from the SEO value being generated – and that's half the battle. But most companies don’t have the time or the budgets to build a never-ending content library, so let’s shift from volume to developing content with a strategic purpose and a single focused intent: Converting a marketing lead pipeline to sales accepted opportunities. How To Apply This Approach: · Organizations with mountains of blogs, articles, webinars, etc – pause the development team and use this outlined approach to run a content audit, recategorizing what’s been developed and redeploy using the outlined strategies. · Organizations in the early stages of developing content – this outline will provide you with an opportunity to work smarter, not harder – you don’t need a ton of content to turn up the demand and lead gen machine. 1. Setting up the Foundation: Define content based on purpose: · Demand Gen –The strategy used to penetrate new markets and spark interest in your offerings. This approach amplifies your brand visibility, enlightens potential customers, and fosters trust. These are brand-new prospects to add to your marketing database. · Lead Gen – Your plan to continue to build trust in your products or services. Engaging existing companies/prospects in your marketing database until they are ready to be converted to sales accepted opportunities. Aligning content to your buyer’s journey: • Early Stage – Targeted end users have little to no awareness that the organization needs a product or service solution • Mid Stage – Awareness levels have increased that either their current solution isn’t delivering as expected or the organization is nearing a time where a new solution must be added. • Late Stage – Targeted end users initiate active searches to seek out solutions using a variety of online tools; frequently, this will lead to an RFP. The trick is to engage these leads prior to an RFP to gain a significant competitive advantage. *Source: SalesForce & Gartner Organizing and Tagging: If you have content, run an audit and tag each by stage. If you're in the early stages of development, use this as a best practice - providing the team with critical tracking data and a viable method to track the progression of a target lead as they move through the buying process. 2. Demand Generation (Attracting New leads) - Content Strategy: Demand generation content should be developed to pull leads in that are in either early or mid-stage of the purchasing process (buyer’s journey). This can be done through a variety of marketing channels, but the diversity of content is what’s most critical to being able to measure engagement since we all have our “favorite” ways to consume information/content, including: • Blog posts: Blog posts are a great way to share expertise and attract new readers – a series of blogs can frequently be stitched together and repurposed as an eBook. • eBooks: Another great way to provide value to your target audience. eBooks can be used to share your expertise on a specific topic or to tell the story of your business. • White papers: This type of content is typically a more in-depth form used to educate your target audience on a specific topic. A great tool to generate leads by providing valuable information in exchange for contact information. • Infographics: A great way to share complex information in a visually appealing way. Typically this type of content is used to explain your products or services, to share industry trends, or to educate your target audience on a specific topic. • Videos or podcasts: Both vehicles are powerful ways to connect with your target audience and to share your message in a way that is both engaging and informative. Either vehicle can be used to explain your products or services, to share your company culture, or to tell the story of your business. 3. Lead Generation– Content Strategy Once you have attracted new leads with your demand generation efforts, you need to nurture them into sales-accepted opportunities. Lead nurturing is the process of providing value to your target audience in order to move them closer to a sale. The type of content you will use should be strategically designed to identify those leads that are moving through the buyer’s journey and becoming more serious about their “intent” to make a purchase. This can include: • Business cases that showcase your product or service's value. These documents are a great way to show potential customers how your product or service can solve their problems and improve their bottom line. When creating business cases, be sure to focus on the specific benefits that your product or service has provided to some of your marquee customers. • Buyer's guides that help potential customers make informed decisions. These documents take time and require input from multiple business support groups, but when finished, you'll have a great tool to provide potential customers with the information needed to make a decision about your product or service. When creating buyer’s guides, be sure to include information about your product or service, as well as information about the buying process. • Customer testimonials that serve as reviews. Any salesperson will tell you that testimonials/customer reviews are critical to the buying process. Grab testimonials from review engines such as G2 or Trust Radius. Interview your customers and capture the interview in a podcast or video. If you are a B2B SaaS company create two versions: A tech version and an End User version (ease of use). • FAQs. This type of content has multiple purposes that go beyond lead gen as the information is frequently used by customers, customer support and customer success teams, and new employee onboarding/training. • 3rd Party Reviews. Digital publications frequently provide editorial content through either an interview or an expert review of various platforms – this may end up being a pay-to-play effort, but the return can be invaluable in shifting a lead into a sale's accepted opportunity. • VIP Events. By invitation only, a themed event that incorporates a demonstration. Add a strategic partner as a co-host to expand the list of highly qualified lead attendance. When pushing out late-stage content – leverage the tools and platforms that support personalization: Name of company, industry, size of business. Be careful not to cross the “big brother” line – meaning using the end-user’s name should only be used if they’ve actively engaged with a sales representative from your organization. 4. Quality Leads vs. a Bloated MQL Database The final piece of the strategy is ensuring your automation platforms are tracking the “readiness” of the lead along with the quality of the lead – • Use lead scoring to determine what stage a lead is operating within the buyer’s journey and the "readiness" to make a purchase. Scoring is a process of assigning a numerical value to each engagement. Scores are determined by how content has been tagged by each stage of the buyer’s journey: Early Stage, Mid-stage, Late Stage. As topics become more closely aligned with the products/services your organization offers – point assignments should go increase as an indicator of the end user’s intent to make a purchase. • Use grading to determine the quality of the lead (the person who’s engaging with the content) - are they a decision maker, champion or influencer? There’s nothing more frustrating for sales than to have valuable time allocated towards a lead that has no value to the sales process. Most automation platforms allow you to configure/set up a grading solution that is right for your company – this is a joint marketing and sales process that will most likely require a few iterations. 5. Content Topical Strategy: Without fail, topics that focus on an operational challenge or new research (ideally research your company has developed or commissioned by a third party) that could impact operations/processes, etc. will almost always outperform general “thought leadership”. Stick to issues that are very real challenges to your end users. Using this approach, I’ve seen self-hosted webinars attract nearly 1000 people – record-breaking for this organization, but also verifiable support around the power of a hot operational topic. This also provides the opportunity to position your company as an “expert,” earning the trust of your target audience. More importantly, from a sales perspective – these types of topics provide an open-door opportunity and a relevant way to engage in a discussion vs. the traditional "are you interested in buying" cold call. From a marketing perspective, you’ve now gained solid data on the type of content the prospect is looking for – give them more of the same, and you're set up with a great segmentation strategy. Tagging: Similar to organizing and tagging your content by the buyer's stages, do the same with topics. Create 4-5 categories to create dynamic segmented lists - this will also be a significant tool for monitoring those categories that generate a high demand and will require new, fresh content. 6. Content Engagement Strategy – Personalization Personalization has often been saved for ABM campaigns, but why? Most of the automation tools support using variable data – data that allows you to personalize the content you’re developing. Adding personalization will increase end-user engagement and could give you a competitive advantage by taking that extra step to ensure the content is relevant. Here are a few data points to mull over: · A Vidyard Study: found more than 70% of sales reps who leverage customrecorded video in the virtual sales process experience higher prospect engagement, and nearly half report less turnaround time to close a deal. · Market Tailor Study: Website personalization can generate 50-300% more leads than generic content while boosting engagement rates. · True Push Study: More than 70% of marketers report personalized emails to increase customer/prospect. Personalized emails can also deliver up to 4x higher click-through rates than generic emails. 7. Putting It All Together: Understanding all the steps involved in the “how-to” in developing strategic content can now be converted into a dynamic content flow chart. Each step serves as a building block towards the ultimate goal – creating leads that sales will gladly add to their sales pipeline as sale's accepted opportunities. I've created the flow chart below to provide a visual roadmap. Value Added Bonus for those that want to “Crush it”, additional tips for creating effective content regardless of the stage: • Make sure your content is well-written and easy to understand. Your business cases and buyers guides should be written in a clear and concise manner so that potential customers can easily understand the benefits of your product or service. • Use visuals to illustrate your points. Visuals, such as charts, graphs, and images, can help to make your business cases and buyers guides more engaging and easier to understand. • Get feedback from others before publishing your content. Once you have created your business cases and buyer’s guides, it is a good idea to get feedback from others before publishing them. This will help you to identify any areas that need improvement. By following these tips, your content will be primed for publishing and sharing by end users – the latter is the best way to cast the widest net with little to no cost. About J Christine Feeley and AMP Marketing, LLC Christine is a senior marketing executive who has successfully led both B2B and B2C organizations throughout her career including Frito Lay, PepsiCo, and Discover Card, and B2B companies such as SBC, Verizon and Comcast. She launched AMP Marketing in 2008, frequently serving her clients as a fractional CMO. In 2012, she made a significant pivot in AMP’s services by converting her marketing generalist background to high-growth strategies designed to support aggressive revenue objectives (demand & lead gen) and the sales teams that must complete the task of opportunity conversion to transaction. This strategic shift was the primary driver behind AMP’s year-over-year revenue growth. In late 2019 Christine had the opportunity to transfer and scale these strategies with a mid-sized, PE owned B2B SaaS organization. Although she held on to a couple of her core clients all other clients were transitioned to her partners, and the next 3.5 years were dedicated to building a marketing team and plan from the ground up. Those plans helped to drive the growth of the organization from $49M to over $110M and a successful exit was completed in Q4 2022. She continues to work with select organizations seeking a similar growth trajectory.