What Content Do Your B2B Prospects Want?
Research on the type, timing and delivery of B2B content your prospects want through the customer journey, continues to improve. What does research tell us about content types that generates the best leads?
- 7 Research Facts For B2B Content Marketing Development
- 14 Prompts To Improve Your B2B Content Marketing
Improve your B2B marketing content with insights from these respected studies. Consider this series of thought provoking questions to hone your own approach to marketing content.
A quick reminder to get us grounded:
The goal of your marketing content is: to answer prospects questions and help them choose the right solution for their particular situation.
For those with internal marketing metrics information use these three studies to benchmark your efforts.
- Lead Generation
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Nurturing (moved up a place to third)
- Engagement
No great surprises in the list. Lead nurturing was previously in fourth place suggesting that B2B professional are moving away from ‘engagement’ as useful for business interactions. This likely relates to the cliff-fall in quality of the social media experience. This is keeping with our experience with JEM 9 clients.
Considerations For B2B Marketing Content
1. 91% of this year’s respondents are using B2B content marketing. At the beginning of 2017, 70% of respondents expected to produce more B2B marketing content than during 2016. Similarly 65% expect an increase in 2018.
=> Consider your mix of spend on content / collateral versus communication channels / dissemination?
2. B2B marketers are reducing the variety of marketing content types (whitepapers, blogs, video, etc) they produce from 13 down to 8.
=> Consider if you need to double down on a select few marketing content types?
=> Is there a type of content your customer personas favour (or favor)?
=> What type of marketing content is your organization good at producing?
3. 71% of B2B marketers consider how their content impacts the overall experience a prospect has with their organization.
=> Consider what content your prospects needs through the customer journey from awareness to conversion?
4. Content marketing strategy and quality creation are the top two factors contributing to content marketing success. Both factors were cited by over 70% of the 800+ B2B marketers surveyed. However, only 37% have a documented content marketing strategy which means there’s an opportunity for strategic advantage!
=> Consider shifting your content marketing approach from tactical to strategic.
=> Consider if a smaller volume of better marketing content may be a more successful.
5. Third party product testing/reviews/opinions top the list of content types that IT pros rely on. With product demos and literature in second place, company generated content continues to play a strong role in answering prospects queries.
Consider: => What is the mix of in-house versus third party content available for your prospects?
Consider: => Who else is ‘educating’ prospects on prospective solutions and what questions their marketing content address?
6. Your prospects are focused on their particular set of circumstances. 62% want additional information about the content they already have from you. 45% want industry specific info.
Consider: => Are your B2B customer persona industry specific?
Consider: => What additional content is appropriate for each customer personas?
Consider: => What customer questions does your existing marketing content not address?
7. Follow-up calls by uninformed sales reps are considered “poisonous” to the sale (a little scary to say the least).
Consider: => What information is available to the sales person about this individual prospect?
Consider: => Does your CRM or marketing automation tool show which content your prospect has already received, opened and engaged with (e.g. downloaded)?