B2B buyers often have made up their minds about a purchase before a sales rep
even gets a foot in the door. It’s no wonder, then, that more than 90% of B2B
sellers have turned to content marketing to help regain access to buyers in the
early stages of the purchase process. Yet CEB research finds that most of these
efforts fall short of expectations. Why? The research, involving over 5,000 B2B
purchase participants across 12 industries, uncovered three mistakes that
undermine firms’ content marketing.
Mistake #1: The content
focuses on “thought leadership”
Most marketers would
describe their current content strategy as an effort to demonstrate “thought
leadership” in their industry. CEB research, however, indicates that simply
representing a “smart or expert perspective” has no significant impact on
customers’ decision making. Only content that teaches customers something new
about their business and provides a compelling reason to
change their behavior proves sufficient to influence the decision process.
Consider Xerox Technology
Business, a division that provides enterprise printing capabilities to various
industries, including schools. The firm’s market research found that while
educators and administrators depend on printing capabilities to support
teaching and enhance student performance, the company was overlooking an
important driver of students’ success. Digital technology has so completely
reset student expectations that their attention and interest dramatically
decline when print materials are black-and-white — as is so often the case in
today’s classrooms. Before turning to what educators could be
doing with new technology (color printing), Xerox content marketing focuses
first on what educators are currently doing with existing
technology (black and white) and that approach’s costs to educational performance.
Only then does Xerox content turn to the importance of color classroom
materials, simultaneously offering ways of capturing digital natives’ attention
through color printing, which is cheaper than new classroom hardware such
as tablets. (Leah Quesada, VP of marketing at Xerox, and her team tell the
story in this video.)
Mistake #2: The content
overdoes personalization
Recent CEB research indicates an average
of 5.4 customer stakeholders are involved in a typical B2B purchase. And as the
number and diversity of required decision makers grows, marketers are
concluding they must personalize content so that it resonates with each
stakeholder. Yet our research tells us this strategy backfires: the greater the
personalization of content for each member of a purchase group that must reach
consensus, the lower the likelihood of a “quality sale” (one in which the
customers didnot take a smaller deal at a lower price).
Why would personalized
content negatively impact deal quality? In short, personalizing content for
each of a group of diverse stakeholders, often with differing priorities,
amplifies disconnects rather than overcoming them. Thus, an effective content
marketing strategy must anticipate those disconnects and present a broader
vision that allows purchasing group members to see their role in a collective solution.
What does a better
approach look like? We like the example set by Jeff Lowe, CMO of SMART
Technologies, and his team. SMART sells solutions that enable remote workers to
collaborate more effectively. Many stakeholders are commonly involved in a purchase:
a CIO, CFO, head of procurement, facilities manager, and leaders of the
end-user communities. Instead of creating content for each of those stakeholder
groups, Jeff and his team target “collaboration champions” in the customer
organization, people who actively support the collaboration cause and can build
purchase consensus around a common vision.
As a result, Jeff and his
team reoriented their content strategy away from personalizing for multiple
individual customer stakeholders and toward engaging these champions. To this
end, they build “champion identification toolkits” specifically designed to
enable SMART sales reps to identify these individuals and then guide them step
by step through the consensus-creation process.
Mistake #3: The content
doesn’t help sellers gauge purchase progress
Even good content can fail
to provide a view into customers’ progress along their purchase path, as it’s
not designed to reveal, through how customers engage with it, where they are on
a purchase journey. Consequently, marketers often mistake engagement with their
content as an accurate proxy for purchase progress and, as a result,
prematurely (or belatedly) pass opportunities on to sales.
The best marketers design
content so the timing of customers’ engagement with it indicates their location
on the purchase path. To do this, marketers first map the purchase path —
including the questions customers are most likely to ask at each step along the
way — and then design marketing pieces that answer just one question each.
Pam Boiros, Skillsoft VP
of global corporate marketing, and her team created just such a piece,
called Cloud Based Learning Solutions. It’s an
online, self-serve toolkit comprising a collection of smaller pieces of content
designed to take customers sequentially through a solution purchase. The team
constructed the toolkit so that Skillsoft can observe customers as they engage
with each piece of content. Because each piece is aligned with a
particular step in a typical buying process, engagement tells Skillsoft where
customers stand in the process. Based on that intelligence, the team has a good
sense of when a lead is ready to be contacted by a rep.
These
approaches represent a break from standard content strategies that rest on the
idea of publishing “thought-leading,” personalized content and monitoring
consumption to indicate “sales readiness.” A failure to rethink conventional
wisdom, however, might easily mean increasing investments in content marketing
that actually diminishes performance.
