It can be difficult for small business owners and leaders to decide how and what type of content to create for their business. Between blog posts, white papers, case studies, checklists, webinars, e-books, etc., it's natural to feel overwhelmed.
There are a few key challenges you can do to make this process easier. The first critical step is creating a strong buyer persona. The second is to do SEO keyword research so you can understand what your persona is searching for.
But what if this work has already been done? Still, when there are too many types of content you can create, how do you decide what content to create and how to prioritize it?
The key is understanding the buyer journey, the typical buyer's journey through researching and evaluating solutions before deciding what to buy. Once you've done that, you can create content that supports each step a buyer might take in their customer journey.
With most products, customers don't just buy on a whim. This is particularly true for B2B purchases. In B2B, it's rare for a single person to make a real purchase decision without input or approval from other users. Instead, buyers go through a research process involving various decision makers until they're ready to buy.
The buyer journey is often expressed in the form of a marketing funnel or sales funnel. The funnel explains the different stages a persona goes through leading up to a purchase.
The goal of building great content is to write content that helps personas get through each stage of the buyer's journey. The more useful and insightful content you can use to support the buyer journey, the more likely buyers are to become paying customers.
You can think of the funnel as divided into three equally important phases: awareness, consideration, and decision making. This is often called the “top,” “middle,” or “bottom of the funnel” (or “tofu (tofu),” “mofu,” and “BOFU (BOFU)” for short). Again, the goal is to provide as much content as possible for customers to use at each step of the funnel. But before that, it's essential to understand each stage of the funnel.
The awareness stage is a stage where buyers aren't aware of 1) your company, 2) the fact that something needs to be resolved, or both. Often, prospects have experienced this challenge and even though they are showing symptoms, they haven't named the issue or don't fully understand it. So, they go out and do their research.
Many companies forget about this stage of the funnel and focus only on the late stages by creating tons of data sheets, case studies, brochures, etc. The challenge is that this kind of content is totally useless if buyers don't even know they have issues.
The review phase is where buyers have clearly identified an issue and are beginning to narrow down solutions. But they're still not ready to enthusiastically pitch their solutions because they're continuing a lot of research here. Again, many businesses are eager to jump in and start selling. However, even that will not work during the review phase. In this case, continuing to provide education and insight is just as important. This is true even if the insights are targeted to help narrow down customer solutions.
At the decision-making stage, the buyer decided how to solve the challenge. At this point, they're probably trying to compile a list of vendors that meet their needs and narrow it down to a single vendor to buy. This is where traditional sales-related marketing materials, such as case studies and feature guides, come in handy.
Remember, the needs of prospects vary greatly at each stage of the funnel. Creating an effective content plan requires content for each stage of the funnel and for each persona. You need to consider your prospect's goals at that stage of the funnel and what kind of content they need to achieve those goals.
Certain types of content work best at specific stages of the funnel. Case studies, for example, aren't very useful for prospects who are in the awareness or review phase. That's because prospects aren't ready to narrow down vendors yet.
Jess3 and Eloqua's content grid is one of my favorite graphics that has stood the test of time.
The biggest mistake companies make during the awareness phase is wanting to talk about themselves. This isn't at all suited to what prospects are looking for at this stage in the funnel. Promotional or sales content doesn't work here. Save it for the decision phase and use it for a limited time during the review phase. If you do too much sales or promotion here, customers will lose interest and be forced to go elsewhere in search of research and information. And if you do, you risk not coming back when you're ready to start looking at solutions and making decisions. So what kind of content is effective during the awareness phase?
When it comes to raising awareness, your company blog is your most important asset. It's important to create lots of valuable, high-quality, SEO, and keyword-driven content here.
In fact, effective blog posts are those that are rooted in SEO research and focus on specific keywords or topics relevant to the audience. What other keys are there for great blog posts?
We know that human attention is declining. There's never been less time to capture persona's interest, and keeping it up has never been harder. Videos are a great way to create content that's engaging and easy for viewers to understand. Many businesses avoid videos because they fear they'll have to spend a lot of money and time to create highly professional videos. In reality, people tend to be skeptical about videos that seem overly promotional. In many cases, you can shoot video with modern mobile phone cameras of sufficient quality. What are some great videos that work when it comes to raising awareness?
When it comes to human attention spans a limited amount of time, infographics are extremely powerful during the recognition phase. Good infographics present slightly complex data in an easy-to-understand manner. Another great thing about infographics is that they are highly shareable. Don't forget to include your logo and website link at the bottom of the infographic in case others share it. If you do that, your work will be recognized.
We can't talk about awareness without talking about social media. Pew Research found that 72% of people use some form of social media. For the most part, your persona is active in some form on social media. If your company serves B2B customers, LinkedIn is likely to be the most successful channel. There's also a niche market for B2B customers active on Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes Instagram and other networks. Again, it's about shortening attention spans, but another great thing about social media is that viewers tend to read short and quickly.
Now that you've grasped the basics in terms of awareness, let's focus on the latter part of the funnel. During the review phase, prospects will have a deeper understanding of their challenges. Now they are trying to thoroughly investigate a solution to that challenge.
The review phase is the stage where you begin to get more deeply involved with the product or service itself. Still, care must be taken here. Generally, prospects under consideration are not yet ready to actively sell. However, if you promote too much, you run the risk of alienating prospects. Instead, we should continue to focus on providing useful information so that we can confirm that the product or service is part of a set of solutions to be considered during the decision making phase.
What should we consider during the review phase?
From here on, I'll talk about downloadable content called “gated” that can be offered to viewers. The key to success with such downloadable content is that it's rich and valuable enough that prospects are willing to exchange contact information in return. Next, we'll ask you to fill out a form and provide your contact information so they can download it.
The risk is that if you create poor quality content or promotional content, prospects who provide valuable contact information to receive that information will feel burned and deceived. That's not a good way to begin building relationships with prospects.
E-books, playbooks, and guides tend to have short downloadable content. The design and layout of these contents often weigh heavily on graphics, so they feel slightly “lighter” than white papers, etc.
Quizzes are a very effective way to acquire and acquire prospects. These are fun and extremely easy to share with friends and colleagues on social media. Successful quizzes relate to your field of expertise, field of knowledge, and buyer persona, and not about random, unrelated topics. If quiz respondents are asked to enter their email address, implementation results will be displayed.
We believe webinars can be one of the most effective forms of content marketing if implemented correctly. What are the rules for a great webinar?
Another helpful tip is don't try to host your own webinar. It can be really difficult for small businesses to get a lot of people to a webinar. First, it might be better if you don't have the necessary reach to attract a large number of participants yourself. Second, even if the reach is large, simply hosting a great webinar is often not engaging enough to attract people. Again, they spend the majority of their day's productivity attending webinars. Instead, we recommend finding a partner in your industry who has more reach and is reliable (not a competitor). You could even consider co-hosting a webinar with them or paying for a sponsored webinar.
We love white papers, but the challenge is that there are often huge misunderstandings about what white papers actually are. Many white papers have been found to be advertisements for products and services offered. Again, similar to e-books, making people provide contact information that is essentially equivalent to advertising has a negative impact on marketing and business.
Good white papers are detailed, technical, and provide unique insights that readers can't get anywhere else. This is the big difference between white papers and e-books. Whereas white papers dig deep technically and focus on written content, e-books are less technical, less in-depth, more accessible, and have many design elements to break up written content.
Now, we can finally start introducing traditional marketing materials! Data sheets are extremely useful later in the review phase, when prospects are nearing the decision stage.
The final stage of the funnel is determination. This stage is where visitors have viewed all of your content and narrowed it down to your products and services as potential solutions. If you've got prospects up to this point, your content is about you, and you'll see how you're different from your competitors. Let's not forget that one of the competitors we always face in the decision-making phase is “no decision.” This competitor determines that they are happy to address the challenge or are happy to solve the problem with the solutions they currently have at hand.
With all of this in mind, let's take a look at some content your persona might need when they reach the decision-making stage of their journey.
This is the first step in helping people better understand the features and benefits of your products. You can also discuss how and why you are different from your competitors.
Naturally, people like to buy things that are trusted by others. In psychology, demonstration is known as social proof. Case studies should focus on the different challenges and types of personas you have. If you can show that similar companies have solutions that solve similar challenges, it will be much easier for prospects to buy from you.
A good structure for a case study is to break it down into three sections: “Issues,” “Solutions,” and “Implementation Results.” The more detailed and quantified each of these sections is, the more likely it is that case studies will force prospects to buy from you.
At some point in the decision-making process, price becomes an important factor for prospects. Having a guide to help frame the price and the value it brings is critical to closing the deal.
Finally, the best way to let customers decide whether they want to use a product or service is to try it out. This is particularly common in software products. Also, if you're offering a service or product that doesn't have a free trial, a free consultation is a great way to continue adding value to prospects and move them closer to buying the product.
In this guide, we've covered at least a dozen types of content your business might be able to create. But don't forget, you're running a business and taking on all that content creation might seem daunting. So what should you do?
The first thing to do is set priorities. As you map out the content you'll need to create for each persona, think about what content is most important to make your persona journey come true. Let's start there. And I often want to start at the top of the funnel and work my way down. If you don't have a lot of content about awareness, your site probably isn't attracting many new visitors, so there's still no point in creating content for considerations or decisions.
You can also look for reliable partners to help you develop strategies and create content. Aspire offers a wide range of inbound and content marketing services to help grow your business.
Bill Gates is famous for writing “content is king” in the early days of the internet (1996). This is still true today. Small businesses are often eager to get into the content game because they know their competitors are doing the same thing.
But if you go in without a strategy, you can't expect to get consistent results from content marketing. By creating a map of the content you need to create for each persona and for each step of their journey, you'll be in a great position to create quality content that motivates people to take action.