Content creation is the fusion of experimentation and creativity. But as the buyer becomes self-directed, what role does content play in their journey?
Content marketing is about answering a question. Advertisements, blog posts, snippets, and designs answer a question in the reader’s mind. Effective content adds value to an audience, pointing them in the right direction.
From the early days of our ancient literature to the value-providing pages of the modern blog, audiences seek to elevate their understanding of a subject in response to a need. The need could be an intellectual curiosity, or for the B2B buyer, it means ending their analysis paralysis.
Content is the cornerstone of effective marketing. It is a win-win solution in this pay-to-go digital era. Imagine all the content you have read and the value it provides. With some brands and suppliers, you might have felt they were still holding something away from you.
On the other hand, some brands like HubSpot, SEMrush, and Gartner (Just like our very own Ciente.io) provide high-quality content because they understand the value of giving something in return.
It enables the buyer to control their buying journey and increases their trust in the brand.
An audience will think: If they can provide free content of such high value, what do their paid efforts look like? They purchase because of this.
Look at HBR— they provide two free articles every month. A patient audience member might wait a month, or an audience with the agency will subscribe to it. And for the value they provide in two free blogs, many choose to do it.
Effective content creation always gets the buyer asking for more. It gets them thinking: What else is possible?
Content Marketing is a multi-platform opportunity to interact with the buyer at every step of the funnel.
Resonating with the prospect is critical for marketing campaigns to work. If they are disinterested in what you are saying, your emails, blogs, and newsletters can quickly become spam for the audience.
The only way to gain their interest is to:
- Provide value and confirm what they already believe in.
- Create compelling copies and designs that provide style and substance.
- Create content that is uniquely positioned to cater to their needs
- i.e., Why my product is suited for your specific needs and how we can enable your teams to become more efficient.
- Describe clearly, through communication, that your product will empower them to solve existing problems and avoid any incoming ones.
- Position yourself as a cost and time-saver in an uncertain world.
- Promise an achievable and doable positive outcome.
Many marketing firms in the past were contended with top-funnel leads, but the buyer is not a decision-maker anymore; they are a committee. And each individual is armed with knowledge and information from your competitors providing similar high-quality content. That is why ABM is so necessary in today’s information age.
How does an organization differentiate? It is within every individual marketing team to create a unique message. It is necessary to let the team experiment with their creative styles and acquire data for what works and what doesn’t.
The message
The market is saturated with solutions for every problem. They exist because there is a problem or potential problem that can be mitigated through these unique solutions.
The message is always crafted through these products. These messages are called product-led marketing and have picked up a storm. It is part of the Go-to-Market strategy and is an effective way of acquiring, activating, and retaining customers.
A product-led marketing campaign is a complete funnel journey. It targets potential self-directed buyers throughout the funnel and guides them through an actual journey.
Many complain about the B2B routine, and 48% are bored with B2B marketing. Some call it a “snooze fest”.
Content throughout the funnel lacks a certain electricity that is so natural to the competitive landscape of B2C marketing. And often, marketing teams debate that the prospects are methodical.
Absolutely! But aren’t methodical buyers also interested in acquiring knowledge about available solutions in the market without being bored? And what better way to do that than to present it in engaging content!
Imagine a blank paper: you are asked to promote two computers with the same specs. What does a marketer write in it?
Imagine one writes computer A is the fastest in the world. It has a graphic card! You should buy it.
And someone else writes computer B solves your computational problems in seconds. Plays games at a high framerate with crystal clear audio and visuals.
Which computer would you choose? There you have it. The message is what your product does for the user. Not what the product does for itself.
Revealing the message and delivering it to the right audience are two separate endeavors.
When we think of the delivery, the core idea behind it is to draft creatives outlining all possible benefits for the consumer, for every possible need, at every step of the funnel.
Content Marketing to the entire funnel is a rare yet rewarding marketing strategy.
And it has become crucial for success. The majority of prospects are now self-directed. A group of C-suites are industry experts, add external knowledge from third-party sources, and the group becomes hyper-aware of the industry problems and its possible solutions.
If they are in the market for a solution, they want to know why your solution is the perfect fit for them. And the only way to do that is for marketing teams to: –
- Understand their product and its story
- Analyze and observe the product-fit market
- Anticipate all storylines a self-directed buyer would assess before buying the product.
Pushing compelling content to the right audience will ensure a basis of trust. Buyers will purchase for this trust and the quality of the product.
If teams are sure the product is the perfect market fit, the message should reflect it. The buyer should come to buy; the brand shouldn’t sell. They should strongly suggest that their product is the right fit for a particular audience.
The case study: Ahrefs
And no one does this better than Ahrefs.com
Do you see how diverse the first six blogs from Ahrefs are? They are masters of the Go-to-Market strategy. One could say they revolutionized the full-funnel marketing strategy.
How did they do it?
- By having a top-class product.
- By creating content around that product for every stage of the funnel.
Ahrefs understands their market to perfection: People/marketing teams who want to increase website traffic.
Can you spot the trick here? Their content is compelling because they understand that teams and people could belong to any industry and designation. Not just a marketer. From lawyers to healthcare, their content goes in-depth to provide free and comprehensive guides for unique.
Their content has seamless buyer journey integration. An exciting offer for each stage of the funnel.
Top-of-the-Funnel
Ahrefs offers free SEO tools. They have limitations, but for what they do, the tools are impressive. Especially the backlink checker. It is the best in the market.
Any SEO specialist or professional will land on this page if they are venturing out into organic ranking for the first time. Users will generally search for the keyword Free SEO tools.
And even from SEMrush data, a competitor, Ahrefs consistently ranks in first place for the keyword ‘Free SEO tools’.
This is a fantastic introduction to Ahrefs. You think: If their free tool can do this for me. What does the paid one do?
Middle-of-the-Funnel
Ahrefs offers comprehensive free courses on using their tool and organic marketing. They do not need people signing up or any information. Seems counterintuitive for MOFU content. And that is why it works.
Nowhere does Ahrefs ask for sign-ups in any course, blog, guide, or FAQs. Yet, these are still MOFU content. From Tim Soulo, the CMO, to the VP of marketing, the courses feature industry leaders.
This content nurtures the prospect without any additional efforts on their side. As the prospect interacts more with Ahrefs as a company through their content, prospects will form a bond of trust between them.
And then comes the next step of the middle funnel.
Their tool section is part of their MOFU content. It has very soft CTAs and a beautiful presentation-esque media kit embedded into the website. Here it is below.
Through their meticulous use of content, we can see Ahrefs understands the value of content. But wait, they aren’t done yet.
Bottom-of-the-Funnel
The dissection of Ahrefsʼ website offers a masterclass in content creation. But where is the BOFU content? Obviously, it is in the emails they send. And the offers they give out. Their sales collateral and everything else in between, right? Of Course!
But there is one hidden right underneath our noses. Their blogs.
Wait, wait, hear it out. Their blogs are full-funnel content.
Their blog contains beneficial information for teams across the board, especially for those who use Ahrefs. Their product blog offers deep dives into the strategies a marketer would need to rank their website. From building high-quality links to finding out what keyword relevance is, there is a blog on their website addressing all the possibilities written by experts in the particular domain.
Their blogs are written to attract, activate, and retain. The core of a successful Go-To-Market strategy.
Ahrefs understands that with attractive and original designs, you can get the prospects’ attention. But to hold it, you need to go a step further and provide real value. Let them ask for more.
They let their content speak for their product. And let the prospect come to them.
Effective content creation for the self-directed buyer is about helping them overcome decision fatigue.
Decision-makers need to be extremely careful while making decisions. Changing vendors is costly. Especially for Enterprises, since businesses charge them differently than SMBs and freelancers. As such, the self-directed buyer will be rigid and hyper-aware of each decision.
Content is the way to break their decision fatigue and get them out of analysis paralysis.
Content Creation: The How
Sales and Marketing Alignment: –
The way to create content that breaks analysis paralysis is by aligning your sales and marketing teams. No one can provide feedback better than sales. They understand the market. They know what the buyer is looking for. The crucial insights a sales rep can provide to the marketing team have the potential to make or break the message. They can answer the question: What are the buyers looking for?
Understanding the Audience: –
The next step is to understand your audience’s creative needs. What type of content do they love to read or watch? Your content must reflect or be an upgrade of the current industry standards. The current industry standard is to create in-depth articles and inundate the prospect with infographics, demos, and more.
But lately, leaders have realized that to reach an audience, they must speak from experience. Irrespective of the size of the content. The content an audience reads needs to touch on topics relevant to them.
- What does the audience care about?
- What channels do they use to consume this content— LinkedIn, Instagram, or websites like Forbes or the Ahrefs blog?
- What does the best content in the industry look like, and why is it perceived as the best?
- What are the possibilities the audience deals with on a work-life basis?
Questions like these will help you answer the creative needs of your audience.
Departmental Collaboration: –
Collaboration across departments has become crucial for creative messages to resonate with the right audience. The product teams know what the product can do. The sales team knows what the buyer wants. Content has to be the cohesive line connecting all of it. If your team is writing about increasing CLTV, who should you consult but your finance department? They know which behavioral group has shown more CLTV.
Craft a story a.k.a. Brand Guidelines: –
Brand guidelines or the story of your brand ensure a consistent message. It is the tone of your organization or founder-lead teams. It stems from your brand mission.
Example, Atlassian positions itself as a workflow improvement software, and as such, all its content revolves around how businesses and organizations can improve time and workflows.
Give your team creative freedom: –
Once the marketing team has gathered the necessary data. Content creation requires a bit of risk-taking. Leaders must encourage it. If the team knows what their playground looks like, it is simple to play in it.
Every creative they create will have some truth in it. It might not be complete, but it will be there. Let the team craft what they feel would work. From long-form content to shorts like TikTok, B2B has evolved to accommodate all forms of media. There is no reason not to get creative and take risks.
Encourage a swipe file: –
All good ideas come from copying and then honing the message. A swipe file can be full of competitor strategies for keywords to their designs. Understanding what worked for them and not for you is crucial to creating content that is “disruptiveˮ. People love to watch and read a deconstruction of an existing trend. Swipe files help creative teams understand these trends and high-quality content look like.
Delete what is unnecessary: –
Having an editor on the team is like having a golden goose. Not only are they able to streamline the content creation and ensure brand guidelines are met. They provide a reign for the wild ideas the team may have and bring out the gem in them. Saying no to excess experimental creative ideas is finding the idea that feels “just right”.
Bring the experience together as a CMO: –
Marketing leaders must work with other departments to create an experience for the audience. By acquiring data from different departments to having a final say in what is published, marketing leaders will drive the message to the final audience. They must serve as the editor-in-chief, as content becomes vital for the survival of a business. And they must ensure the message delivers on the promise.
Creating content is not limited to the steps above. But it is a good start to create an experience that will seem frictionless to the buyer. To have them believe in a cohesive message that is unique to you.
As the buyer becomes more aware of the market, the content must meet their standards.
There is a lot of content out there. Emails, blogs, e-books, social media posts. Itʼs endless. The buyer, as they evaluate options, needs to feel as if they are being understood. And if the content you create doesnʼt resonate with them, ending just as another voice, then that is not possible.
Your content is a reflection of your product. When the decision is business critical, it is time to make each content count.