Virtually every B2B company today does content marketing. A 2013 report by the Content Marketing Institute found that 91% of B2B Marketers use this strategy.
But dark clouds are gathering. Buyer persona guru, Tony Zambito, wrote in a recent blog post that with buyers being constantly bombarded with content, they’re experiencing information overload that makes the process of finding solutions more laborious. He went on to speculate that “toleration has its limits and we may be at the point where buyers do not want to tolerate overload of poor quality.”
What does this mean for the future of content marketing?
Zambito concludes that overload of poor quality content will lead buyers back to the salesforce as a source of useful information. Yet Zambito himself says that working with the salesforce will only help if the salesforce is able to provide truly savvy advice. In other words, the problem isn’t content marketing per se. It’s poor-quality content marketing.
The real solution—whether you want to continue to use content marketing or beef up your sales efforts—is to provide useful, high quality information.
What is it about content today that buyers object to?
The biggest complaint is that content is too blatantly self serving and promotional.
The answer is to create content that’s buyer centric, useful, credible, well written, and action oriented.
Buyer centric
Much content produced today doesn’t connect with buyer needs and concerns. Instead, it talks primarily about the company and the solution. High-quality content starts with the buyer. Ideally, the organization would create a buyer persona by interviewing people who bought the solution as well as people who evaluated the solution but didn’t buy it. Through these interviews you can learn about customers’ business objectives, their misconceptions about your product, their buying process, what they need to help them through the buying cycle, and where they look for information. Having this information makes it much easier to produce buyer-centric content because buyers have actually told you what they’re looking for.
Useful
What makes content useful? Your buyer-persona research will help answer this question. Useful information might address buyer misconceptions. It might answer commonly asked questions. It might tell them how you can make their life easier. It might give them tips on how to purchase or use your product. By putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes and writing content from their perspective, you no longer run the risk of creating hypey content. Instead you’ll provide useful content your customer will be happy to read.
Credible
Copy that’s based on buyer needs is by definition much more credible than content that simply hypes a vendor’s solution. Other factors that contribute to trustworthiness include backing up claims and statements with data—and citing your sources. Use quotes from customers or industry analysts. Explain the issue you’re talking about in the context of larger industry trends.
Well Written
Much content from technology vendors is marred by poor writing. Good writing starts with having a point to make and proving it. Come up with a single thesis and support it through the rest of the paper—just as you would if you were writing a paper for school. Make sure the paper flows logically. Tailor the style and voice to the needs of the buyer — consumer-oriented copy is considerably less formal and breezier than copy targeting financial professionals. Use active rather than passive voice. Strong action words are better than adverbs with nouns. Edit to eliminate unnecessary verbiage. Check for consistency: use one person (I, you, he or she, they) throughout, use the same tense, spell words and use punctuation consistently. Have someone else proofread your copy. For a thorough education on how to write clearly, check out William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” or Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style.” If you’re not confident in your in-house writing skills, hire an outside expert.
Action Oriented
Many types of writing exist solely to inform or entertain. While those are certainly worthy goals, the primary purpose of marketing copy is drive the reader to take some type of action typically to move the buyer in some way closer to making a buying decision. The action can be a hard action, like placing an order, or a soft action, like downloading a PDF.
Right now, content marketing is being overrun with a glut of badly written, hype-filled material. Content marketers that continue along this path run the real risk of tarnishing this very useful strategy in the minds of buyers. One solution is to dial back your use of this technique and bring out your salesforce. A better one is to cut through the clutter with buyer-centric, useful, credible, action-oriented content that addresses the needs of one particular audience. By producing high-quality content, you stand to elevate your brand by giving people a great impression of your company, increasing brand awareness, generating leads and referrals, and differentiating your business in a powerful way.
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