Content Connection

Creating Killer Content: Demand Generation Via Clear Value Propositions

By Chris Frank, Director of Marketing, Treehouse Interactive

Every phase of the buying process is now exposed online — from buyers attempting to fully understand their issues and how others have solved them — to deep commentary on solution alternatives. This has created great opportunities and challenges for marketers. One of the most important opportunities is that you can now get to potential buyers much earlier in the buying process with killer content, thereby securing a position in later buying phases. The greatest challenge, however, is that you need a new content marketing approach to be effective, which takes time, energy and focus.  

So how do you get started? The first step to creating killer content is to map out the buying process for your potential buyers. While this article shows a typical B2B buying process, yours should be much more detailed. How do your buyers become aware of the issues you solve? Where do they look for and find relative information? Once you have a good understanding of that process, map the content you have to it. As you identify deficiencies, create a content creation plan to fill the gaps.

The table below shows different content and potential buying phases to consider using it in.

Simplified Buying Phases and Content Types

In all of these deliverables, there is a balancing game that goes on where you need to communicate both advice and product value. In the awareness phase, you should be firmly focused on providing good advice based on the issues your product solves. This means you have to know your industry, its trends and your buyers. As they progress through to the decision phase, you should communicate more and more of your product value while referencing customer issues.

Getting Your Content to Buyers
If you create good content—specifically in the awareness and early consideration phase — it doesn’t become “killer” until people widely have access to it. Social media is obviously one of the places to syndicate your content. Your blog is definitely another. Beyond these, you should know the bloggers, journalists and analysts in your market on a first name basis, and have built relationships that warrant them helping you syndicate content. In social media and blogging communities, you may get free pick-ups if you have established relationships, but don’t expect that from industry news sites and analysts. Work with those you think would be good partners for both content creation and syndication.

With all your content, you should also have nurturing paths clearly defined and automated. If people self identify and have interest in your content, progress them deeper into your buying cycle. They may have downloaded a webinar that leads to a buying guide that leads to an ROI calculator. Approach that progression from a buyer issue perspective, make logical suggestions for content and measure how effective those nurturing paths are in generating business.

Measurement Tactics and Technology
Traffic to the landing page is obviously the easiest thing to measure, along with the number of downloads. With marketing automation technology, even if you don’t gate the content, you can identify companies visiting the download page. Some marketing automation systems let you use this information to reach out to places like Data.com. There you can purchase contact information for people at identified companies that match your buyer profile. This is a way to grow your database based on interest. Just be sure you follow CAN-SPAM laws.

At the point you gate your content, even by just asking for an email address, you can do much more. Marketing automation systems can serve up whatever content you want after initial buyer information is provided. This means potential buyers can download other resources you place behind that initial gate without having to fill out or even see a form again. This marketing automation technology, however, lets you see all that content download behavior and enables you to target and nurture based on it.

Having a content gate also enables you to go beyond total traffic and conversions for a piece of content to identifying what syndication source is driving conversions, what content is converting better than others and what the big picture is in terms of aggregate content downloads.

Remember to start by detailing your buyer process, mapping your content to it, filling in the gaps and using the right technology and tactics to get the most out of your efforts.

Chris Frank has more than a decade of marketing experience at high-tech companies and regularly consults with companies on their marketing processes and technologies. Chris is currently the Marketing Director for TreeHouse Interactive, a company that provides both partner relationship management and marketing automation solutions. He can be reached at chris.frank@treehousei.com or @treehousei on Twitter.