C2C14 Content Strategy Track: Keeping The Customer At The Center Of Content Development

Customer-centricity has not only made its way into the B2B marketer’s overall business model, but it is now being adopted in order to produce quality content that will enhance buyer engagement and produce valuable — and also accurate — leads for the sales team to work with.

At the 2014 B2B Content2Conversion Conference in New York, content marketers came together to learn tips and best practices to come out on top in a challenging and constantly changing B2B landscape. Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions Inc., kicked off the content strategy track with her view on how content marketers should be shaping their content to meet the customer’s expectations.

Is was very clear throughout the entire conference that taking a more customer-centric approach with content marketing strategies isn’t as difficult as it seems. The goal is to show how you are different amongst the competition, according to Albee. But how are you different? Instead of differentiating from the competition, you need to make sure that you are able to show your strengths in the eyes of the customer.

“The No. 1 fear marketers have is that they are terrified about not being able to reach their customer,” said Albee. “Let’s fix content marketing so marketers can practice the discipline and focus on what you have to offer, instead of doing it just to do it.”

Content effectiveness depends primarily on the story it tells, which creates momentum through the buying process to keep the audience interested and engaged, according to Albee.

Like any storyline — and especially with content marketing — B2B marketers have to be clear with who the hero (the buyer, customer) is. These heroeshave a problem (big question/pain point) and are looking for a solution (decides to take action). Since theylack expertise and encounter obstacles (or the “what if…” questions), the heroes learn from the mentor (the B2B company) and gains consensus (climax/closed deal).

Albee concluded that “we need to be the mentor, we can’t be a pushy salesperson. We need to structure the content to help the buyers move along in their story.”

Boost Content Ideation With Curation

When creating new content ideas, marketers oftentimes forget to maximize the value of previously created content. In a session held by Pam Didner, Global Integrated Marketing Strategist at Intel, she showed various ways content marketers can repurpose, reuse and refresh (RRR) their already created content.

There are many different techniques content marketers can implement RRR into their ideation strategy, such as creating multiple pieces of content out of a larger piece of content, molding produced content to target different audiences and aggregating several small pieces of content into one big piece.

Measure Content Metrics To Enhance Buyer Personas

Another important takeaway from #C2C14 was that there was far more to content than the customer engagement. Autotask Marketing Director Amber Trendell stressed the importance of collecting data from content interaction so that it can be leveraged throughout the entire organization.

When analyzing the results, “use any unexpected responses to build a unique story,” according to Trendell. These results will also help you identify pain points that your target audience is facing that you can research and see if you can solve.

Packaging and promotion is also key to the campaign’s success. Whether its E-books or webinars, testing and researching will help you understand what styles of content resonate best with the target audience.

One of the biggest advantages that content metrics can bring to an organization is the insight into your content audience, which can then be leveraged to build personas and help ease the content creation process.

The buyer’s journey as we know it “no longer exists,”according to buyer persona authority and blogger Tony Zambito, who spoke at C2C14. It isnow replaced by context-based scenarios that marketers need to understand if they want to foster better relationships. If “content is king, then context is everything,” concluded Zambito.

By gathering specific scenarios, marketers can understand the story behind emotions behind each buyer. According to Zambito, these personas help illuminate realities for marketers that will further enhance the buyer-seller relationship.

“You cannot capture emotion with a message that’s generic and caricature-like,” Zambito said.“You want to create micro-scenarios and micro-stories and offer an alternative future to your buyers.”

Social Content Can Expand Reach, Link With Always-On Buyers

Social content is often overlooked, according to Hana Abaza, Director of Marketing at Uberflip. However, social is one of the best tools in order to find a target audience and draw them into content. Abaza emphasized during her session that connecting the dots from social content to the main content of a particular campaign is a great way to get action and boost engagement.

In a session hosted by Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, he discussed how content created for social media can cover various aspects of the company — whether it’s changing the brand perception, connecting with new buyers, shortening the sales cycle and fueling social media efforts.Odden recommended marketers to use influencer tools such as Traackr, FollowerWonk, BuzzSumo and Keyhole to gather data about top influencers in the social circle.

Social content also gives B2B marketers to tap into the mobile market. Mobile’s role with content is evolving the engagement process. Paul Danter, Genwi VP of Sales & Marketing, explained during his session how this engagement has to be “progressive” in order to move the audience on and on down the buying cycle to the next content.

Native apps — compared to mobile websites — can no longer sit in its own silos. They work best as a tool throughout all channels in order to enhance engagement. Since more time is spent on a native app, marketers should design the buyer’s journey to land in the native app — increasing engagement potential.

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