There’s no arguing that technology and online platforms have handed marketers a whole new armoury of weapons. But… have they changed the people we’re targeting?

Here’s the core, driving belief of the techno marketer: Through smart coordination of paid ads and social platforms you can corral prospects. You can capture every opportunity and convert them efficiently.

You can be their guide as they are herded from awareness to action.

Minimal wastage and complete visibility over effectiveness.

No more waste

The starting gun for this game is when prospects ‘signal’ that they’re ready to buy. So you’re not wasting time, effort and budget with prospects who have no intention of buying.

There seems to be a whole subset of the industry focused on defining what a reliable intent signal looks like and what you should do with it. Seems you now need the ability to interpret the ‘confluence of multiple signals,’ according to one company that – guess what – has a tech solution to clear the mist swirling in your crystal ball.

You may be getting the sense that I’m a little sceptical about over-reliance on technology. (And I haven’t even mentioned AI and what it might or might not do to for you).

My feelings aside, what about your prospects? Will they fit neatly into your nurturing sequence and do as they’re bidden?

The realistic marketer

A more realistic view (in my opinion) recognises that prospects’ lives are messy and distracted.

Realistic marketers believe that the odds of a prospect slotting neatly into any digital consideration and decision matrix you could design are tiny – even if you could reliably deliver the ‘right content at the right time’ and ensure the right prospects pay attention to it.

Moreover they also accept that ‘who we’ve heard of’ and ‘who people we know have heard of’ are the biggest factors in deciding whether you even have a chance of being considered.

There’s a huge weight of evidence from Gartner and others to suggest that, if you’re not already known to the prospect before they start seriously considering a purchase, your horse is blithely munching grass in the paddock while the real contenders are being loaded into the starting gate.

Who’s right? Maybe your own behaviour as a B2B buyer will provide a clue.

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Is your content planning still driven by keywords and search volumes?

Does it feel like you’re writing about topics related to what you do – rather than for a defined set of readers?

Are you really getting to the heart of what motivates your market? Or dancing around the periphery and publishing the same stuff everyone else does?

Content planning demands more effort than it usually gets. (I know this because I’ve seen how much effort it gets). It shouldn’t come down to: ‘we’ve got to do a couple of posts this month, what can we write about?’

ChatGPT isn’t your saviour. It’ll spew out a list of subjects suitable for any industry within seconds. But it only knows what’s been done before. It doesn’t know your target customers. It doesn’t know your business.

B2B content plans lack purpose. It’s why more and more B2B marketing content treads the same well-worn path to mind-numbing mediocrity.

Think I’m being unfair or overly gloomy? A recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute found that:

• 58% of businesses rated their content planning as ‘moderately effective.’
• Nearly half of respondents struggled because their content lacked clear goals.

Bear in mind that the businesses on the CMI’s radar ought to be those that take content marketing seriously.

The value of a value proposition

There’s a simple choice when it comes to content marketing: you can do the hard work up-front and make ongoing planning simpler, or you can skip over the foundations and condemn yourself to a hard and unproductive slog.

It might sound blindingly obvious, but the point of marketing content is marketing. And all successful marketing is customer-driven.

Can the same be said of your content planning? Is it set up to reach, engage and convert the people who really matter for the future success of your business?

Beyond the general and the obvious there are specific things that your target customers value. There will be observations and potential advantages that will make them take notice.

A value proposition says: ‘here’s what you really want beyond the delivery of a product or service, and here’s how we help you achieve that.’

Customer wants can be varied. There may be multiple threads to your value proposition. That’s a good thing. It shows you’ve thought it through. It also gives you plenty of relevant subject matter.

When you map all of this out you start to build the framework of your content plan. No shortage of topics – and all with a specific slant tuned to your target customers.

Surely that’s better than just writing about stuff?

Who cares, and how much?

It’s well documented that around 95% of your market isn’t buying right now. No amount of educational and persuasive content from you is going to change that. Demand isn’t something you can force into being.

Instinctively, you might think that these people don’t matter (not for now, at least). Focus on capturing the people who are looking to buy imminently.

Big mistake. When buyers are ready to start serious research they begin with who they can remember.

How do you plan to get the attention of those folks and plant little memories in their minds? Don’t expect them to act. Give them something to remember instead.

How much of the content you publish currently is skewed towards buyers who are already in-market? Perhaps your content (however good it is) comes along too late to make a difference to their decision.

The big thing missing from most content plans

Let’s assume now that you’re talking to in-market buyers. There’s one thing you need to know.

Buyers don’t buy the best solution.

They buy the one that offers the most advantageous balance between commercial advantage and personal risk.

If your content planning is focused on features, benefits and value, it’s missing something fundamental: building trust.

You might be tempted to skip over risks and potential complications to concentrate on the sunlit uplands of successful implementation. But they’re very much a constant nag in the minds of your prospects.

Purposeful content planning

I guess the upshot is that to have any chance of success your content planning needs to be customer-driven and purposeful.

Drop me an email or LinkedIn DM if you want to chat more about how to do this.

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Welcome to the crunch issue for B2B marketers. Your content primarily has to build trust with people you don’t know.

The fact is that businesses don’t buy products and solutions based on features and value. It’s all about risk-adjusted value.

What buyers want

Their main concerns are looking good and not screwing up. Benefits are secondary to the preoccupation of not being criticised or fired.

Bigger brands win because they’re the choice that’s easiest to defend. Even rubbish incumbents stay in place because they’re a known quantity.

So your content has to work harder than you imagine to fill the trust gap through empathy and honesty.

Don’t sweep risks under the carpet

It’s tempting in your marketing communications to only focus on the positives. This isn’t how your prospect is thinking.

‘Advanced,’ ‘cutting edge,’ ‘ground-breaking.’ These all translate in your prospect’s mind as ‘risky.’

If there’s any level of complexity involved in your solution, they know there are inherent implementation risks. So talk about them. Show how you’ve worked with other customers to manage and minimise those risks. Don’t pretend they’re not there.

It’s what makes case studies potentially powerful but hard to do properly.

The power of familiarity

Most of your target market isn’t buying. They’re not even thinking about buying.

When that changes, they turn to who they can remember and tend to stick with their initial, narrow consideration set of possible suppliers.

If you make the initial list it’s because your consistent marketing presence makes you look like a viable option. One trust hurdle cleared but still plenty to go.

Trust in marketing

Successful B2B marketing goes way beyond features and benefits. It means understanding your buyers’ psychology and anxieties and meeting them head-on.

AI won’t do this for you. An experienced B2B copywriter can.

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Problem is, you can’t do it. Anyone who tells you you can, doesn’t understand what demand really is.

In B2B, your prospects buy things when they need them. They know all about their problems but focus on those that are urgent and important.

No amount of marketing communication will shift them from being out of market (which is about 95% of them), to being active buyers.

Instead of trying to create demand…

• Focus on being more memorable with businesses you’d like to work with.
• Create and reinforce mental associations between their needs and your solution.
• Aim to be the first business that comes to mind when they’re ready to act.
• Be patient and realistic. The ‘problem unaware’ buyer is another dangerous myth.

What triggers demand?

If ‘demand creation’ is a myth and you can’t persuade your prospects into demanding your solution what should you do?

The point about demand is that it’s driven by your prospects’ circumstances and priorities. They’re busy. They’re not actively looking for more ways to spend money. (I guess your business is pretty much the same in this respect).

So you need to understand what factors or events will make finding a solution like yours a priority. Understand what they’re not getting from their current vendor and you might see a profitable positioning opportunity.

Marketers talk about these factors and circumstances as Category Entry Points (CEPs). The better you understand your CEPs the more you’re able to shape your marketing communications to be relevant when it matters.

It might be that they’ve outgrown their current solution, their current supplier is letting them down, or that the deficiencies are limiting their business expansion.

The answers are in your market, not inside your business.

What happens when demand is triggered?

Prospects start with who they know and who they can remember. Big, well-known competitors have a natural upper-hand here. You need to work hard to be remembered by your ideal customers.

Buyers also hate risk.

According to the Harvard Business Review 80% of vendors have a set of vendors in mind before they do any research.

90% of businesses who go on to make a purchase will choose somebody from the day 1 list. Scary!

Add to this the fact that 40% of procurement processes result in no decision and you get a sense of what you’re up against.

Forget demand creation

When it comes to customer demand and winning new business, you can’t shape the world as you’d like it to be. Learn to work with how it really is and ignore those who want to convince you that demand creation is a thing.

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