Content Strategies Proven to Convert Leads

Editor's Notes

• #5 Thanks Alexis… <read agenda> …So lets begin with when to offer different types of content to your prospects.
• #8 Thanks Alexis… <read agenda> …So lets begin with when to offer different types of content to your prospects.
• #11 So where do we begin? It starts with identifying your ideal prospect profile and the buying personas that you are selling to then mapping out the buying process. Now this doesn’t replace any methodology you use like ‘the Demand Waterfall’, AIDA or any home-grown process… this simply lays over all of those methodologies recognizing some truths about your prospects:Pains – b2b2 buyers will only write checks to solve business problems. Sometimes buyers are aware of these pains but sometimes the pain is hidden and it requires educating the buyer about their business problem before getting them to commit to action. This is also where you have the best opportunity to engage prospects before they are actively in the market. Great examples here include whitepapers and articles focusing ONLY on the business challenges your prospects face. No selling here. Just educating.Options or solutions – once the prospect has identified there is a business problem that must be addressed, they are ready to consider options… these options may or may not include you or even something that ocsts them money BUT you have an opportunity to shape their thinking here by offering “Top 3 failure points of ABC” or “10 best practices when implementing XYZ”.And finally… Why you. This is the stuff we are all good at. It’s selling… telling them why you are the best alternative in a field of options.Now, on the previous slide, we just said that buyers don’t follow a linear process so what’s the point in mapping one out… reasonable question. The answer is that we’re not identifying a linear flow that buyers must traverse, but rather we’re mapping out the boxes that all buyers must check through the process… now, boxes may not get checked in a specific order, they may get unchecked then checked again as requirements change and not everyone on the team will check the same boxes BUT, your prospect, as an organization, will in fact check all of these boxes.
• #24 To be sure there is some pretty sophisticated software out there that can measure every input and cube the data up for regression analysis. And there are many algorithms and heuristic models that predict which piece of content is the most effective. There are however two major shortcomings in these complex and expensive approaches. The shortcomings are that they are complex and expensive…. And in many cases have the added benefit of being inaccurate. Now don’t get me wrong… I love this stuff and we’re always seeking a unified theory of the universe that can neatly explain everything in a single formula BUT the reality is that this is very hard in b2b sales. In contrast, sending tens of thousands of b2c prospects to a series of landing pages that offer multiple pieces of content that drive you t a shopping cart offer the scale, statistical significance and simplicity to make these models useful. But b2b markets with small prospect databases in the hundreds or thousands (not 100’s of thousands or millions), relatively low web traffic and long complex buying cycles that get influenced from many data sources, these models fall apart quickly.
• #25 One of the biggest reasons these models fall apart in complex b2b sales is that the prospects are influenced in many ways that you cannot measure and those inputs dramatically affect your outcomes. For example, lets look at two prospects in the Payroll outsourcing business… if prospect #1 was currently outsourcing their payroll to Company XYZ and prospect #2 was doing payroll in-house on home grown software. How might a whitepaper on “why outsource payroll processing” affect these two prospects? Clearly one company already has a disposition to outsourcing and probably an existing budget that could easily be flipped to a new vendor while prospect #2 will have serious technical and financial considerations before making a switch. The short answer may seem like… lets just add a field to the form that asks if they do payroll in house or currently outsource… and adding a field or two may not be a big deal BUT every field you add adds friction to the process and will decrease the # of conversions you get…. And at the end of the day you just can’t ask all of the qualifying questions on a web form to distill all of the inputs for a complex b2b sale.The other consideration is that even when two prospects really are the same, they may consume content that shapes their thinking form another source. If your competitor also has a whitepaper on “why outsource payroll processing” and the prospect read it… they may not feel compelled to read yours of a similar title. The end game therefore is to try and get your content consumed (read, watched, listened to, etc.) in every box of the matrix.