Content That Converts: How to Build a Profitable and Predictable B2B Content Marketing Strategy

by Laura Hanly

This is the second key to creating powerful content: having an opinion.

you have to let people know what you stand for, so they feel compelled to join your tribe or get the hell away from you.

Pillar Four: Discipline

Being disciplined about producing high-quality content creates high-quality opportunities.

You don’t do stuff you hate doing. Make it easy on yourself to be disciplined about it. Set a BIG vision for your business and the content it’s built on, and then get after it on the regular. Only exciting, visionary ideas will energize you, attract the right customers to you, and keep you motivated to maintain your production schedule.

Pillar Five: Content Delegation

1.Audit your current recurring content marketing: a.Do you have all six elements in place? b.If not, what would it take to have them built and implemented this quarter? 2.If you have (or are considering) a long-form content asset, does it have the four elements that would make it most successful? a.If not, what would it take to have them build and implemented this quarter? 3.Should you or your team be producing your content? Or would you be better served by outsourcing it to an expert who will produce high quality material while freeing up your time?

Choose the Right Audience

First, you need the right audience.

Secondly, you need the right offer.

Finally, you need the right copy.

evergreen content should be where you focus most of your efforts — content that holds its value over time, that doesn’t date badly, and that continues to be useful to your audience regardless of when they read it. This

three-fold approach to identifying if a market segment is right for your business: perspective, capabilities and profit potential.

Assessing perspective is about making sure the customer’s attitudes fit with yours.

Assessing for capabilities is about the ‘embedded resources’ of your company.

the profit potential of your chosen market. Do they have budgets that will accommodate your prices?

B2B Customer Avatar Development Background: •What is this person’s experience in this industry? •What are they responsible for? •What is the profile of their company (revenue, headcount, trajectory) Demographic: •Age, gender •Income •Family status •Location Identifiers: •Position in the company •Preferred communication channel Goals:

•What motivates them at work? (i.e. delivering a profit, being seen as innovative, valuable to the company etc) •What’s the main responsibility in their role? •What’s their professional biggest opportunity? Biggest risk? •What’s their major fear or anxiety in their role? •What’s their ambition beyond their current position? Challenges: •What is hard or impossible for them to do themselves or in-house? •Where do they get resistance or push-back at work? •What pressures or problems are they facing from the rest of their team? •What pressures or problems are they facing from their industry and competitors? Influences: •Who do they pay attention to? Who’s the “If so-and-so says it, I’ll do it” person?

•Where do they get their information from? What are their go-to websites, podcasts, and books? How you help them: •What part of their job do you make easier? •What problems do you handle for them? •How do you make them look good? Their key objections: ...

1.Get a pen and paper and think of a market segment you’ve done work with. Assess them for perspective, capability fit and profit potential. Is there a sufficiently good fit for you to commit to focus on working just with that segment? If not, repeat the exercise until you find a segment that fits the criteria.

2.Go through the customer avatar development list. Think of the customers you’ve had the best experiences with in the past, and model the avatar for your primary customer on them. Remember that your primary customer is the one you actively build your marketing and business development around. 3.Repeat the avatar exercise for secondary and tertiary customers. These are the customers who will want your service but are not the people you actively pursue in your marketing.

Make the Right Offers

Your offers

should be tailored to your primary customer.

marketing begins long before you ever publish a blog post or run an ad. I

To identify the types of offers that are most likely to be a success with your market,

Understanding their needs, problems and motivations will help you settle quickly on the offers that will serve them.

Is their business struggling to carve out market share? A book on powerful positioning a...

In order to settle on an offer like this for your business, you must have an iron grasp on what matters most to your primary customers. In some markets, they will value economical pricing. Others will want speed of implementation. Others will want pure performance, and others will care most about appearance, or efficiency, or optimization. You have to know them in order to pinpoint what the most valuable thing you can offer them will be.

developing the right products is the most important thing you can possibly do for your business.

Market validation, then, is a critical part of developing the right offers for your audience.

Step One: Get the Facts

•Why did you choose to use [product/service]? •How are you using [product/service]? •What is the key problem it solves for you? •What are some secondary problems it solves? •How has it made life easier for you? •What’s the best thing about it? What would you change? •Did you consider other solutions before choosing ours? What made you choose us?

What were your doubts or concerns before choosing us? What questions did you have that weren’t addressed? •What else do you think we should know or be doing? •If you were telling a friend about this, what would you say to them?

Would you use this product? What would you use it for? What would it do for you? What would you want it to feature to serve you best? How much would you pay for

Step 2: Simplify

Step 3: Review

1.Write down all your assumptions about how the offer will suit your audience: what problem they are trying to solve, the best way you can help them do that, and how you think that should be packaged up (including the positioning, pricing and production). 2.Put together a survey based on the questions in earlier in this chapter. List all the questions in an online form and

send it to customers who have agreed to respond (Typeform or Google Forms are very easy to get set up with, and they look professional). You can invite your best customers to participate, or you can send it to your whole social media following and/or email list. You can also contact people who you think would be your ideal customers and ask them to get involved. Regardless of where you get your participants, try to offer them some sort of incentive for responding so that they are more willing to get involved. Bonus content tends to work well — worksheets that help them work out something practical for their business, access to educational recordings or videos, or resources that you usually only share with clients. 3.Collect all the answers and set them aside for a few days. Take some time out so you can sit quietly and go through all the responses. Grab a coffee at a nice sunny cafe and get ready: you might be surprised at what you find. You may need to be ready to work some changes into your business. You may not be surprised at all, in which case you’re obviously doing something very right, or have made adjustments already that

have put you on the right path… or you might get sledgehammered, and be forced to recognize that there’s a lot of change that needs to happen in your business if it’s going to work. Whatever it is, take the time to delve deep into the responses and map out what they mean for your offers. 4.Brainstorm some ideas for offers that will give your customers what they want and need, and that will maximize your customer lifetime value. Send these ideas to all the participants and ask them which of those options they would actually want to use, and how much they would pay for it. Not only does this give you real clarity about what the market wants, but it gives you an opportunity to sell that offer to those people immediately. You can sell it at ‘beta testing’ prices and create the product as you ...

Get Your Messaging Right

You must settle on your primary customer profile first, then develop the right offers, and then get your overall messaging strategy pinned down before you should touch any copywriting.

Creating powerful, compelling messaging — whether it’s sales copy, blog content or social media updates — depends entirely on knowing who you’re talking to, what their problem is, and how you’re going to solve it.

Once you have a clear profile of who your primary customer is, you need to identify what affects their psychology, how they perceive themselves, and what kind of language they use. Are the individuals you deal with directly motivated by wanting to look good in front of their colleagues and getting lots of recognition, or are they driven to achieve by a crippling fear of failure? Try to find the nuances that let you get inside the mind of your customers.

It’s not always easy to get to these core drives, but going through the customer avatar exercise in Chapter Three will give you a good starting point.

you might have to do a little bit of extrapolation from conversations you’ve had with ideal clients before. What have clients told you previously that they’re worried about? What have they let slip that gave you an insight into the world behind the

professional facade? What are their priorities? What do they think they need to learn or acquire to get to their ideal outcome? You can expand on past customer experiences to predict future client experiences.

•A deep-seated need to... •Prove themselves to authority figures or leaders •Get attention and be in the spotlight •Be perceived as a champion or high-value asset to the business •Beat others so as not to be seen as being lower down the foodchain •Maintain the status quo to preserve their position •A paralyzing fear of… •Being exposed as a fraud (even if they’re not one) •Failure (on any scale) •Public humiliation (in the eyes of the general public) •Private humiliation (in the eyes of people who know them) •An unquenchable appetite for…

•Money •Power •Freedom (not having to answer to anyone) •Fame and reputation There are also external pressures being brought to bear on your customers all the time: •Differentiating themselves and remaining competitive in their market •Dealing with new competitors in their market •Implementing adjustments in market regulation •Handling increases, downturns or adjustments in consumer behaviors •Anticipating changes, opportunities or threats in their market

If you’re a newcomer to the scene, disrupting the way things are done, then you can use a more cheeky or lighthearted messaging. Getting to understand your place in the market you’re operating in will help to define your messaging. That’s not to say that industry is the only consideration —