B2B Content Marketing Requires Deep Customer Knowledge
Are you struggling to make any significant strides with your current content marketing strategy? Do you feel like it’s simply not hitting the nail on the head? It’s possibly because your strategy isn’t aligned with your B2B personas and customer profiles.
B2B content marketing encompasses creating and sharing blogs, videos, social media posts, and other online material that stimulates interest in your product or service. But what if your B2B content writing isn’t tailored to your target customers?
What if the videos aren’t garnering any appeal because you’re not fully aware of the kind of content your audience prefers watching?
Knowing your customers is imperative in the creation of a successful and effective content marketing campaign.
This article explores how having deep customer knowledge can subsequently help you curate a content marketing strategy that delivers results.
Why Is It Important to Know Your Customers?
Irrespective of the industry or business model, every organization wants higher customer acquisition and revenue generation. To achieve this, you must understand your customer’s business too.
In a B2C content marketing strategy, businesses can work with the information about their customers. But in a B2B model, businesses must also understand their customers’ customers.
Understanding your customers and their requirements (or the services they want to provide further to their customers) is important for the following reasons.
Align Your Content Marketing Strategy With Your Client’s Business
Suppose you’re not sure what your customer wants to use your product for. How will you create an effective value proposition for your product without this crucial information? In this case, your knowledge will be limited to only what you know about your product’s offering.
However, B2B products are often quite versatile and serve different customer personas differently.
Therefore, if you have sufficient customer knowledge, you can market your product in a way that tells the customers how your product or service will particularly benefit them rather than simply listing the features of your offering.
When you align your offering with your client’s needs, you become an integral part of what they further offer to their customers. It’s the perfect way to establish long-term business deals and ensure high customer retention.
Customize Your Marketing Campaigns
B2B marketing campaigns are typically conducted at mass levels. Recently, newer methods, such as account-based marketing, have changed the way B2B organizations market their products and services.
For instance, in account-based marketing, you concentrate your marketing resources on a set of target accounts. It includes the personalization of the campaign to engage each account so that the marketing message can be tailored to that particular account’s needs and attributes.
Rollworks reports that 87% of marketers found ABM to outperform other marketing activities. But the key to running a successful marketing campaign, whether ABM or any other, is knowing your customers.
If you have to personalize and tailor the message to specific B2B customer profiles, you must know their attributes and needs in-depth.
What Should You Know About Your Customers for Effective B2B Content Marketing?
If you have a clear indication of the B2B personas your marketing campaign is targeting, you’re more likely to see results. Besides your customers’ needs, you should also understand their behavior and the kind of messaging that will appeal to them.
Here are a few general questions you should be able to answer about your customers:
- Why are the customers purchasing your product or service? Are they using your product or service to ensure smooth work operations in their business? Do they plan to use your offering in creating a service that they further offer to their customers?
- How often will they need your product or service? For instance, if you offer a subscription-based model, you should know if your customers are more comfortable with an annual offering or prefer a monthly subscription plan.
- Who are they serving? In a B2B model, you must also consider your customers’ customers. If your customers use your product or service to serve their own customers, you should have an understanding of the end user’s needs since your customers’ requirements will depend on that.
- Where are they likely to purchase your product or service? For instance, if you’re an entirely online entity, you should only focus on this aspect. But if you also have a brick-and-mortar presence, the messaging for your online clients should be different from those who want to visit you physically and schedule in-person meetings.
- How is your product better than that of the competition? Unless you’re the luckiest company in the business, you surely have competitors who’re just as committed as you to providing a good product or service. How is your product better than theirs? Does it solve the customers’ pain points faster or in a more effective way? Is it cheaper?
Together, the answers to these questions will help you find out the following about your customers.
Purchase Motivations
Customer purchase motivation is an internal state or reason that drives a customer to buy your product or service. If your product fulfills the customers’ conscious or unconscious needs, they may be motivated to make a repeat purchase.
Meanwhile, if your product fails to satisfy the customers’ initial motivation to buy your product, they may look for alternative products elsewhere.
If you understand your customers’ purchase motivations, you can create compelling content for them, whether it’s written or visual. For instance, your B2B content writing team can create blogs that explain how the customer’s motivation can be met by a service like yours.
Buying Factors
In a B2B space, three types of buying factors play a role in the customers’ purchase decision:
- Economic factors
- Functional factors
- Marketing mix factors
The economic factors correspond to the price of the product. Sure enough, your customer won’t buy a product if it doesn’t fall within their budget. Therefore, when conducting marketing research, you should determine the optimal price range for similar products and services.
Secondly, functional factors are associated with the customers’ needs. To what extent does your product solve their problem? Is your product a recurring or one-time solution? Is your service scalable? All these factors help a customer decide if they want to purchase your offering or not.
Finally, the four components of the marketing mix are:
- Pricing: Are you offering a competitive price? Are your content marketing efforts targeting customers who can actually pay the price you’re asking?
- Product: How is your product better than other similar ones in the market? Why should a customer pick you rather than a competitor? Is your product cheaper, faster, sustainable, or more effective?
- Promotion: Your content marketing efforts can be helpful in promoting the product. But it’s important to ensure that you’re promoting your product as a solution for the customers by keeping their exact pain points in mind.
- Place of Distribution: Do you sell your product or service online? Do you have a brick-and-mortar presence? Even though online business dealings have become more common than they were in the past, many customers still prefer in-person meetings. If you offer a hybrid approach, you should make that a highlight in your content marketing efforts.
Pain Points
Your customers’ pain points are the specific problems they face in the marketplace. The pain points for B2B customers can be categorized into four types:
- Productivity: Your customers want to spend their time more efficiently and increase productivity in their workplaces. They are unhappy or unsatisfied with their current solutions. For instance, if you’re a software development firm, your target customers’ pain point may be an insufficient ERP system. How do you solve their problem? By creating a customized ERP system for them.
- Financial: In some cases, B2B customers want to save costs by using more budget-friendly products that are just as efficient (or even more) as their existing solutions.
- Processes: Your B2B customers want to improve their internal processes and streamline them for better productivity and performance. For instance, as a talent development partner, your B2B customers might depend on your services to upskill or reskill their employees. Your customers’ pain point, in this case, is the skills gap in their organization.
- Support: The customers’ pain point may be associated with poor support. It’s likely that your customers want to switch from their existing solution to a service that comes with better technical assistance.
When you curate a content marketing campaign, you must keep your customers’ pain points in mind. It allows you to create relatable content that speaks to the customers directly.