Marketing & Demand Gen | B2B SaaS Scaleups | Refine Labs | Focused on Fundamentals for Profitable Growth
Create content for your audience, not your funnel. This is a big miss I see marketing teams make. They get caught up in thinking of where in the funnel they need to write content or campaigns for. Figure out what is most valuable to your audience, where they natively spend their time, and what formats they prefer. Then create from there. Don’t even think about where in the journey they are. It really is that simple. #marketing #demandgeneration #contentmarketing #b2bmarketing
Ashley, this change in approach is so critical. Buyers have core questions they always want to know about. Answering their questions is key: 1. Is this the right category of solution to address our situation. 2. Is this a vendor I should be considering? 3. Would we be successful 'digesting' this solution at our company with our people, processes, and tech? 4. Will we be successful in getting economic benefit, how is it measured, how much, and when? With answers to these questions, prospects can self-select. And they are also more likely to request to be contacted.
I need ketchup to eat this. Question: What about organizing content based on the level of awareness the customer is, should be a better approach than the funnel?
I"m so glad you posted this Ashley - this concept of breaking out content based on a theoretical and conceptual funnel is flawed and drives me crazy.... additionally, when marketers do this - the priorities aren't often based on actually needs of buyers.
Using these terms is fine for describing who in your audience the content is for based on how ready they are to buy. BUT it shouldn’t be the focus of your strategy. Start with the pain points your customers have before buying. Then focus on a specific type of customer with your content. That’s B2B content strategy in a nutshell.
I've been a part of *too many* marketing conversations that were over complicated by forcing everything into a funnel stage. 🤦🏻♀️
I've been in many meetings to plan content for where someone is in their journey when most of us could simplify it to 1) problem or brand unaware and not ready to buy; 2) ready to buy.
Does this suggest that Eugene's 5 stages of awareness shouldn't be used as well?
This is awesome yet very true Ashley Lewin . Nice format, by the way.
Love the new carousel format!
Let's increase the conversion of your 24/7 salesperson | B2B conversion copy consultant | EN/NL SaaS copywriter | editor | publisher
1yWhile I totally agree that no customer journey is linear, frameworks like these are mostly used (by creative teams) to apply much-needed structure to content marketing efforts. Otherwise we’ll get back to churning out bland whitepapers that are written for everyone. Or just write a lot of sales emails with last chance to apply for this amazingly boring pre-recorded webinar. 😉 When it comes to content creation I’m more of a fan of the 5 stages of awareness. Both frameworks give you great insight in your strengths and weaknesses in all necessary areas. After that you can produce or tweak the necessary content. Because you do need high-level materials and down and dirty sales emails. By just stating that creating content for your audience is too generic to have any meaning apart from the fact that you should always create content with your audience in mind. 🤓 I suspect you’re coming from the way your Hubspot or other marketing software presents you with this linear approach which isn’t realistic. But to just rubbish the most useful frameworks to bring meaning to the madness from a production standpoint is irresponsible. 😌