Working smarter not
harder is the mantra of any good leader.
And we have certainly all had to
do an awful lot in difficult circumstances in the last 8 months. As 73% of marketers are now saying that they
need to focus on improving their lead funnels*, here are my top tips on getting
the most out of this with less effort.
Creating the right
content
78% of CMOs believe
content is the future of marketing.**
And content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and
generates about 3 times as many leads*** – whether you are providing content
for B2B or B2C marketing – content is the fuel that you need to curate ‘fully
or semi-bespoke’ journeys that support your sales funnel. Get this right and you will move passive
enquirers into purchasers and 1 off purchasers into frequent buyers and
eventually your best customers.
In B2B marketing –
you might need to think about factsheets, blogs or e-books and in B2C – it will
be more style tips, recipe ideas, savings guides (dependent upon your sector) -
basically anything that you can do to help the customer to answer the specific
challenges or questions that they might have at this stage of purchase –
positioning yourself as helping them to make informed choices – not by selling
to them, but in the much more subtle support of their needs by answering their
questions as they move through the sales funnel.
A B2B consumer looks
at 7 pieces of content before making a purchase decision – 60% base decisions
on info and recommendations they’ve acquired via digital content****. So, you need to support your sales funnel
with content at the top middle and bottom. Applying the same logic to your
existing customers – creating content that is relevant for both retention and
cross sell – for each audience segment.
Don’t be fooled,
whilst this sounds uber simple in principle, creating appropriate tailored content
is time consuming – and without extensive marketing teams, you might struggle
to distribute this at the right time.
So here’s a 3 step
approach to understanding your audience and creating relevant content:
1
Mapping
your customer journeys
Dig into your data,
gather useful info from your various analytics tools to map your customer paths
to purchase. There is software out there that can help you to track these, but
if you don’t have the budget to invest, or you are simply trying to establish a
‘proof of concept’ and need to create a ‘minimal viable product’ (MVP) as a
test, a simple pen and paper flow chart will help you to map these out.
Now, it would make
our lives very much easier if our customers were all alike, with the same needs
and wants – but we only have to look at our own friends and neighbours to know
that this just isn’t the case. So, you
will need to recognise this within your sales funnels – creating bespoke
content for the different audiences (segments or customer types). The first
step of which is to create some form of customer or audience segmentation
2.
Super simple audience segmentation
Remember that for
each audience and each stage in the funnel your aim is to create targeted
content and the management of this is often a real blocker when it comes to
executing and sustaining your plans. My recommendation
is to keep your segments to a minimum and concentrate on ensuring that they are
highly differentiated. You can become
more granular over time – and scale up once you have established processes for
recognising and actioning the few that you start with. A good example of highly differentiated segments
would be
A)
people
who cook from scratch
B)
people
who cook from mainly packets and jars
How they cook
informs what they will buy, their level of cooking competence, how much time
they might have to cook and budget available – what they browse will help us to
identify them online and enable us to chunk them into 2 distinct groups with
different needs.
So for group A) you might
send complex recipe ideas where you literally start with a range of ingredients
that they lovingly prepare and produce, whilst group B) Might need recipe
inspiration to try new combinations that can still be mastered with minimum
cooking in a short timescale.
These are clearly really
different segments with very different needs. But their browsing behaviour
alone won’t help you to determine all of this, it will simply say that you have
2 different types of searches (1 for ingredients and 1 for packets and
sauces). This is the start of your
segmentation – what you now need to understand is the ‘Why’ behind the ‘What’.
If you have never
done a segmentation before, then check out my previous post on really
simple
segmentation .
Once you have a view
of the behavioural segments - you will need to understand more about them in
relation to their need state at each stage of your journey. Using a variety of available sources such as
search criteria, browsing history and qualitative and quantitative research you
can now gain a better understanding of each group – enriching your audiences to
develop more insightful personas that will help you to develop your
segmentation further. Maybe creating
some basic pen portraits that will allow you to socialise them more easily to
key stakeholders or create briefs to your teams to gather and develop bespoke
content for each.
3. Creating a content
Plan
Your content plan
starts with a quick audit of what you already use at each stage of the funnel, to
see if it can be re-purposed to fit the specific needs of your segment, or
whether it now needs to be moved into another part of the funnel.
Here’s the fun bit -
brainstorm each part of the funnel, asking yourself what is the customer doing,
what do they need, how can I help for each stage and each segment.
Make sure you think
laterally to explore related topics and different types of content that will
best support your audience needs, answer their questions and foster trust. If you are testing this process – you will just
need to create a couple of pieces of content for each stage of the funnel – so
that you are not making this task too onerous.
Over time, you will be able to create a wider library of content – but
the clear objective for your test is to establish that a more tailored process
is better than a generic one.
Getting this content
to the relevant segment at the right stage in the funnel is the final part of
this process. Most people have some
capability around tailored journeys within their websites, CRM system or email
program and you can use this AI to generate your specific journeys. So now you have to write the ‘rules’ that
respond to the behaviour flags that will help you to chunk your audiences into their
relevant journeys as they move through your funnel.
Don’t worry, if you
don’t have capability around all of your channels, you can start where you do
have it – usually in your advertising programmatic or email distribution
system. Remember you are likely proving
the efficacy of your approach, so you can do this in any channel to support
your business case for further investment in content writing and system
development.
One of the other benefits
of providing a more personalised journey is that the value you create in the
content you provide gives you the juice to fuel your conversion process. This value exchange of a contact for a download
will help you move an ‘anonymous’ to a ‘known’ prospect so you can put them
into an automated sales program for conversion.
Converting the B2B funnel
– here’s what the above might look like
- Lead
reads a blog which tracks what they click on
- They
then look at other content that you can track and learn about them
- Get them
to give you their email in exchange for a piece of great content related to
what they have just read
- Now you
have moved from anonymous to named – you can put them into the automated
program which sends them helpful content based upon their needs and interests
- Your
third interaction is a topic based email with a customer success story – which
inspires trust and increases perceived value
- Having
met the criteria for a Qualified Lead program –move them into your sales team –
who email them a datasheet based offering solutions based upon their
needs/problem
- Sales
follow up with a phone and send an ebook explaining how to discuss benefits of
solution with executive team
If you need help
analysing your data, segmenting your audiences or actioning this insight to
develop audience related content then please get in
touch.
Research Sources
B2B process – Acton.com
*Demand Generation Report
**Demand Metric.com
***Demand Metric.com
****Bluecarona.com
