Business to business marketing depends more and more on creating ‘content’ – material that provides information that is not necessarily sales or marketing related. Examples include business articles, technical white papers, YouTube videos and presentations. The purpose of generating this content is to indirectly influence your target audiences – if they think what you have to say is interesting and insightful then they’ll come back to talk to you when they’re buying your kind of product or service.
MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com) provides some great tips on the kind of content you can use to promote your business in their B2B Lead Gen handbook. They provide some important points to consider:
On this last point they recommend your content should suit the information needs of potential customers as they move through three broad stages:
I think this is a great starting point when planning the kind of content you will need to generate to support your marketing plans. It also prompts you to think about the information needs of the different buyers you are trying to influence. Does a technical buyer move through Awareness, Consideration and Risk Avoidance/Decision the same way someone working in procurement does? Do you have to provide content for both of them? In the next post I’ll summarize the types of content you can generate to meet the information needs of buyers.