The 5 Commandments of Buyer Enablement Content Strategy
A few years ago, Gartner researchers uncovered this troubling stat that sent me on a real bender: 77% of B2B buyers state that their latest purchase was very complex or difficult.
This was frightful. Because I knew that:
Most B2B companies were investing in content marketing.
Thought leadership was getting super buzzy and everyone was trying to figure out how to do it right.
So… our content must be helping this situation. It must be attracting leads ...right? Right??
Yeah, maybe. And yet many of the companies I’ve encountered in the B2B SaaS space are dealing with poor lead quality and long sales cycles.
What’s going wrong? We’re throwing all this money at content marketing...and yet purchasing is getting more difficult, even though we know that buyers are investing a significant portion of their time in online research. And MQL to closed-won rates get more and more depressing.
Do you ever have that moment where you wonder if all the work you do is a colossal waste of time?
Well. I took a hot minute and had a wee professional crisis.
Then I started digging into this.
And as it turns out… a few smart brains over at CEB Research shed some light on this disconnect. After surveying more than 600 B2B buyers, they discovered that the vast majority of sales professionals believe that giving customers ALL the information will help them make better decisions.
I think we all believe that, don’t we?
Seems logical right?
And yet, piling on more information and options just seems to make things harder. In fact, it drove an 18% decrease (DECREASE!) in purchase ease.
Does that smell like long sales cycles to you? It does to me.
More recently, Uberflip reported that 33% of B2B buyers see“too much irrelevant content” as a top pain point.
Picture this:
By day, well-meaning marketing executives and their busy content marketing teams are over here putting our best efforts to fill our resource centers with a semi-readable whitepaper for every imaginable theme and an SEO blog post for every topic that’s remotely tangential to our value proposition —
But by night, our prospects — instead of playing soccer with their kids — are spending hours parsing through and deconflicting the 15 different pdf ebooks they downloaded from us and our competitors. And potentially none of this content is helping them move forward (sigh).
I was initially afraid to ask this question.
Is it possible that the tsunami of content we’ve unleashed isn’t necessarily making it easier for our buyers to buy, but rather making it harder?
And if yes, should we give up now?
Nah, there’s still hope.
But what’s going wrong with our current approach to B2B content strategy?
In my work with B2B SaaS start-ups and scale-ups, I see many teams over-focused on creating thought-leadership content, at the expense of buyer enablement content.
And in some cases, the traditional way of content marketing--bludgeoning prospects to death with mediocre thought-leadership and infotainment content on a variety of topics somewhat tangential to your product/service--isn’t working as well as we’ve been promised it would.
While well-executed thought-leadership content can have its merits, it isn’t usually oriented to help your buyers build a business case. Or make buying easier.
And those companies who are winning have realized that there is a BIG difference between content that sells products/services and content marketing that aims to make buying easier.
So it’s time for marketing (and sales) to start paying closer attention to the buying process. And begin creating content that is aligned with the strategic, informational needs of their buyers, as they seek to build a business case.
That’s what buyer enablement content is.
Buyer Enablement Content: Tools and resources designed to make buying easier, by equipping your buyers with the prescriptive advice and practical support they need to make the business case to their buying group and navigate the purchase decision as efficiently as possible.
And the sooner you can start creating content aimed to make buying easier, the sooner you will improve lead quality and increase pipeline velocity.
I’m going to go through 5 out of what I like to call the 10 commandments of buyer enablement content.
These pieces of advice are going to help you avoid making some of the most common mistakes I’m seeing in B2B content marketing today, and shift your content strategy to be more aligned with the real buying process.
#1. Thou shalt create content to help your buyers build a business case.
The phrase “B2B content strategy” used to scare the heck out of me, because it sounded complicated and onerous. When I was interviewing for content marketing manager positions and asked if I knew how to design a B2B content strategy, I never really knew if I did.
Until a lightbulb came on. Instead of thinking “What content should we be creating to generate leads? To build awareness?” I started putting myself in the buyer’s shoes. Which helped me realize something.
All they’re trying to do is build a business case. They just want to:
Make sure they have accurately diagnosed the problem in their business
Validate that they have chosen the right solution category
Compare and contrast all the relative merits and trade-offs of potential suppliers
Sell through this purchase to their boss and buying group
And have the roll-out go without (too many) hitches, achieving (more or less) the results they have been promised. Aka no regrets, and possibly a promotion for them.
The last few years of data on B2B buying tells us the same story.
Demand Gen’s B2B Buyers Report noted that 89% of B2B buyers surveyed said that the top supplier “provided content that made it easier to show ROI and/or build a business case for the purchase”.
As your buyer is attempting to build a business case for your purchase, they are asking questions like…
Why do we have to change anything?
How will this change help us compete?
What’s the cost-benefit analysis?
The total cost of ownership?
The break-even point?
What is the rollout plan?
What are the KPIs?
But, to answer these questions, all they have access to is a bunch of sell sheets, infographics, whitepapers and maybe some training documentation.
If you’ve never thought of B2B content strategy from this angle, it does require you to apply empathy to anticipate your buyer’s needs. One way to get yourself and your team in the right mindset is to run a round of qualitative buying process research (this is what I do! More details below).
#2. Thou shalt NOT better-faster-stronger your way to differentiation.
Whenever I ask my clients “what are your differentiators”, the first thing most of them do is feverishly pull up a window in Google and start trolling their competitor’s websites to figure out what THEIR differentiators are.
What you find is that everyone says they are better-faster-stronger. With minor variations, yes, but more or less the same message. Booo-ring!
But anyone who knows anything about real differentiation--like the infamous Louis Grenier knows that this is the wrong place to start. Trying to come up with a message and content that is just different enough from your competitors but still tooting your own horn?? Nope.
Rather, the companies who are seeing the greatest success with B2B content strategy are brave enough to deprioritize their own promotional messages, so first, they can serve their audience’s informational needs.
And so the third commandment is...
#3. Thou shalt OBSESS over how to make buying easier.
...and use what you learn as a basis for your buyer enablement content and sales training strategy.
And this WILL differentiate your company. Because trust me, not enough organizations are taking this approach.
How does it work? Well, when you:
Choose to take the time to get to know your buyers
Figure out the challenges they are struggling with through the purchase decision
Create neutral content to work through buying obstacles and challenges
…you’ll be making it easier for them to buy from you. Or disqualify themselves out of your pipeline sooner, wasting less of their time and your sales resources.
And this is the REAL way to differentiate your buyer journey.
So, how do you get to know your buyers and the challenges they are struggling with through the purchase decision?
That brings me to the fourth commandment...
#4. Thou shalt NOT leave all the buyer conversations to the sales team.
Why should they have all the fun? No seriously. On one hand, when you’re putting together a content strategy, there is so much to be learned from sales team feedback and most marketers are accessing it- almost 75%. But compare that to how many are actually having their own conversations with customers...less than half.
As you can see in the graph above, most B2B marketers spend their time analyzing website data, digging into keyword research, doing social media listening…and all this good. But there is no replacement for actually having a human conversation with your buyers.
This brings me to the fifth commandment…
#5. Thou shalt regularly have conversations with your buyers.
Whether it’s running regular win/loss analyses, qualitative buying process research or simple closed-won debrief conversations; getting to know not only who your buyers are and what they are struggling with over the course of the purchase process is the most important thing you can do with your time as a marketer.
Read it again.
I mean it! Getting to your know your buyers is THE single most impactful investment for your time and resources as a marketing and/or sales leader.
Besides gleaning a whole lot of useful language you can use in your marketing collateral and sales training, you’ll begin to get really specific insight into buying obstacles and corresponding informational needs, which will help you plot milestones in the buying process.
There are lots of ways of doing this, but I’ve found that the best way to jump into the shoes of your buyer (and come out with useful insights you can share throughout the entire marketing and sales team) is to run qualitative buyer enablement research.
Why am I so passionate about this? Well, I do this work for my B2B clients who are looking to increase lead quality and pipeline velocity.
I’ve developed a new 8-week buyer enablement research and content strategy package for founders, CROs and VPs of Marketing or Sales at SaaS start-ups and scale-ups who are ready to explore the real buyer journey--not what marketing templates told you it was.
During this program, I’ll:
Reduce pipeline friction by helping buyers overcome the most common buying struggles, with laser-targeted buying resources and tools.
Align marketing and sales strategy around the same buyer journey. Not that awareness-consideration-purchase thing….nope, we’re looking to demystify the complex, circuitous journey that your buyers would go through with any vendor, so we can mine golden insights to guide your commercial strategy.
Create a more predictable pipeline by empowering sales to be a buying guide, anticipating buyer needs and sharing content designed to signal buyer intent. Rather than wasting sales resources on low-quality MQLs.
Convert more leads by accessing key buyer feedback to align your marketing messaging and sales training to speak your buyer’s language.
Get definitive answers about your buyers and stop wasting sales cycles with wishy-washy pipeline priorities. Rally marketing and sales around a shared pipeline goal: What can we all do to make buying easier?
And as always, I would love it if you want to hit ‘reply’ and message me with your biggest question or your biggest takeaway. This helps me get more connected to what resonates the most with you guys.
Let me know if you loved something, hated something, want to blatantly disagree, don’t be shy!
P.S. Fully unannounced and unintentionally, I ended up reducing my summer email communications to once/month. Well, now you know ;) This is not an excuse, but I have been gearing up for a move back to the South of Spain and it’s been busy, to say the least.
In other news, I was invited to speak at a virtual B2B Buyer Enablement Event in October (yay!) and have been prepping my presentation. This article is actually a summarized version of my full spiel. More details to follow on event access if anyone is interested in attending.