The Crucial Step BEFORE Planning a Content Strategy (and Why Most B2B Companies Miss it)
Why does coming up with a content strategy often feel like pulling ideas from a black box?
Probably because for many marketing and sales teams–especially at growing start-ups and scale-ups with a complex purchase process–the B2B buyer journey is also a black box. And when we don’t understand how buyers are buying and–more importantly–what is holding them back from buying, how are we going to come up with a content strategy that enables them to buy?
And still, many sales and marketing teams operate with a very vague grasp of their buyer journey. Sales are typically interested only in the information that will help them sell, and marketing usually adopts a general buyer journey framework –like the awareness-consideration-purchase funnel. At the end of the day, it’s nobody's job description to become a buying process expert and for B2B companies– this is why content planning often feels like pulling teeth.
Why You Shouldn’t Base Your Content Strategy on “The Funnel”
This is the most common approach I’ve seen to content strategy. Usually, the marketing team discussion goes something like “We need more awareness content” or “we need some case studies for bottom-of-the-funnel”. In short, you are creating content to achieve your marketing goals. This is socially acceptable and it won’t get you fired. But you are missing about a million opportunities to increase both pipeline velocity and lead quality. Here’s why:
The funnel provides an overview of our marketing and sales strategy relative to the vendor’s perspective–not the buyer’s. In other words, we are building awareness of US (the vendor), consideration of US, etc.
But it fails to mention a number of key buying activities that happen before a buyer lands on your website or meets one of your salespeople—and these activities tend to compose the bulk of the buyer journey. Researching vendors, ranking options, reading through a mountain of content, fielding questions from every angle, refereeing internal debacles, cost comparisons, etc.
The funnel also fails to highlight buyer challenges –and instead blindly proposes tactics without knowing what hurdles we are trying to help buyers surmount.
The funnel falsely misleads us into thinking that buying is a linear progression when in reality, buyers bounce around between websites and talking to sales in no particular order. Furthermore, the funnel has led us to organize marketing and sales as separate functions when the buyer is just trying to get information out of the organization–they don’t care whether they are getting it from marketing or sales.
The funnel fails to account for the nuances of B2B buying, simplifying it into awareness—consideration-purchase.
When actually, B2B buying can be a tangled mess of:
Researching vendors
Ranking options
Reading through a mountain of content
Fielding questions from every angle and internal stakeholder
Refereeing internal debacles
Comparing costs
And so much more…
Is There a Better Foundational Step to Take? Yes.
Before developing a buyer enablement content strategy, I build buyer journey maps for my clients, based on qualitative data. And they look nothing like a typical marketing funnel. Instead, they organize buying insights by the 6 B2B buying jobs that Gartner identified a few years ago.
This one is a bit boring because it's the template minus all the juicy bits, but you get the idea.
Building a buying map vs. mapping content to the marketing funnel
Oftentimes, marketers will go straight into ideating content strategy, email marketing tactics, and website changes based on how they want the buyer journey to be. Build-a funnel-and-will-they-come? Not always. Take a look at your lead quality and pipeline velocity to assess if this is working for you.
Building a buying process map adds an extra step before jumping straight into funnel-focused marketing tactics. It gives marketing and sales an opportunity to share knowledge and build consensus around the actual hurdles that buyers seem to be experiencing. It gives us all a chance to breathe and identify key opportunities to help buyers through the challenges they are facing as they buy, and do a better job of answering the biggest questions they are grappling with.
In short, this means that your marketing and sales strategy won’t be a hopeful shot in the dark based on assumptions, but rather grounded in the reality of the real buyer journey.
How do you build this map?
The best way is to build this based on buying process insights I gather while interviewing a mix of closed-won and closed-lost SaaS buyers during my 8-week buyer enablement research and content strategy package.
But for clients who don’t have tons of buyers yet––or for other reasons, it is tricky to get interviewees, there is another option. We can create a working buyer journey map based on a session I’ll facilitate with marketing and sales. Then as buyer interviews become possible, we can add more data.
Find out How to Attract More Qualified Leads
To create a robust buying process map, I recommend:
Nailing down buyer psychographics. Who are these buyers? What are their most commonly held beliefs?
Identifying the buying triggers (organizational changes that precipitate a need for your service)
Digging into the biggest buying hurdles that are holding buyers back
Identifying the buyer questions that are slowing down the sales cycle
Figuring out the biggest opportunities to make buying easier
Looking into how buyers are quantifying the problem in their business
Including insights on the process through which they are exploring solutions
Listing out the most common buyer requirements
Listening to why buyers did and didn’t buy from you
Asking about any tradeoffs or too-good-to-be-trues about buying from you
Finding out how buyers are building consensus to move forward with this decision.
How should a buying process map fit into your content marketing planning process?
Well, as we covered above, it’s a first step that has to happen before randomly proposing marketing ideas to meet your annual or quarterly goals. But after you’ve nailed it, content planning is going to be dead easy.
Because once you are clear on the biggest buying obstacles…coming up with content ideas to enable them to get over these hurdles will be really straightforward.
Looking to shed some light on the black box of the buyer journey before planning your content strategy? This is what we do during my 8-week buyer enablement research and content strategy package. Here’s what you can expect out of working with me:
Reduce pipeline friction by helping buyers overcome the most common buying struggles, by identifying these obstacles and developing laser-targeted buying resources and tools to help.
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 do to make buying easier?
P.S. Thanks for sticking around! It’s been a hot minute –i.e. 5 crazy months, including a round of COVID-19, a rebrand, a house-hunt in Andalusia and a roadtrip of the Iberian Peninsula. Life is good and crazy but doesn’t bode well for my writing schedule! Begging forgiveness. Looking forward to what I hope will be a boring and peaceful rest of 2022.