The first step to coming up with an effective content marketing game plan is to have a good understanding of your target audience. B2B technical solutions are in essence much more complex than consumer products. Hence, the seller that can best support the customer’s decision-making process and serve their needs would have a distinct advantage over its competitors.
Below are 4 key characteristics of B2B customers that would give you insights into the dynamics of their buying journey.
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B2B customers are highly intentional and facts-driven.
Unlike B2C customers, B2B customers are rarely swayed by marketing gimmicks. What this means for B2B content marketing is the strong emphasis on high quality content that appeals to logic and is evidence-based. To create impactful content that serves the customers’ needs, it is important to know your products including the relevant technical information and how they will benefit the customers.
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B2B customers spend only a very small portion of their buying journey on direct interaction with the sales team.
The exact number for this “very small portion” is 17%, according to Gartner’s research that was conducted before the pandemic. This averages out to be about 5% per seller. The pandemic makes the case for content marketing even more compelling as customers shift towards digital touchpoints. Post pandemic, businesses are quick to recognise the importance of switching to an integrated omnichannel marketing engine powered by digital tools to help their customers make better informed decisions.
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B2B customers conduct thorough review before making an official purchase
For B2B customers, there are more moving parts to the buying journey than your typical sales funnel and is rarely a straightforward linear conversion process. Before getting to a “yes”, B2B customers are committed to completing a set of tasks as part of their due diligence review and these tasks are summarised below.
- Problem identification
- Solution exploration
- Requirements building
- Supplier selection
- Validation
- Consensus creation
Knowing about these tasks will bring clarity and focus to planning your content marketing campaigns with regards to content types, topics and distribution channels.
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B2B customers need to get buy-in from many internal stakeholders.
According to Gartner’s research, the B2B buying journey can involve as many as 6 – 10 decision makers that bring with them different perspectives. This translates into a longer list of criteria that that the B2B customers are looking to fulfill, as well as the longer sales cycle.
In order to appeal to these B2B decision makers and influencers, it Is not enough to provide high quality well-researched content that addresses the long list of criteria. Content marketing is also very much about designing great customer experience (CX) and a good content marketing game plan takes into consideration how the customers experience the content. The more ease that the decision makers can find, navigate, consume and share your information, the better your content will fare at cultivating trust with your prospects and establish your authority on the subject matter. This will in turn motivate these decision makers to become followers on your company social media channels and frequent your corporate website for more news – all of these will help to bump up the business seller’s search engine optimisation (SEO) ranking.
Indeed, B2B marketing presents a unique set of challenges. To win over B2B customers, content marketing has to be an ongoing coordinated effort and a commitment to invest in resources for sustainable momentum. Having a steady pipeline of good B2B content is not easily scalable, particularly in organisations that face a shortage of resources and manpower.
At Impact Papers, we offer a variety of content marketing services to help you connect with your B2B prospects. With a proven track record of running successful content marketing campaigns promoting science, engineering and technology solutions, we can help you tackle your B2B content marketing challenges and tailor a content marketing game plan for your business. Drop us a message to schedule a complimentary discovery call.