A simple trick to improve your B2B marketing strategy
Once companies start marketing, the next challenge is how to improve your results. B2B companies tend to have longer buying cycles with higher-value sales. This longer process means you cannot necessarily wait for feedback from each customer or wait to see if they buy based on your current efforts. Instead, you need to constantly monitor engagement at each stage of the sales process, and that includes re-evaluating your marketing efforts where possible.
Fortunately, there is one approach you can implement today to improve your marketing efforts: update all of your marketing content to speak about the client’s challenges and showcase how working with your company will improve their lives.
It may sound obvious, but all too often companies focus on describing their services, their team, their pricing, and so on with limited focus on the customer. Instead of describing your company and everything great that you do, describe how you solve the customer’s pain points, in all of your marketing assets. Many companies do this well in something like a case study, but you should take this approach to all of your content.
How to Implement
Conduct an Audit
If you’re not a writer or not used to creating customer-focused content, it can be challenging to know where to start. For a quick exercise, open up your website and read all of the content on your main pages (homepage, services, etc.). Jot down how many times your company name (including variations, such as “we”). Compare that with how many times you use client-focused pronouns (i.e. you, clients, specific industries, etc.). If the first category is higher, you know you have some tweaking to do. Repeat this exercise for all of your marketing materials, especially proposals, which should include the customer’s name at least twice as many times as your company’s name.
Get into Your Customer’s Mindset
After noting the sections where you need to revise your content, the next step is to have clear insights into the actual needs and challenges of your customers. If you do not already have this documented somewhere, it’s time to get started! Speaking with your sales team and implementation teams will give you the best insights into the true challenges your current customers phase.
Where possible, create a list of the common words your customers use to describe their challenges and why they chose to work with you. For example, if you offer design services and you hear customers complain that they don’t “have an eye for design” or they worry about their materials “looking professional”, then include this exact language in your content. By tailoring your marketing materials to the language used by your current customers, you’ll attract more clients who have similar problems that you can solve.
If you are expanding to a new market and you do not currently have that insight into your customers, conduct research by reading journals and articles in their industry. You can also research your ideal customer in that space. You may be able to gain insights based on recent press releases, Glassdoor reviews, and other information that gives you an inside look at the company.
Revise Content
The last step, of course, is to actually physically update your content. During this stage, you will use the insights you gained from the second step to update any weak sections you identified during your audit. Focus on painting a picture of how working with you will solve the top 2-3 problems faced by the customers you help.
After updating the content, you can always move back to step one to audit again and confirm that your content was improved.
Next Steps
With more client-focused content, you should find that customers better understand why they should work with you, and they most likely will approach you as more of a partner rather than a vendor (depending on your offerings). With this trick, you will help attract more customers and make selling much easier for your sales team once they do reach out.
Always review your content regularly to ensure that the pain points you address are still relevant and resonating with your customers.