Escorting Prospects with Frame-of-Mind Connections
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
—Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com
Now that our content has been planned to meet the format objectives and pain points of our targeted personas, it has to fit your prospect’s frame of mind. If done correctly, we could let our content do our talking in a less intrusive way than how it has been done traditionally. This more permissive way of marketing especially suits today’s B2B buyer who is estimated to be two-thirds to 80 percent of the way to a buying decision before they reach out to a sales person.
Historically, lead generation and nurturing was a process controlled by sales people that advanced prospects from leads to customers through business card sharing, ad follow-ups, trade show courting, and cold call interrupts. Each of these elements would steadily advance a customer from overall awareness to information gathering (criteria development), competitor evaluations, and ultimately to a purchase.
From today’s fast-growing adoption of inbound sales, however, we can conclude that relationship building through highly useful content sharing offers a more promising customer connection than what can be expected from traditional cold call techniques. Sales and marketing personnel are now collectively leveraging their content, social networks, and social customer relationship marketing CRM systems to nurture sales leads.
This process begins with the content landscape guidelines laid out in Chapter 1. The next logical step, therefore, is to align the content to your target audience’s buying stage as though you are escorting, not pulling, your prospects through the funnel. Using marketing automation systems, the right content can be served to your prospect based on your prospects downloading behaviors. More on this will be discussed in Chapter 11.
Shown on the right of Figure 2.1 is an example of how carefully crafted content shared across social-media channels can progress a target audience from a potential sales lead to a customer. In this case, the sequenced release of blogs, e-newsletters, webinars, case studies, and product reviews can be leveraged as a means of progressing leads and prospects to customers. The keys to advancing customers through these stages is to continually create trust with seller familiarity, sincere problem solving, and incentives for prospects to test drive your offerings.
Early in the process of engagement, for example, target audiences are best met with content that allows them instant education on something you can potentially fix or further edify. This top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) content should then educate or help the visitor to better understand what they came looking for when they searched for content like yours.
Most often, ToFu content includes content that educate audiences about your area of expertise (but without suggesting your offerings at this stage). These techniques set the stage for you to demonstrate your knowledge while creating an atmosphere of trust. At the same time, your prospect is provided a solution free of charge. Consequently, they may share your advice to others.
Should you elect to go this route, you are now on the hook to continue feeding your audience with relevant content. When successful, your prospect gets a complete view of how you regularly solve their problems. You not only gain trust, the prospect begins to rely on you as a source of expertise. For example, consider how a video blog dealing with your industry segment’s business challenges can create overall awareness of your industry contributions.
Figure 2.1 Comparison of Outbound and Inbound Marketing
A series of “how-to” videos, articles, and blog posts can then enlighten your prospect on TALK-worthy topics. Hopefully, at this stage, your prospects are delighted with free content that solves problems close to home. A challenge at this point, however, is to keep the prospect engaged while advancing their motivation from early interest to desire to outright action (e.g., pulling out their wallet).
Now imagine this progression taking place without your coming across as pushing your agenda. At the same time, you want your prospect to advance from a “general awareness of a problem you can solve” to “what should they consider” to “why you are distinctly favorable.”
In subsequent middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu) phases (information search and evaluation of alternatives), you can begin discussing your brand as some trust has been earned. Consider using techniques like reviews, case studies, and webinars where prospects can gather information that allows them a thorough and objective vendor evaluation. What you gain at this stage with helpful content is a customer that has developed a sentiment of allegiance toward your contributions. A challenge at this point, however, is to develop more content that invites the customer to test drive your offerings perhaps through an online (YouTube) demo, a webinar, or a free trial. More on this will be discussed in Chapter 13.
Shown in Figure 2.2 is an example of a quarterly content plan developed for the real-estate accounting firm discussed earlier. The content sequence addresses its property management audience using the landscape table shown in Figure 1.6 as a foundation for selecting its overall content selections. Keep in mind, however, that a company’s content progression through its respective buyer journey differs widely across industries. This particular example is representative of professional services.
Figure 2.2 Example of Quarterly Content Progression Through Buyer Stage for Accountant Selling to Property Managers