Last month, we talked about a simple – but not easy! – framework for content marketing that can help you create consistently effective (and always improving) marketing for your B2B business.
As useful as that framework is, like most marketing tactics, it benefits from additional support. In fact, extending this framework to leverage other marketing tactics becomes a two-way street with each tactic strengthening the others.
Let’s start with what framework helps us define:
- Tightly defined audience or audience segment
- Their pain points
- Their desired outcomes
- The messages that will resonate with the audience members
With these elements defined, you can craft marketing content that will guide your prospects toward action, whether that action is a micro-conversion or a buying decision.
For example, you can use this information and the messages you’ve developed to create a cadence of emails to share with our prospects. This has three key benefits:
- First, you build relationships by sharing valuable information while demonstrating your expertise and familiarity with their situation.
- Second, you create calls to action that encourage engagement from your audience, either nurturing relationships further or generating sales.
- Finally, you learn more about how accurate your definitions of pain points and desired outcomes are based on how your audience interacts with your emails.
That third point is key. Paying attention to the feedback loop that is a natural part of any well-designed marketing effort helps us fine-tune our targeting, our value proposition, and our messages. 
Next month, I’ll dive further into the specifics of using our framework as part of your email marketing. For now, I invite you to think about who your audience is (and whether you can further define audience segments), what their pain points are, and what outcomes they want that your product or service can deliver. Accuracy and specificity here are critical to making the 4-step plan work.
I would also challenge you to review your marketing to confirm that you are squeezing every bit of value you can out of it – in terms of brand/relationship building, in terms of lead generation and sales, and in terms of testing the accuracy of your marketing’s assumptions. Tracking performance in those areas is key to the ongoing performance improvement you want to see.
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing.
By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Kid Circus on Unsplash
