Marketing ain’t easy, but sometimes it’s incredibly simple. And that means that if you’re willing to do the hard work to lay a solid foundation, you can create effective marketing for your firm and understand how to make adjustments to improve results as market conditions – and your focus – changes.
Simple, Not Easy, But Absolutely Doable
“Simple” is the good news. With the right framework, you can be sure you’re asking the right questions.
“Not easy” is, of course, the bad news. You’ll still have to work hard to answer the important questions.
But the way these four steps interconnect makes it easier to see where you may have strayed from the strong answers you need. Let’s dive in.
Four Key Areas
What I’ve learned after working with countless B2B companies is that effective content marketing is based on on four key foundational areas:
- Audience
- Pain Points
- Outcomes
- Message
Audience – More Than a Name
It’s great to know that your audience is, say, casual dining restaurants in small cities with annual revenue of at least $500,000,” but there’s more to creating marketing for a target audience than being able to name that audience.
Most importantly, you need to know what their day-to-day challenges are, what pressures they’re facing, and what’s keeping them from achieving their “what’s next.”
It can help to keep notes on the conversations you have with clients and prospects that touch on the “what’s next,” which can take many different forms from revenue increases to geographic expansion, to brand extension and beyond.
No piece of content, or even an entire marketing campaign, can effectively cover all of those possibilities, but your content does have to be concrete enough to allow your prospects to recognize themselves in your marketing.
So step one is to understand your audience and their business.
Pain Points – The Problem, not the Solution
Knowing your audience means you probably have a pretty good picture of the problems they may be facing. But every firm is different and understanding their pain points means asking the next question.
Here’s an example we see in our work: a prospect says, “We need a new website.” Often, a quick look at their existing site confirms that their site couldn’t possibly be effectively supporting their marketing. But even in those cases – and especially in cases where the deficiencies aren’t obvious – asking the next question is critical.
The next question, or questions, help us understand whether the real issue that the site is no longer converting leads, or that it doesn’t reflect their expertise an longer, or that it isn’t supporting new sales goals.
That information is critical to us being able to talk intelligently about how any solution we propose will achieve the outcomes they really want.
Pain points are often hidden beneath surface-level requests. You have to know when to dig deeper – and how to do it without sounding like 6-year-old who just discovered the word, “why.”
Digging deeper helps you in two ways: better questions mean better answers, which means you are much more likely to craft a proposed solution that succeeds. And better questions almost always lead to a higher close rate. Prospects value the questions we ask more than the answers we give, particularly when our questions demonstrate that we understand their business and that we have insights we can bring to bear on the issues they face.
Outcomes – Their Goals, Not Yours
Your marketing can’t be about what you want – more clients, more revenue, more profit. It has to be about helping your client achieve their goals.
That subtle shift in perspective changes the focus of your marketing from you to them. You become the trusted guide who gets them there. And in the process, you build trust, you create conversations, and ultimately, you win business.
A clear way to make sure your marketing content has made this shift is to review it with an eye on perspective. Is your marketing inward-facing, with a focus on features, capabilities or even your own company milestones? Or is it on the outcomes the reader will experience when they work with you?
Message – Make it About Them, Not You
Sometimes making the switch from inward-facing to client-facing messages isn’t easy. If that’s where you find yourself, reexamine how well you know your audience. Remember that knowing your audience means more than just being able to define them by industry or role or company size. Knowing your audience requires understanding why they’re looking to you for help and demonstrating that you know how to help them achieve their goals.
Focus on what you’ve learned from your conversations with clients and prospects – you are a good listener, right? – and review your messaging to be sure it reflects what they’ve told you. Much less about “our solutions,” “our process,” and “our team,” particularly for prospects early in their buying process, and much more about what their future looks like once your solutions are in place.
If all of this sounds like hard work, that’s because it is. Understanding your audience by digging into their real challenges and crafting a message that aligns with their goals isn’t something you are likely to knock out in an afternoon. But once you do the heavy lifting, your content marketing becomes much easier to execute, and far more effective.
Photo by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash
