Ask any B2B marketer and they’ll tell you that being able to create great content is one of their top priorities.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of the term “viral” and believe that especially in the B2B space it’s not so much about creating VIRAL content as it is about creating high-quality, USEFUL content. But regardless of how you call it, we all want our content to be welcomed by our prospects. We never ever want them to view one of our emails as nagging, intrusive, unnecessary, or as spam.
So how do you do it? How do you create content that your prospects will actually see as useful? The short answer is: LISTEN FIRST. it’s the secret to any successful communication, and marketing – especially in the social media era – is essentially communicating with prospects.
When you listen first, you get a good idea of what your prospects are looking for. You can better identify their exact pain points. Your ultimate goal is to create a message that answers a specific issue, and lands in a prospect’s inbox just as she is ready to do some research and find a solution, or maybe even when she’s ready to make a buying decision.
Listening to a large number of prospects, remembering their issues and responding to them in your emails can be challenging. It’s not a coincidence that marketing automation systems have been so successful in recent years. Manually updating spreadsheets can only take you so far when it comes to effectively communicating with the right prospect, at the right time, and with the message that they’re looking for.
The first step to creating great content is listening to your prospects and identifying their pain points. A good marketing automation system will then help you keep track of all these conversations, and stay on top of any changes in the prospect’s needs or in their buying readiness, so that you can keep the conversation going, stay on topic, and of course identify when the prospect is ready to be contacted by your sales team.
Google+Tags: B2B content
December 1st, 2010 at 5:05 am
[...] that moment arrives when you can ask for the sale, focus on the relationship. Listen to your prospects. Create lots of interesting, informational (as opposed to promotional) content for them to read and [...]