Out of the box: A new way to sell content | MarTech

Too many content marketing programs fail to connect the brand to the customer’s problems first The customer starts looking for a solution. At this important and overlooked point in the customer journey, many brands provide product and industry content, when they should be addressing specific customer pain points.

There’s a “gap in every program … when it comes to putting your brand in the spotlight,” said Liam Moroney at the MarTech Conference last month. “One of the biggest side effects is that it creates a weird experience. It transitions too quickly from thought leadership to product but fails to position your brand in the consumer’s mind.”

The winding customer journey

Moroney, co-founder of Storybook Marketing, a demand generation agency specializing in B2B SaaS, has devised a strategy to solve this problem. The first step is to stop thinking of the customer journey as a straight path from awareness to purchase consideration.

“[Customers] they don’t go this clear way,” he said. As we want people to do, as we create our programs, products are being selected in the minds of consumers with mental lists developed long before those solutions emerge.

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Instead of the customer journey, marketers must focus on creating a mental presence: Having their brand in mind when a customer encounters a problem. Doing this requires using team login information and having content that associates your brand with the specific problems it solves.

Entry points in a group are situations or facts that cause the customer to think about a problem and a possible solution. An HR software vendor might focus on issues around “management challenges for hybrid and distributed workforces” or “improving the work experience for remote workers.” These articles address real problems that potential customers face and position the brand as knowledgeable and helpful.

Marketers need information related to these entry points. But…

How do you do it?

“How can you map these issues? How do you create a content component in your overall program that helps you handle these entry points? Moroney asked.

By focusing on the issues at the center of the problem and thinking about the content not just in terms of the funnel, but in terms of what it is trying to communicate to the audience. Fortunately, because your product is the solution, you already know what the problems are.

“We tend to focus more on the solution than the problem,” he said. “We are in love with our solutions. We see our technology as suitable to talk to everyone, and we often forget about the problem it solves… but the problem is what the audience is interested in.”

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This content should not avoid talking about the product but should show a deep understanding of the problem and how the brand is dealing with the solution.

It’s all about the problem

Content that is relevant to the audience’s challenges and provides valuable insights, establishing a brand as a thought leader and trusted source of information. Because of this, this brand is more likely to come to mind when the customer starts thinking about a possible solution.

This is a long-term strategy and may not result in immediate sales – the ultimate metric of success. So, what do you measure to determine if you are successful?

“From a measurement perspective, consumption is key with these issues,” Moroney said. “It is not a plan to convert. It is not a demo application driver. It’s content that will sink into their brains, develop memory structures, but those memory structures will be far more important than the many lists you’ll come up with on medium and low content. ”