Content Marketing Tips for B2B Organizations - Whiteboard Friday

[Music] howdy Moz fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday this week we're gonna chat about b2b marketing specifically b2b content marketing and some tips that I've got for you that are a little bit different from how we would do b2c or other kinds of content marketing and I get like a lot of the examples that you see in the content marketing world are b2c or there at b2b companies that are more like Moz where we have a b2c like community and a b2c like audience so I think that when it comes to b2b because there's some tricky elements I wanted to try and walk you through a few of those let's start with the funnel so the b2b funnel is very similar to a b2c funnel in fact marketing funnels in general work like this people become aware of a product they have some consideration for whether it's something they might actually want to buy they do some form of comparison against other solutions they decide to convert or not and then there's a retention element retention element is less true in a lot of b2c fields especially e-commerce one-time purchases it's generally more true in the b2b world I think one problem that we have in b2b marketing is a lot of times we target the wrong part of the funnel this is actually really common because in b2c usually things that hit on one of these hit on a lot of them the same things that create awareness about a product or a brand also help with conversion also might help with comparison because a brand affinity also might help with consideration and retention it's less true in b2b not to say not true at all but less true and so I think one of the jobs that we have is to look inside our funnel and then identify which part needs help versus which part works fine another thing that is very important here don't try to target them for the majority of your content don't try to target it at more than let's say two of these stages right so I might say hey I've got a piece of content that I think can work really well for awareness and consideration or it's much further down the funnel that's for people who already know us and are already considering us it's really about comparison and conversion or about conversion and retention that's fine I think when you get into trouble is when you say hey you know what this is going to help throughout the funnel awareness consideration and conversion well that that tends not to be the case that's not to say it can never happen but try to choose when you're creating your content when you're designing the strategy for why you're gonna produce a particular piece decide what it's gonna help with pointed at the content that's in that the area of the funnel that is in most need of assistance so let me give you a quick example here there's a company called pivot desk their fellow foundry company pivot desk does something really cool they help small businesses in particular a lot of startups and early-stage companies but plenty of regular small businesses to find office space so they're very business-to-business right there talking to landlords and they're talking to small businesses they have a great funnel but they decide that they need more awareness which is good good job pivot desk identifying which part of the funnel is the problem if you've seen that lots of people who are already aware of you and visiting you are converting and getting through this part of the funnel then you don't need to focus your content efforts there or maybe less of them we could think about you know potentially saying hey let's say that awareness is our problem awareness to whom is it awareness to small businesses or is it awareness to the landlords again to different audiences in this case awareness the landlords perhaps is the problem and I'm making these up I don't actually know if pivot desk has these problems but if that's the case maybe what we want is an interactive tool that's essentially part survey and part comparison you know benchmarking metrics so they that a landlord can go in and say oh my space is in Seattle I have this much square footage of triple a space and the current price is 31 dollars per square foot triple net and there's the average you know me versus the the what the rest of the Seattle market looks like Oh fascinating I am under charging or I'm overcharging or I have less square footage than most folks have or I have you know the I'm missing these amenities or whatever it is right that that could work potentially very well for this stage of the funnel and this is the process that I'd urge you to use when you're doing that b2b content strata she target the right section of funnel make sure it's hard to the right audience and then come up with a piece of content that's gonna move the needle in the right place when you're measuring success in b2b it is pretty different than than b2c a lot of the time unfortunately the metric by which you will be judged upon is number of leads created b2b tends to be very leads driven there's a few folks who are in b2b who are also self-service like Moz is but for the vast majority its leads for the sales folks to follow up on and because of that the classic metrics like how many social shares you got across different networks and how much visibility and raw traffic and engagement and those kinds of things tends to be less important than quantity of leads generated and this is really tough when you get into these areas of the funnel that are not the conversion point right if I'm trying to create raw awareness among my audience I can really get misjudged if you know they're only look if my boss my team my client is only looking at the leads so what I urge you again to do is to take note of what you're trying to improve and apply the right metrics to it don't just take the same metrics that are used for well obviously b2c but don't take the same metrics that are judged on conversion for a retention or can awareness for conversion this is critically important or you're gonna on you're gonna focus on the wrong parts of the solution you're trying to create next up many many b2b transactions in fact the overwhelming majority don't just have a single buyer in b2c it's really simple right I'm selling blue jeans I'm selling them to a consumer that consumer tends to be the only person who's in on the consideration maybe their partner right is also think about it but for the vast majority it's just that one person I'm selling to not the case in b2b not at all oftentimes the person who ends up buying who you interact with who your sales person reaches out to as the conversation that person is just one link in the chain of individuals involved from a corporate ecosystem in who makes the buying decision and for that reason a lot of times again content marketing that reaches this person does a great job of reaching that buyer but does a terrible job of reaching their manager the CFO and the HR person who are all involved in these decisions as well might be less successful and this is why we need an overlapping persona you know analysis when we do our content it's also why when we're thinking about the funnel we can't think about it without regard for who which target is in which stage of the buying purchase right that it could be that your buyer is all the way down here but you have no resources no content that's going to help convince a CFO and an HR person up here that they should even put you in the consideration set because you have no comparison against what are there are other options and why do you help save the money and those kinds of things so be careful with this target your content to not only your buyer but other folks as well especially if your sales folks are giving you feedback that that's where they're getting stymied with b2b it's actually it tends to be the case that you can be much more aggressive with forms of remarketing and retargeting that means paid content that means amplification it means spending dollars to promote the content that you've created the reason that you can do this as opposed to a lot of b2c is because it tends to be the case that your customer lifetime value is way higher b2b transactions you know we're talking about usually many hundreds if not many thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per converted customer and so what you want to be looking at is not just the lifetime value but also the current cost of customer acquisition or CAC as it's called there's a ratio that a lot of folks look at in B to B which is the CAC to C LTV ratio essentially how much does it cost us to get a new customer versus how much value does that customer provide b2c folks look at this - but b2b folks tend to be obsessed with it and when you see that this is low right when I see that basically I've got a are sorry when I see the ratio is high or the CAC itself is low in comparison right this is G's 450 dollars to acquire a customer versus 3780 CLTV that's that's like gah 9 to 1 ratio right something like that I have a ton of room to boost that I could probably boost that I could more than double it and I'd still be fine with a 4 to 1 ratio or even a 3 to 1 ratio so I might consider spending a tremendous amount more money to get a customer and if I can see through my funnel that I measure that that I'm measuring to see how content performs is it pushing people down this funnel and gets them to conversion if I can see that for every thousand views or 10,000 views I'm getting a customer converting well then I can go and I can amplify through paid channels through retargeting remarketing I can pay a lot of money to go push that content to more places and to more people I can probably do things that I would almost never ordinarily do like even by search ads you know paid search ads against a against a keyword that is very content focused not very you know conversion focused that lives up here in the funnel and I can still have success this is something that very few b2b marketers are doing but some very successful ones our last thing that I'll cover here most b2b content does this I don't know it's like every b2b marketer reads from the same playbook and look I go through this process a lot because I'm interested in a lot of b2b content since Moz is a business that I'm trying to grow right and what happens is that the content exposes very little for free right so I might hear about something and go oh yeah I am interested in the average lifetime value of self-service software as a service companies it sounds super corporate and boring but I'm deeply interested in it right really affects Mazdas metrics so I might go look and then I see like well I can't really tell what's in here what's behind the wall that you're not showing me very much right there's supposedly this amazing content but I don't see anything there and then it asks me for too much in order to get access so if you fill out all these ten different form fields about every you know your position of the company and how much revenue have and how many employees you had and what was your growth rate last year and which other products in this field are you considered man geez I feel like I just had to sign a lease agreement in order to get a piece of content and then that content is not ex web-accessible I have to download it which is insanely frustrating if I'm on one of these it sucks right I mean it just is a terrible experience on mobile it's even a bad experience on desktop I don't want to have to download something and open it back up that makes it less shareable it's very hard for me to amplify that content if I'm interested in it then when I want to share with other people I have to tell them hey you've got to go to this download link right and what happens well I'll tell you what happens every single time I download it and then I attach it in an email and I send it to every relevant person at Moz and that b2b company that made it only gets one email address and I unsubscribe from their lists insanity insanity so if you can fix this process by making your content web accessible making it so that you're providing more of a teaser right on the page here so that more people are likely to go through here ask for as little information as you possibly can you can get more later you can learn a ton about someone once you have just one piece of information they're correct email address if you have that you can learn tremendous amount about them you don't need this right you've got tools like full contact where you can use the API plug in an email address and they'll give you all sorts of persona type data about that person you can go then research the company and get all the facts from tons of stuff to do and then the last thing that I find that's oddly frustrating I don't know why I'm frustrated about it but but you should be if you're a b2b marketer should be frustrated about it is you don't make you don't reuse the audience for future content amplification so if you know that I downloaded this piece of content I think it is perfectly okay to follow up with a personal message the next time you produce a piece of content like this and say hey we redid it and here it is again that's not that hard right if I haven't well hopefully you have an auto subscribe me to an email newsletter and I'm getting tons of pieces of content that I care nothing about what's far better is if you tell me hey we redid this piece or since you like this piece you'll probably be very interested in this other piece that's gonna work really well you can also do RLSA with this for more paid amplification so I can take a list of emails of all the people who downloaded this upload it to Google upload it to Facebook and then have this content accessible via these paid formats so that you know I'm bidding in Google and I'm showing the ads some people on on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn all that kind of stuff alright everyone hope you b2b marketers out there are doing some awesome stuff with your content in the near future and we'll see you again next week for another edition of whiteboard Friday

Channel: Moz

Views: 74,292

Keywords: B2B, SEO, Whiteboard Friday, Content

Id: rwxAlthNmwQ

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2017