Is your business pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into paid-placement campaigns or splashing out big money on B2B (business to business) advertising that just doesn’t yield the results you want? You’re not alone. In the over-saturated online marketplace, attracting corporate clients with conventional advertising is like swimming against the tide.
If you’re looking for a better way to reach the decision-makers who’ll become your next customers, it’s time to make a paradigm shift and look at your business from your clients’ point of view.
Talk about the problems you solve rather than the products you sell
Every potential customer has a host of problems they need to solve. Whether they be engineering challenges, supply chain gaps, disruptive competitors or profit shortfalls, these customer problems are the conduit that can help you recruit your company’s next big client.
Content marketing has arisen as the primary channel for B2B selling because of its unique ability to demonstrate an understanding of your clients' needs. With content marketing, we can flip the script on conventional B2B communication, putting the needs and aspirations of the prospective customer at centre stage rather than focussing on your products and services.
Your clients want to know how well you understand their business
Research shows that content marketing is 62% less expensive than conventional advertising and generates approximately three times as many leads. But why is content marketing so effective?
The foundation of content marketing is narrative-driven discovery. 91% of successful B2B marketing professionals use content marketing as a key strategy because it hones in on the problems potential customers are facing. Your future clients are all too aware of the challenges their business faces, but they don’t necessarily know what the best solution to those problems is. Content marketing materials like blog posts, YouTube videos and podcasts address the problems your clients are trying to solve. When they’re searching the web for solutions, prospective customers are more likely to identify with information that reflects their own experience. It’s the prospect’s narrative you want to focus on when you engage in content marketing because that’s the story they will immediately understand.
An example: maybe your company has a new software product that dramatically shortens the time it takes to submit bids. You’re selling new, disruptive technology, so it’s unlikely your prospective customer is going to know how to find you based on your brand name and the specific properties of your product. But, if you’re generating well-crafted content marketing materials that focus on solving customer problems, search terms like “speed up online bidding” or “shorter times to submit tenders” will yield links to your material.
Giving away information is a sure-fire conversion strategy
Since the earliest days of modern commerce, customers have always gravitated toward businesses that gave good advice as well as just offering products. In the simplest terms, people are much more inclined to go to a hardware store where the people behind the counter can talk them through how to do a job as well as sell them the tools they need.
Content marketing is the leading channel for B2B selling because it attracts prospective clients to your brand by giving them the information they need to solve their problems. Whatever your company sells, the first step to generating new leads is demonstrating consistently and clearly that you understand the challenges your customers are wrestling with.
Building your brand into a reliable source of expert advice will always be more successful than firing off endless advertisements. Your next big client wants to do business with a company that deeply understands their problems and is focused on solving them rather than touting products.
I’m Emmanuel Marshall
I create communities around brands that promote SEO and generate qualified leads.
The content marketing work I’ve done for clients like Motorola Solutions, Versent and MailGuard has helped them get international press coverage and build industry authority.
Let’s talk about how I can help you grow your business.
