THE CUSTOMER COLLECTIVE: CREATE CONTENT TO ENGAGE EARLY STAGE LEADS
The Customer Collective’s Ardath Albee observes most businesses have hearty content for late stage buyers, but she is concerned there is a lack of content to engage the prospect from Day 1. She suggests one way to solve this is to understand the prospects’ current circumstances and needs. From there, you can speak to their pain points.
The Customer Collective Excerpt:
Most B2B companies have lots of content for late-stage buyers. This includes data sheets, solution briefs, technical white papers, online demos, etc. If you evaluate your website content, you’ll likely see most of your content oriented around your product offerings and solutions.
The gap I see most often is a lack of early stage content that develops a relationship from the start of the buying process and primes your prospects for that later-stage interest. B2B buyers of complex solutions need a lot of education before product-oriented content is useful to them.
Early stage content is not about your product. Your company is the only entity that truly cares about your product. What people care about is what your product enables them to achieve. But, at the early stage, prospects don’t even care about that. Whatever their situation, they’re dealing with it. It may not be ideal, but it hasn’t stopped them in their tracks, so it’s sufficient.
This means that we need to reach farther back from what our product enables people to achieve in order to create content relevant enough to gain the attention of early stage leads. Before you can talk to them about change, you’ve got to show them you understand their current circumstances.
Start by answering the following questions…