When I’m working with b2b clients one of the first questions I ask is what does your sales team wish prospects knew before ever talking to you?
I already know what the answers are going to be, but the exercise is valuable regardless. Most companies want leads to know:
– That the product exists
– What the product is
– The problem the product solves
– What the product does
– Who the company is
– To trust the company and its people
In other words, they want leads to be buyer ready.
Here’s two tactics that when paired together create buyer-ready leads with low mental energy input.
Educational content hosted by a team member
Every b2b brand now knows they need to make content. But so much of the content I see made is just sales BS in disguise and provides zero value to prospects.
Give this up. Do it right now.
And instead, focus on purely educational content with a strong call to action to learn more about your product.
When you give without expecting, you create what I call digital gravity. When you increase your digital mass online, you get more influence in your target market.
The easiest way to make extremely educational content is to bring thought leaders in from your industry and have them share their expertise. It allows a couple of things to happen:
- It is a way to “offboard” content idea generation. Your job no longer includes creating unique ideas, but instead curating and sharing those ideas.
- By associating yourself with this content, and “hosting” the educational content you are going to elevate your brand.
- You build a content engine to build an owned media library. This library can be mined whenever you want for content to repurpose other places.
Ok, let’s bring our list back. Which of the items from our list does this marketing activity solve?
[YES] What the product is
[NO] What the product is
[NO] The problem the product solves
[NO] What the product does
[YES] Who the company is
[YES] Build trust for your company and its people
Remarketing demos for b2b audiences
It literally blows my mind that there are still gated demos in 2022. B2B customers want to learn everything they can about a product before they even talk to someone.
Give the people what they want.
An easy way to get these demos in front of your customers is to scrape all their emails, and import these list as customer match lists into all platforms people spend time online on.
Then create demos, and remarket those demos to this audience along with anyone that touches your website (pixel them).
Because the time horizon for a b2b purchasing decision is typically long, demos like this that show and educate people how the product can improve their lives will create customers that deeply understand your product before they even talk to your sales team.
Ok, let’s bring our list back. Which of the items from our list does this marketing activity solve?
[YES] What the product is
[YES] What the product is
[YES] The problem the product solves
[YES] What the product does
[NO] Who the company is
[NO] Build trust for your company and its people
Conclusion
I challenge you to talk to your sales teams. Ask them what they wish leads knew before talking to them, and then build marketing initiatives to solve these problems.
