The internet changed technical sales
In the “real old days” (pre-internet), when one needed to buy something, the first thing you did was contact sales in some fashion. Whether it be walking into a brick-and-mortar store or calling up a supplier directly, you interfaced with sales first.
That all changed with the internet: now, before you talk to sales, you can do tons of research on your own, somewhat anonymously. The buyer has a chance to educate themself prior to actually interfacing with companies (and salespeople). This means that when the buyer does contact the company, they already have detailed questions, and more importantly, they already have some bias in their thinking. They also are not going to fall for BS, either, so the quality of the salesperson needs to be high!
What this means is that the sales process starts much earlier, before the prospect actually contacts a supplier. So, this means that the supplier has to seek ways of actually getting information (and hopefully some bias!) to the prospect before they make themselves known directly! This is especially true for technical products.
Content marketing to the rescue
The term “content marketing” is recent (1996), although many of us practiced it before the buzzword was coined and became used so heavily. A simple definition, according to the Content Marketing Institute is:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
The key word here is “attract“: the purpose of content marketing (CM) is to pull prospects/customers from the population at large so they do engage with your company, despite possibly not even knowing of your existence prior. One of HubSpot’s founders coined the term “inbound marketing” to describe this process, and this is exactly what is needed for the scenario described above, where you need to get information to the prospect before they approach you directly.
CM was initially used in the B2B space, but with the proliferation of the internet has now crossed into the B2C space as well. Think about it: whenever you need to buy a durable good such as an appliance, consumer electronics, etc., you first do research online. This consists of reading consumer guides, trade-journal articles or other “authoritative sources” to narrow down your choices before you set foot in a store. This is when vendor’s content marketing can make you aware of their offerings.
In technical, B2B markets, the need for CM is even more key: these are complex products that require education of the prospect in order to “pull” them to reach out to you.
The new sales/marketing funnel
The traditional “sales funnel” basically makes sales out to be a numbers game: start with a large population and work through a qualification process to slowly reduce the population to the ones you can close as sales:
Source: https://salesxceleration.com/intelligent-sales-pipeline/
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the above, in fact, most salespeople would say the basic premise still holds true. The difference today comes in the approach and implementation: in the past, marketing was responsible only for the “top of funnel”, and sales took over from there. This created an almost adversarial relationship between sales and marketing: sales people asked for “more/better leads”, which marketing produced, but these ended up being lower quality because they were unqualified. So salespeople spent more time chasing unqualified leads.
As stated above, the internet changed things dramatically in terms of the marketing approach. In a widely referenced article, Worldwide Business Research states that B2B buyers are 57% – 70% through their buying research before contacting sales. Newer published data agrees with this, and states it to be 70%. This change means that marketing now owns the bulk of the sales funnel process, leaving sales to concentrate on the bottom levels of the sales funnel:
Source: https://stevepatrizi.com/2012/10/23/the-new-marketing-sales-funnel/
HubSpot, and others, have abandoned the “funnel” representation recently in favor of a “flywheel” depiction of the customer journey, which is customer-centric:
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/funnel-into-flywheel
One of the key premises behind this customer-centric approach is the 80-20 rule, aka the Pareto principle, which simply states that 20% of your customers will generate 80% of your revenues. Concentrate on your best customers, and they become repeat customers and advocates for you!
Building “brand authority”
Content marketing is a way of generating brand authority:
You can think of brand authority as your company’s earned trust. It’s the degree to which your brand is seen as a leader or source of expert information within your niche or industry.
If your company is perceived as a thought-leader in its area of expertise, then you will naturally attract qualified prospects for your products at the beginning of the sales process (top of the funnel).
Brand authority goes well beyond human perception though: good authority content builds upon itself by establishing credibility in search engine algorithms and domain ranking. If content marketing is done right, a simple search engine query on a topic that your company has brand authority on will yield top-of-the page results for your content. This means a higher likelihood of that prospect landing on your web site and beginning the customer journey there as opposed to your competitors’ sites.
I always tell my clients that if they do content marketing correctly, they can insure that their company is at least considered in any relevant procurement activity: as they say, “you’ve got to be in it to win it”, especially when the prospect is unlikely to interface directly with you in the early to mid-stages of the process (as much as 70% of the way through the process per above!).
This brand authority is especially important with technical products, where prospects may be interested in education first, before sales. Remember that they regularly communicate with their peers in the field also, so if someone tells them “check out XYZ Corp’s website, there’s a lot of good information there”, they probably will visit. If customers publish technical papers with links to your technology that will also increase brand authority. Lastly, quality, educational, well-planned CM builds brand authority through planned Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and unique content.
Content marketing is hard – you are playing the “long game”
A lot of businesses fail at content marketing because they think it merely means throwing a bunch of keywords on a page and seeing what happens; things like “top 10 lists”, “listicles”, etc. add up to what becomes “content advertising”:
The first thing businesses struggle with is creating truly valuable content without embedding advertisements in the message. It simply runs counterintuitive to a business to spend their precious time giving away valuable (and sometimes proprietary) content without having some kind of sales pitch embedded in the message.
Management tends to think that marketing should produce immediate, measurable results. In the old “push” days, this might have been true: running an advertisement could produce quantifiable results. However, in today’s “pull” environment, this is no longer the case.
It is only possible to quantify CM’s effect over a much longer term, which makes it frustrating for management to grasp. Nevertheless, CM has been proven over and over again in the last 20 years to be the only effective marketing strategy for technical markets. If you are a start-up company, start building your content and brand authority right from day one…. it will serve you well!
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