Founder + Creative Director at Gallery Design Studio NYCaward-winning B2B content creative agency.
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Creating content for specific stages of the buyer’s journey has been proven to pay off: the Content Marketing Institute’s annual study found 62% of the most successful B2B companies create content for every stage of the customer lifecycle. After all, making sure prospects and customers see the right materials at the right time is how marketing teams drive sales and retention. The right kind of content, i.e. the right item type delivered in the best possible format.
The solution? Standardize a list of content options for each part of the customer journey.
Awareness
The first stage is a lot like casting a fishing line into a murky lake – you know there are fish there, but you just can’t see them and you’re not quite sure if they can see your lure. This is the point where you want the content to grab attention in just the right way. LinkedIn posts, thought leadership articles, and explainer videos are powerful ways to reach new prospects. LinkedIn posts are great opportunities to share a snapshot of the better day transformation your product offers.
Consideration
Once you’ve hooked them up, it’s time to reel them in. Case studies and one-pagers are some of your best bets for moving interested prospects from consideration to purchase. The appeal of one page is clearly its brevity. When a buyer has a buying committee full of people to report to, they’ll love a quick, one-page page detailing exactly how your solution ends their pain points and makes them look good in front of their supervisors. And when that committee wants proof that your solution works? That’s when case studies come in, with a compelling story and impressive data and metrics that illustrate how much time you’ve saved, your sales have increased, and other measurable benefits you may be able to provide.
Purchase
No fisherman wants to see their hard-won catch pop off the dock and back into the water! Once a new customer has made their purchase, the last thing you want to do is make them doubt or regret it. Research current customers and work with customer success to find out which FAQs and critical information belongs in your onboarding series. Prepare short, helpful introductory videos and store them in an easily accessible place, such as a single folder on a digital asset storage system. This allows new users to use your service easily and at their own pace and convenience. People hate struggling, and even if your customer support is readily available, most people would rather not have a problem at all. Keep updating your videos based on feedback from new customers and your customer success team.
conservation
We don’t want to take the fishing analogy too far, but if you have to, think of retention as the way to use every part of that fish you just caught. Besides eating it for dinner, you can make a nice broth from the bones – I think things just got weird. Either way, at Gallery Design Studio, we’ve seen B2B SaaS clients retain and upsell their existing customers with the right high-performance content. Assets such as knowledge base content illustrate the further capabilities of your service so customers can continue to improve their experience. Knowledge base content can take the form of a helpful information page on your website with helpful videos and tutorials. Some of the shorter videos can even be used as social media posts: everyone loves content that can be easily reused. Meanwhile, resources like newsletters help you maintain a steady stream of communication with your customers. Make sure you don’t overwhelm them, we recommend semi-monthly newsletters, no more often than weekly, assuming you have valuable content to share on a weekly basis. Value is always the name of the game.
Advocacy
There is no sales tool as powerful as a video testimonial. According to Wyzowl, 79% of people have watched a video testimonial to learn more about a company, product or service. This means that your current customers can deliver some of your most powerful content. I mentioned the power of quantifiable data when it comes to case studies, and while quantifiable data also helps with testimonials, the power of a testimonial also comes from the qualified data that a happy, satisfied customer can provide. There are few pieces of content that sell your product better than a testimonial with a big smile and a relaxed demeanor that attests to how your service has made this customer’s life easier.
It comes down to
The point of all this? Get your assets in order. Build your content library intentionally. And please, for the love of marketing: measure, measure, measure. The best way to know if your content needs an upgrade is through statistics. Sales, marketing and customer success need to track and share their data. Once you’ve set up company-wide content metrics and built a content library that shows which components are used in which lifecycle stages, you’ll be creatively driving revenue.
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Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.