As marketers, it’s our job to guide B2B buyers along a seamless journey with unique insights, perspectives and best practices that help them make a confident purchase decision. The content you provide them on this journey relies on messaging that reflects their wants, needs and challenges—and where they are in their research and consideration processes.
Messaging helps you translate those wants, needs and challenges into persuasive content that answers their questions and demonstrates your solution’s value, aligned with the considerations they care most about. It’s vital that you put their needs at the center of every piece of content, whether you’re educating them about an industry trend, the capabilities of an ideal solution or showcasing client success stories.
The best way to develop buyer-focused messaging is with persona research. Once you have a clear profile of your target buyer and identify your demand type, you can begin to develop buyer-focused messaging with these three steps.
Identify Buyer Insights
Pinpoint relevant insights from your buyer persona by identifying patterns and trends in their needs, behaviors and preferences. These insights will serve as the foundation for your marketing storyline. Often, you’ll focus on the benefits and differentiators of your solution or your prospective buyer’s objections and emotions.
Refine Those Insights
Once you connect these buyer insights with your solution’s benefits or the goals of your campaign, you can establish the components of your messaging. That may be a single keystone message or a grid that maps several supporting messaging elements for a multi-touch nurture program. Boil your insights into a single, concise statement.
First-person statements put you directly in your buyer’s shoes. Describe their challenges and goals with language they might use to describe them to a colleague. All these things help you enter the buyer’s frame of mind throughout the content planning and creation process.
Apply Your Messaging
Now you’re ready to put your messaging to work creating content that aligns with the buyer’s journey, taking care to select the best formats to tell your story. Identify where to focus your asset or your campaign: the top of the funnel (awareness), the middle of the funnel (consideration) or the bottom of the funnel (decision). Consider the questions your buyers are likely to have at each particular stage so that you can further hone your messaging.
The Messaging Foundation
This process goes beyond helping you create a single piece of content or even one campaign. The messaging product you create can fuel onboarding, nurturing and competitor displacement campaigns. It can empower your internal teams—including sales—with a clear understanding of your organization’s marketing goals. It can even help you support thought leadership in the form of blog posts and articles.
Your buyer-focused messaging is the basis from which you’ll create more effective campaigns that address your target audience’s top priorities.
Take a deeper dive into messaging strategy with Marketing to Prospects vs. Customers: Why Your Messaging Should Be Different.
Holly Celeste Fisk
Holly Celeste Fisk is an accomplished marketing pro with 20+ years of experience in B2B and B2C. She’s responsible for Content4Demand’s internal marketing efforts, managing everything from content creation and email marketing to events and sponsorships, blog publishing, website management and social media presence. When she’s not working, you’ll find her sliding into third at softball, buried in a book or practicing her Italian.
