Marketers continue to find success with audience-centric content, and for good reason. Product-centric content just doesn’t resonate. It’s ineffective at reaching buyers. And it doesn’t give way to productive interactions with buyers.
The reason why this type of content is so effective is because it includes the buyer’s perspective. This includes their wants, needs, goals, challenges, questions and anything else they would want to be addressed at each step of their buying journey.
As important as it is, many marketers struggle with understanding how to incorporate the buyer’s perspective throughout their strategies. Why is this perspective so important? And why do marketers have trouble integrating it into their strategies? We’ll dive a bit deeper into both questions so you can optimize your strategy.
Why It Matters
If marketers go to market without knowing or incorporating their buyer’s perspective, marketers are guessing or going on limited information about what they believe buyers want and need. Making assumptions rather than using facts and data doesn’t give way to success.
For one thing, a strategy without a buyer’s perspective leads to inconsistent messaging. You don’t want buyers receiving mixed or opposing messages they have to decipher. Your interactions with buyers should be easy, and your content should help them get what they want when they want it and in ways they understand. If you can’t provide that, they’ll go elsewhere to get what they need—and that’s likely to be your competitors.
In addition to this, understanding your buyer’s perspective is not a one-and-done deal. You need to regularly check in with your buyers to see what’s changed and adjust your strategy accordingly.
We’re seeing this play out in real time as buyers’ priorities are shifting. If you haven’t adjusted to reflect buyers’ changing perspective and realities as 2020 unfolds, you could be going to market with irrelevant, out of touch or even tone-deaf messages.
Your business is already facing enough challenges. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment because you aren’t in tune with what your buyers need and want.
Build the Perspective
Once you understand the importance of incorporating your buyer’s perspective throughout your marketing strategy, it’s time to find the information to help you build it out. Here are some ways you can create or update your buyer’s perspective and incorporate it into your strategies.
Do your research. Where do your buyers go to find information? What content formats do they like, and why? What are their most pressing questions when they begin their journey? These are important answers to know as you build your buyer’s perspective. Go to reputable resources like Sirius Decisions and Demand Gen Report to get started, and review the research they’ve compiled on buyer insights and content preferences.
Conduct surveys and interviews. Research will give you a great foundation, but surveys and interviews will provide crucial details. Ask your customers about how they like to receive information, what messages resonate with them, what content formats they like at different points of their journey and any other questions that will help you create a more complete perspective.
It’s important to note that you have to conduct both surveys and interviews and not choose only one to pursue. If you only conduct surveys, you don’t get context with answers and it’s difficult to see potential widespread patterns. And if you only conduct interviews, you run the risk of sampling bias.
Bring in product and sales. Your product team knows your offerings inside and out, and your sales team talks with your customers every day. You’re already working together to build buyer personas, so it makes sense to continue working with them to build a comprehensive buyer’s perspective. Getting everyone’s input and knowledge into one place is crucial for consistency in how you reach out to and speak to buyers across all functions of your business. This ensures buyers will see content with unified messaging.
Map it out. This is a critical part of the process. Using all the information you’ve gathered, create a map that includes each step of the buyer’s journey and the perspective of the buyer at each step. This could be a physical map or a digital map, but whatever you choose, make sure it’s something you and your colleagues can easily access. The map should include things buyers would want addressed at each step, including:
- Their questions and concerns
- Their goals
- The content they’d prefer to consume
- The messages that resonate with them
Incorporating your buyer’s perspective into your marketing strategy is more important than ever. When your strategy includes this crucial information, marketers can successfully build an accurate, informed content strategy that includes their buyers’ preferred content, activities and interactions—and lead you to more success in closing sales.
Be sure to register for our upcoming webinar in Demand Gen Report’s Buyer Insights & Intelligence Series on Friday, July 24, at 3 p.m. ET: New Trends in Buyer Enablement Content: Top Formats & Tactics That Drive Conversions & Build Trust.
As a Content Strategist at Content4Demand, Toni Boger partners with clients to build successful content strategies that empower their digital marketing objectives at all stages, from ideation and creation through execution and promotion. She has a decade of experience in B2B content strategy and development across several industries. Outside of helping clients take their content to the next level, you’ll find Toni learning how to paint, reading a good book, taking aerial arts classes at circus school and watching classic films.
