To generate leads, transform them into customers, and keep them engaged with your brand is the ultimate goal of every B2B business, as it directly corresponds to business revenue. As a marketing team, we suggest focusing on your leads and customers through the prism of a customer journey powered by content marketing. Let’s look at how you can think about your leads’ experience through content in this blog.
Customer journey: from attracting leads to retaining customers long-term
With so much noise every one of us experiences daily from social media, there is a high pressure to reach the right audience, with the right content, at the right time. The hard truth is that just reaching someone who fits your perfect client profile once is not enough. You have to keep checking all of the “right” boxes over and over again. This requires a lot of strategies and planning to keep your prospect moving along the marketing funnel, which should be done with customer journey planning.
As a B2B business, you should plan the complete personal experience of being your customer through content. It is not enough to just write relevant content anymore – you should really focus on making leads engaged and excited all the time. This way, you will increase your number of leads and increase their customer lifetime value.
While every customer takes a slightly different route, they all encounter these 4 stages:
- Awareness: A prospect learns about your brand and offerings but may not be aware of why they need your services
- Consideration: The prospect considers their options but is still researching other choices and discovering their pain points
- Decision: The buyer is ready to make a purchase but needs to be convinced that you’re the best option.
- Retention: The buyer has made a purchase but might not be ready to make repeat purchases.
It is your job to help leads move through these stages: first, from becoming your customer to choosing you over and over again. This can be done by building an interactive customer experience.
strategy
How to build long-term customer engagement with interactive content
The strategic focus in 2024 should be on building long term customer engagement. While there are certain content types that work well for funnel stages, the challenge is to make them more engaging and less boring for the audience. Carefully crafted content should act as a guide, leading customers deeper into the buyer’s journey without them even realizing it.
Let’s first focus on attracting leads and nurturing them into customers:
Awareness
Content aimed at potential customers in the awareness stage should make a loud and positive first impression. Oftentimes, you’re crafting content for total strangers, which means that it has to grab their attention quickly, and then entice them to keep reading, watching, or listening.
How to make awareness content more interactive:
- Think about what data you can use to build unique interactive dashboards. It can come from your own research or ongoing activities. Turn this data into dynamic market overviews or pillar pages. For example, you are a supply chain visibility platform; you can share data about exciting and relevant industry statistics.
- Analyze the interests and pains of your audience. In addition to educational blogs, add interactive parts to your content. For example, depending on the audience’s characteristics, you can ask them specific questions to check their understanding of your content.
- Ask your audience questions and then share the statistics with them.
- Based on customer action, give them content that is specific to their interests and needs.
For example, at the end of your educational blog, check how well your audience understood it with questionnaires and then propose sharing where they stand compared to others
Consideration
Customers in this middle stage understand their pain points and they’re looking for solutions. You want to create content that gets your leads thinking about the next step, which means producing deeper content than the awareness stage content. This content might be entertaining, informative, persuasive, or convincing, or it might combine any number of these elements.
Your goal here should be to answer questions, overcome objections, and equip your audience with all the information they need to make a purchase. You also want to build confidence in your brand, so that your solution remains a contender when your customer is ready to buy.
How to make consideration content more interactive:
- An interactive calculator, “how-to” content that engages with your unique data, interactive comparison of your product & services to the competition. In exchange for sharing personal data your user has to receive content that is relevant specifically to them.
Decision
This is your last chance to swing a sale your way, after a buyer has educated themselves and sits poised to make a purchase. Content in this stage aims to persuade or convince your audience. You already know they’re interested—you just want to set their mind at ease.
Social proof, such as user ratings and customer testimonials, is very helpful at this stage.
Your goal here is to overcome any final objections and resolve lingering feelings of risk. You want to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that your solution will solve their problem and showcase why it outstrips your competitors’ solutions.
How to make consideration content more fun:
- Custom demos, individual videos made specifically for your lead. For example, sales makes a short interactive video introduction of products & services to encourage the lead for longer real-time meeting.
- Feedbacks from other clients who share similar qualities, video interviews with these clients.
- Custom content libraries – gather an active page for the lead with info relevant to them. For example, a success story, a demo, custom pricing proposition.
How to engage customers with content marketing
The goal of customer engagement is to foster trust and loyalty during your relationships with a lead that already became your customer. You should do it to keep your brand relevant and trusted. Increasing engagement in its simplest form is creating an ongoing flow of content that your customers interact with and trust. It also helps your brand remain top of mind.
Start by revisiting your customer profiles. Your customers keep dealing with some of their problems even when they start working with you: these might be challenges directly connected to you, like not understanding industry-speciding language that you speak or not knowing how to ask you the right questions, you measure your value. Or it might be something on the side, where you can still provide insights and share expertise. It is your goal to generate value consistently even after you have became partners, to remind constantly that you are there and your customer needs you.
Retention stage content ideas:
Aligning your lead generation and customer engagement processes
Building client experience is a powerful tool for moving prospects along the customer journey and deeply planning their every interaction with your B2B business.
However, content experience strategy implementation can differ greatly depending on the niche and specifics of your company. To make sure you are utilizing the right resources and maximizing your input at every stage of interaction with customers, having an experienced partner, like 42DM, is crucial.
At 42DM, we have created and implemented content marketing for numerous B2B clients since 2017, developing our own expert tips and tricks to help our clients scale effectively.
If you are experiencing limited demand or struggling with any part of the customer journey, we are here to open a new universe of content marketing for your business!
