Two things we know:
Implication: You need to be on the shortlist before your customers ever talk to your reps. Your marketing has to do the heavy lifting to get you there, because by the time the customer arrives, it's too late.
That's a significant shift. Marketing used to be about getting the word out: "Did you know we exist?" "Here's who we are." Awareness was enough and customers would reach out for more. Everything else was sales enablement: brochures, selection guides, and the like.
The problem is that many Industrial B2B marketers are still operating that way. When we audit client content, we consistently find it overindexed on awareness — a sure sign that conversion isn't happening. The other telltale: there's rarely any mechanism to keep the dialogue going. We act as though the conversation continued, when in reality, it didn't.
Getting from awareness to the shortlist is not trivial. Much of the research customers do has nothing to do with your value case. Before they evaluate any solution, they're trying to understand their own problem and the options available to them. When we look for that kind of content in client stacks, we almost always come up empty. Most industrial B2B companies avoid talking about the other options their customers are weighing, which means they're opting out of shaping how buyers frame the problem early on. We also look for content that helps internal champions build the case to the rest of their buying group, and yet this step is often critical to getting shortlisted.
Marketers need to think in entirely different content categories than they traditionally have, and they need a deeper understanding of how their customers actually make decisions.
But before getting there, start with what you have.
Understand the full picture: What are you producing? How much falls into each category? What's your tempo, and do you have any way to know whether your content is actually converting?
Before overhauling your content, build devices that keep the conversation going. Customers rarely jump from "Did you know we offer X?" to "Request a sample." The decision process takes time, and without mechanisms that work over time and ways to measure how well your content is performing, new content won't matter. Consider a newsletter. Setting one up will force you to ask exactly the right questions about what your customers are doing when they research these decisions.
Until next week,
Kendall -
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