Author: Keirra Woodard

Video: B2B Content Marketing – How to systematically move buyers down the funnel. You can read the transcript below (lightly edited for readability).

B2B companies often create and publish content regularly to generate website traffic. How can you systematically turn your website traffic into qualified sales leads?

Hey everyone, I’m Keirra Woodard, and today, I’m going to show you a process for making sure that your content converts buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey and consistently produces high-quality sales leads for your business.

Typical B2B Content Marketing Process

Here’s the typical process of creating and publishing B2B content: the marketing team will create some content ad-hoc, usually based on what the sales team needs at the moment. Or, maybe they have set up a publishing schedule to publish, for example, one white paper a month or a certain number of blogs each week.

After they have published this content — usually to their website blog, maybe to their social media pages — this generates a little bit of web traffic.

But often, they find that it’s a struggle to turn that traffic into inbound leads. 

Sometimes, there might be a white paper download attached to a blog post. But those white paper downloads end up being low-quality leads, as website visitors are usually not ready to buy anything yet. 

Often, there’s not any downloadable content at all, and B2B marketers are relying on the website visitors to click to schedule a sales demo as soon as they read some content or visit the website. Often, buyers are not ready anything to buy anything yet, so potential customers are being lost.

But there is a method that you can use to systematically capture that lost traffic, keep marketing to leads, and nurture them until they are ready and excited to talk to your sales team.

Step 1: Identify which types of content are best suited for each stage of the marketing funnel

So here’s how to use content marketing to systematically move potential customers through the buyer’s journey and generate those high-quality business leads.

The first step is to identify which types of content are best suited for each stage of the marketing funnel.

So this is the buyer’s journey:

At the top, you have “Awareness”. This is when a potential buyer is becoming aware of your solution or product.

So think about how you become aware of a potential company. Maybe a friend refers you to a company blog, a colleague tells you about a webinar that’s coming up, or maybe you hear about a podcast.

You’re not looking for anything specific at that point.

You’re either looking for general educational content to help you get better at your job, or you’re looking for a solution to a specific problem and you’re just browsing the internet.

So that’s how you come across a particular company at the awareness stage — when you’re not looking for anything specific.

Next, there’s the “Consideration” phase. Think about it: you’ve already determined that you have a particular problem, but you don’t know how to solve that problem yet. So you start considering different options on how you might be able to solve it so maybe you pick up an ebook or white paper.

Maybe you’ve gotten on an email newsletter for a particular company, or sometimes you’ll watch a webinar or some kind of demonstration. You’re comparing different types of solutions to figure out what’s the best way to solve your problem. You move into the “internet research” stage once you know that you’re trying to solve this problem in a particular way.

And then, once you’ve narrowed it down and you know exactly what type of product or solution you’re after, you start reading the reviews, you may get some case studies, you may hop on a call with a salesperson, or do a demo. You’re ready to buy, and you’re comparing options between different providers.

Step 2: Determine what your target audience needs to understand at each stage of the buyer’s journey

There is a process for buyers to move through that buyer’s journey for your particular company. Your target audience needs to understand what you’re selling, why it’s important to them, and how it’s going to solve their particular problem. This information moves them closer and closer to making a final purchase decision.

So here’s the marketing funnel:

As a marketer, you want to attract customers and educate them. And then, when you’re trying to get buyers to make a decision, you convert them by demonstrating why you’re better than your competitors. 

Here’s a specific example. Suppose you’re selling a product — Product X — to businesses.

You want to attract businesses with a general topic that’s relevant to your audience. Perhaps you’re assuming that your audience doesn’t know how to solve the problem they have. Or, maybe your audience doesn’t know how to define the problem yet. This is why you’re writing about general topics in the attract phase.

Next, you want to educate them by explaining what the benefits are of purchasing products from this category. You want to ask yourself: “Why should they buy the particular type of product that I’m selling?” (Not my product specifically, but this category of products.)

And now, you start explaining why Product X is the best of all of the options that are out there.

Step 3: Create content tailored to your target audience for each stage of the buyer’s journey

Suppose that you are a software company, you sell marketing automation software, and you’re selling this to a target audience of small businesses.

At first, you might create awareness content. You want to attract your potential customers with some blog posts on a general topic. 

If we’re talking about small businesses in general, they probably don’t know about any specific ways to improve their marketing results. You’re just attracting them so they become aware of your company.

Perhaps you post these blogs and include a call-to-action. Instead of asking potential customers to just book a sales demo, you include an attractive offer like “download this white paper” or “download this ebook,” and that gets them onto your email list where you can re-market to them.

Then you can move them into phase two. You can send them a handful of emails; for example, you could send them white papers on why small businesses should be using marketing automation software. 

So now you have people from small businesses who want to improve their marketing results. They are interested enough to sign up on your email list. Now you have the opportunity to show them content about why marketing automation software is right for them. You’ve moved them into the consideration phase.

After reading your email newsletter, they know marketing automation software is right for them. So you start sending them some bottom-of-the-funnel content. You send them case studies. You send an email inviting them to a live demo webinar. Maybe you have a sales team member reach out to them and ask them, “Are you interested in having a one-on-one demo?”

The topic of this bottom-of-the-funnel content centers around “Why our company’s marketing automation software is best for small businesses.” You’re trying to get them to make a decision. You’re trying to show them why, of all the options, they should buy from your company — not anyone else’s marketing automation software.

New and improved B2B content marketing process

Previously, we were creating content ad-hoc or coming up with a calendar that only showed us how many blog posts or white papers to produce.

And we were creating lots of different types of content, no matter what we needed at that moment. That was generating some inconsistent web traffic for us, and we were struggling to turn that traffic into inbound leads.

But now, we know what type of content will be most beneficial for our business to create because we know we need content for every type of target audience at each stage of that marketing funnel.

Want more tips on B2B content marketing?

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