How To Avoid Wasting Money Creating The Wrong Content

2 years ago, when a new VP of Marketing joined a company, one of their first decisions was what to buy/who to hire. In other words, how to spend money. Fast forward 24 months, and the first question a new marketing leader asks is what can I drop and how can I save money.

In this edition, we’ll talk about some questions you should ask before investing in content creation and how to avoid wasting those precious dollars on content that goes nowhere. 

BGM – Continued

In last month’s newsletter, we discussed how ABM is evolving into what’s called BGM – Buyer Group Marketing. BGM refers to targeting and engaging all the members of the buying group with personalized experiences. It’s important to note, a buying group consists of a variety of different personas, with different interests and goals. So, the first question we should be asking is which persona within the buying group is this content intended for? 

Understanding our Audience

The first step to understanding the buying group is to analyze their behavior. Let’s dive into some statistics; buying journeys continue to be buyer-led and most of the time (over 90%) anonymous. We have seen an average of 11 pageviews until SQL, with time to conversion increasing by 83%, and with 7-13 unique visitors per company and about 4-6 different personas playing a part in that journey. 

Due to this, you need to make sure to have enough variety of content that can support the journeys of those different personas and answer their own unique questions. Less than 16% of the total content B2B companies produce and publish on their site is actually being read by people in the buying group. As you can see from the above stats, you don’t need mountains of text to convert readers into buyers. Actually, overwhelming your audience with content is a sure way to lose their attention. 

Our Content Creation Checklist

Now that we understand how our audience behaves, let’s go over our content checklist to make sure we are best equipped to convert them:

• Outline each persona to understand what content they will best engage with. 
• Identify the questions they have that need to be answered. You also cross beyond the dark mountains and can ask your sales team which questions typically come up in their conversations with those personas. 
• Review existing content to see if it can be repurposed for different personas. Perhaps you don’t have to create any new content.
• If you do spot content gaps in the persona’s journey, move ahead with creating content that is specifically relevant and relatable for that specific persona.
• Ensure content is easily accessible on your website, through promotions, and via your outreach efforts.

Once we have created our content tailored to our target personas, there is only one more question to ask; has it worked? Well, in order to figure that out we need to create a feedback loop for the measurement of our success. We will need to create first-party data on the engagement of individuals within the buying group to find out if we are on the right track. Stay tuned for the next newsletter where we will break down exactly how to measure our efforts.