Business relationships are sustained by trust. How does this work when there’s no existing relationship?
Welcome to the crunch issue for B2B marketers. Your content primarily has to build trust with people you don’t know.
The fact is that businesses don’t buy products and solutions based on features and value. It’s all about risk-adjusted value.
What buyers want
Their main concerns are looking good and not screwing up. Benefits are secondary to the preoccupation of not being criticised or fired.
Bigger brands win because they’re the choice that’s easiest to defend. Even rubbish incumbents stay in place because they’re a known quantity.
So your content has to work harder than you imagine to fill the trust gap through empathy and honesty.
Don’t sweep risks under the carpet
It’s tempting in your marketing communications to only focus on the positives. This isn’t how your prospect is thinking.
‘Advanced,’ ‘cutting edge,’ ‘ground-breaking.’ These all translate in your prospect’s mind as ‘risky.’
If there’s any level of complexity involved in your solution, they know there are inherent implementation risks. So talk about them. Show how you’ve worked with other customers to manage and minimise those risks. Don’t pretend they’re not there.
It’s what makes case studies potentially powerful but hard to do properly.
The power of familiarity
Most of your target market isn’t buying. They’re not even thinking about buying.
When that changes, they turn to who they can remember and tend to stick with their initial, narrow consideration set of possible suppliers.
If you make the initial list it’s because your consistent marketing presence makes you look like a viable option. One trust hurdle cleared but still plenty to go.
Trust in marketing
Successful B2B marketing goes way beyond features and benefits. It means understanding your buyers’ psychology and anxieties and meeting them head-on.
AI won’t do this for you. An experienced B2B copywriter can.