I was involved in a fascinating discussion around the role of educational content in marketing on LinkedIn recently.
The poster’s view was that people won’t be researching specific products or solutions until they’re actively in the market. I agree with this. It’s hardly controversial. People won’t want to hear about solutions if they don’t know they have a problem.
But there are implications. The poster went on: if most of your market isn’t ready to search for your product or service, what value does your content have? What’s the point of publishing any educational content if people aren’t looking to be educated?
This is an excellent question. It’s one I wish more B2B companies asked themselves. People clearly won’t be searching for your product if they don’t know they need it. What should you do instead?
Educational Content – To Educate Or To Sell?
The answer is to make your educational content, err, educational. Not sales copy dressed up to look like education. (Yes, we’re back to my old friend – the ‘why your business needs…’ content).
To educate you have to be clear about who you’re trying to educate and what education they need. You have to accept that they’re probably not ready to buy and you need to be patient. If you push too hard they’ll be less receptive (at best – in reality they’ll probably just bail).
The example the poster used was sales intelligence software. Prospects will research sales intelligence software when they know they need sales intelligence software – and not before.
I’ve never studied the market for these platforms in detail. But my guess is that further up the funnel they’ll be concerned about how to get better qualified leads, how to have more productive sales meetings, how to score leads, and all the other things I guess sales intelligence platforms help you achieve.
From Enlightenment To Interest
The leap would be to move from seeing these issues as normal features of a challenging business environment to understanding why they happen, and then on to being a set of definable problems with a solution. That’s where educational content has a huge role to play if you pitch it just right.
So focus on prospects’ problems and ambitions as a way in. You can still align the narrative with your value proposition. You can perhaps link to a case study where they can see a problem like theirs being solved.
But really the name of the game is to explore the underlying reasons why managing sales pipelines is difficult and to bring enlightenment. (Substitute whatever problems you solve or things you make possible with your product or service for our sales intelligence example.)
Your goal at this stage is to build associations between their problem and your brand. Their overriding need is to see that you know what you’re talking about and can be trusted.
Accept too that people not actively in the market will be harder to reach. But if you have the right content it doesn’t matter how many times you post and promote it.
And here’s the bonus: pitch your educational content in the right way and you’re moving your sales process upstream. You embed your brand in your prospects’ minds before they start to research products and vendors.
If you want some ideas (and better still a plan) for a content strategy that works. Get in touch.