Content still remains the channel through which you can connect with and engage with your buyers when running your demand generation program.
With studies reporting on how today’s buyers are empowered, the only logical conclusion would be to create more content and buyers will find it. Right?
Wrong.
An empowered buyer doesn’t necessarily mean that their buying journey has become easier. In fact, Gartner reports that 77% of B2B buyers had a difficult time completing their last purchase.
The customer journey is not linear, so your buyer is interacting with information from different sources, leaving them overwhelmed by the amount of content they have to wade through to complete a purchase.
So, publishing more content for your demand generation campaign doesn’t mean that your buyers are getting the content they need at the right time.
This article will look at how to create strategic content that will help you achieve the goals of your demand generation campaign.
What is Demand-Generation Content?
Demand generation content is content that demand generation teams publish to drive awareness and generate interest in a business and the products and services it offers.
A demand generation campaign uses different types of content such as blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, white papers, and research reports.
The type of content and format you choose depends on the strategies and tactics you use to drive demand, your target audience, and the goals of your campaign.
To effectively drive demand using content, you need to understand your target audience, their pain points, and the channels they use to help you know where and how to share your content.
However, creating content that effectively drives demand still remains a challenge because not all marketers get results from the content they publish. Here are a few reasons why.
Why is Demand-Generation Content Challenging?
The amount of content your target audience has to read and move through their buying milestones to make a decision creates more work for them.
Take the current martech landscape for instance. We have more than 9,000 solutions in different categories that users need to choose from to build their marketing tech stack.
Having to choose from several solutions with similar features and pricing leads to analysis paralysis.
Assuming that most of these solutions are publishing content to drive awareness, that means buyers have to read it to inform their buying decisions. That presents a second problem—information overload.
Other times, if marketers haven’t researched their target audience well to understand consumer behavior, they’re likely to create and publish content that isn’t aligned with their target audience. This content doesn’t satisfy their intent and doesn’t show up on the channels that their customers visit.
For buyers, this means more work to find the content they need, making it harder for them to complete their purchase.
It’s impossible to keep publishing more content to drive demand thinking you’re going to get better results. The odds are stacked against your buyers who are more stressed and overwhelmed when looking for solutions to their problems.
To get around this, you’ll need to consider creating strategic content for your buyers.
A study by Content Marketing Institute and Vidyard reveals that marketers have found demand generation content to be more effective during the awareness and decision stages:
Why is this so?
Your buyers go through different buying milestones. Each milestone requires different types of content to help them move to the next milestone.
For example, when buyers are identifying and shortlisting available options, they will consider the technical capabilities of their preferred solution and the long-term financial costs they will incur.
That means they’ll need content that addresses these two issues to help them narrow down and pick the solution that aligns with their needs and is within their budget.
Secondly, the buying committee has both the decision maker and the end user of your product, adopting a democratic style of leadership when deciding what products to buy.
The decisions the buying committee makes will have an impact on business goals and objectives, so executives need to be increasingly considerate of the opinions of everyone involved, lest they end up buying tools that don’t live up to the needs of the end users.
Similarly, end users need to make a case for the tools they want to use and help decision-makers understand why they need to choose a specific set of tools over any other tools available.
To make it easy for everyone involved, each member of the committee will look for content that answers the questions they have, and your content needs to address the needs of both end users and decision-makers.
Content for end users covers tactical information that they need when using your product or service. On the other hand, content for decision-makers covers metal models and frameworks that make a solid case for the products and services you sell.
How To Create Strategic Content For Demand Generation
Strategic content that drives demand revolves around creating specific content assets that your target audience needs to complete their buying milestones.
Before you start creating your content assets you need to align your content goals with your business objectives.
For example, if your business goal is to acquire more users, your content might help you by driving more qualified traffic to relevant pages on your website.
Once you’ve established how your content will help you achieve your business goals, dig deeper into your audience and understand their pain points, needs, and goals.
As you do this, different buyer segments with specific content needs will emerge. This will guide you when planning your content to make sure that it addresses the pain points and needs of each buyer segment.
For tactical content, identify long-tail keywords with low traffic potential and publish content on these topics. Most of these keywords inform searchers who are lower in the funnel and know what they’re looking for.
Here’s an example of tactical content that caters to the end user:
In addition to learning about the spend management solutions available, there’s a link to a guide that has a decision matrix that will guide the buyer to choose the right spend management software.
By the time the buyer is done reading about the solutions available, they won’t have to deal with analysis paralysis. Once they have an idea of what’s available in the market, the next milestone is clear, choosing what they need and making a case for it in the buying committee.
If you’re running an e-commerce store, consider using an AI tool to create compelling product descriptions when comparing different products that your target audience is looking for.
Assuming your target audience already uses a competitor’s tool, how do you create strategic content that drives demand for your product?
Conduct keyword research and see how many buyers are looking for alternative products, then create comparison content for them, showing them areas where your tool can meet their needs and how you’re better than what they already have. Take a look:
This type of content is strategic for buyers who are actively looking for an alternative solution, and instead of going for a hard sale, this blog post is subtly appealing to the intended target audience and sharing how they’re better than what the buyers are using.
On the other hand, content for decision-makers needs to focus on frameworks and mental models, helping them see the larger picture of an idea and potentially calculate the ROI of the investment they will make.
This is the kind of content you’ll find at the top of the funnel, free from technical information but focused on making a case for an idea or a way of doing things. Take a look at this guide on lifecycle marketing:
The guide talks about lifecycle marketing and explains why industry leaders are choosing the platform to automate lifecycle marketing.
By doing this, it addresses the questions and objections that a decision-maker has towards using SimonData as a customer data platform because other industry leaders use it as well.
The guide also introduces a concept known as the lifecycle marketing sandwich, a framework that makes it easy to communicate the ideas behind lifecycle marketing.
Conclusion
With demand generation content, you’re powering your strategy by creating relevant content for different stages of the funnel to create and capture demand, as well as tracking relevant metrics that are directly related to business growth.
It takes time, so you need to create assets that help you build that interest from your target audience at different stages of the marketing funnel.
As you do this, track metrics such as marketing qualified leads, customer lifetime value, cost per acquisition, and conversion rate per channel instead of vanity metrics such as traffic, dwell time, and social engagement.
Vanity metrics still count, but paying attention to them won’t give you the insights you need to improve your demand generation efforts.
