Developing Content For Customers In Various Stages Of Buying Cycle
Jun 19, 2016
10 min read
The buyer’s journey is not too hard to understand in a thoughtfully designed sales funnel. A sales funnel is step-by-step progress taken by the customer in the entire life cycle. Traditionally, it’s been split up into three areas:
- Awareness: Right from the start when the customer becomes aware of his need of a product in your industry category, searches for options over the web- hopefully, finding your business in the process.
- Consideration: By now the customer has narrowed down his choice to 2-3 options and is looking deeper into the choices by directly comparing the pros/cons, processes, etc.). This usually happens for smaller or directly beneficial individuals, but for larger B2B transactions, this is also the stage when the person doing the research may have to present his findings to higher-ups for decision making.
- Decision/Purchase: After much of the effort by the sales team and interactions with the customer via email, phones, or social media, this would be the stage where the customer decides to buy from you or not.
A study supports the fact that a customer is already 57% through the sales process before they even contact a sales representative, it’s obvious to have useful content in place on your site. But if you’re basing your content marketing strategy only on that three-step journey, you could be leaving a big hole in your strategy-making process.
Ahead in the article, we are going to list out how content can be made and optimized along with the various stages of the buyer’s journey: Developing content for customers in the pre-purchase stage, content for current customers, and content for long term/advanced customers. Businesses also need to understand the fact that a customer journey does not end when they become customers. If you stop creating content for people after they became customers, you could be ruining your retention rates or making customers feel that they you left them in cold as soon as you got their money.
Developing Content For Prospects in The Pre-Purchase Stage
To get it all started you must have the data from your previous or current customers that let you know that:
- What questions did they have in mind before they purchased your products? How did they skim through your competitors and make a choice of buying from you?
- Was there any hiccup or a second thought while making the purchase decision?
- Did you have a hard time finding answers to any specific questions about the product/service?
Such case studies could prove to be helpful at any stage of the process. Answers to these questions will let you jump-start right into creating on-site content, whether it is blogs, or FAQ/knowledge base entries. But, to warn you, nobody wants to hard sell or get obsessed with selling and differentiating their product/service in every blog post on their website.
Content marketing institute lists some suggestions for types of content that work well for B2B businesses in the pre-purchase stage.
Developing Content For Current Customers
After the sale has happened, there is the vital step of “keeping your commitments” and “maintaining customer loyalty”. So how do you plan to keep your customers happy? Did you guarantee that your product could solve a specific problem faced by the customers? Then it had better deliver. In addition to all this, there are natural emotions or hiccups along the way after making a purchase:
- Buyer’s remorse
- New influencers and decision-makers
- Resentment or aggression
- Distrust
- Failure to build value
Every customer is bound to go through a post-sale evaluation of the decision they made to purchase the product. Failure on your part to keep commitments and drive home value and you’ll be opening doors for your competitions to make the next sale.
For many businesses, this means tailoring content for mainly two departments in charge of project delivery, and customer service. Content regarding project delivery:
- Building trust with customers
- Addressing customer inquiries
- Does your customer understand the features?
- Pointing out new needs
Content regarding customer service:
- Addressing customer emergencies
- Solving common product issues
- Continuing to build trust
- Explaining sensitive issues
These are some of the key areas where businesses focus on creating content. There are many other issues that might be addressed by content marketing and are unique to your industry. Hence you need to look out for those issues in coordination with the sales team or the customer service team.
Developing Content For Long Term/Advanced Customers
Here you are creating content that helps customers get past the “my product is good enough, but it could be better” area. Now is the time to create customer loyalty or customer advocacy. Within your client base, there will be a small percentage of people who truly love what you sell. In such cases, word-of-mouth still reigns supreme and hence you should create content to encourage these customers to speak about you. Some of the key points that need to be addressed during this stage:
- Go the extra mile to provide your customers extra from what they have already purchased. You should always be the next choice of making a purchase whenever the time comes.
- Repurposing content for the current customers so that it is easily shareable, enables you to create a sales team outside your business venture. This also lets your business open up to new communities related to your current customers. These communities might not have heard about your business before but may have the need that your products can meet.
Conclusion
Content marketing can fit any size of the business. You just need to answer the common questions or hurdles that your prospects face before making a purchase decision from you, even if they have bought it- are they satisfied with it, what steps is your company taking to ensure that it maintains long-term relationships with the existing clients.
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What is a Local Business SEO Listing
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Increases Brand Awareness While searching through a directory, a prospective customer will see your brand even if he doesn’t click on it. Each and every encounter a person has with your business, whether favorable and unfavorable, increase their awareness and familiarity with your brand, warming them up for further engagement. I don’t see why a local business should not invest their time and efforts in creating a well-drafted citation and submitting it to various online local business directories…. It builds backlinks, increases brand awareness, acquaints your business with local customers, increases your search engine rankings, builds trust with Google, strengthens your business as a whole and enables your local business to get discovered by nearby customers leveraging the power of web. So, get started today with claiming, updating and creating your listings online! --> ...
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Don't Miss Out On Potential Business For Your Dental Practice: Get Online
Do you know what separates an average dental practice from the spectacular ones? It’s how they market themselves both physically and virtually. In this generation where life seems worthless without an internet connection, if you are not making an effort to market your dental practice online, chances are that the exposure you’ll get for your practice will be limited only to just 30% of your potential! The importance of marketing yourself digitally is indeed increasing every day. More than 4 billion people today have access to the internet and the number will only go up in the coming future. Which should be a tell-tale sign for you to showcase your dental mastery to the digital world (if you haven’t done already) Now, to market your dental practice online, what’s the first thing that pops up in your mind? Getting a website and optimizing it for mobile? Most dental practitioners’ thinking of marketing themselves online starts and ends with getting their own beautiful dental website but marketing yourself digitally goes way beyond that. The truth is that online marketing reaps the best results when all its components are stitched together and streamlined as one. While creating an informative website for your dental practice is the main component of an online marketing strategy; starting a blog, maintaining and marketing your social media profiles, search engine optimization and managing online reviews are other few important components that require an equal amount of attention as well. And the best part is that it’s free! Unlike printing flyers or cold calling, which requires quite a bit of investment, marketing yourself online organically doesn’t cost you a penny. Which substantially increases its ROI (Return On Investment) and makes it all the more attractive to someone who’s redundant to take the required steps of maintaining a digital presence of their practice. So, let’s talk about the major online components that constitute a stellar online marketing strategy - The Supreme: Website Setting up a new website for your dental practice is like building your clinic all over again…. digitally. According to a survey, 97% of patients prefer to have a look at a dental practitioner’s website rather than picking up the phone and calling them for information. Also, your website is the place where all of your other online marketing efforts will lead prospective patients to so you’ll have to make sure that it matches your branding, gets the message across, portrays your dental practice in the best light, is mobile responsive and mentions your physical and contact information clearly. Build relationships using Social Media The first rule of marketing is to market where your potential customers (or in this case, patients) are. And that is why Social Media Marketing has picked up so much heat recently with almost every brand out there trying to penetrate the inner circle of their customers. Having a strong social media presence serves not only to stay in constant touch with your patients and remind them of your dental practice but also to attract new patients and give them an inside look of your clinic and services. Also, a dental practice that actively engages with their patients in some way or the other on a regular basis is more likely to appeal to prospective patients as well. Start a dental blog ‘Blogging’ has recently become a buzzword for getting a lot of website traffic and eventually clinic patients. But that is not the case. The essence of successful blogging lies in providing value to your patients. And it takes a lot of consistent efforts to get successful at it. If done correctly, it can generate a lot of exposure for your dental practice and redirect a myriad of new potential patients to your website regularly. Leverage the power of online reviews Online reviews are the 21st-century version of ‘Word of Mouth’, 84% of people confirmed that they trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. Reading online what your past patients have to say about your clinic or practice, in general, helps them decide if they want to become your patient or not even before entering your premise. So, it’s highly advisable to manage your reviews on your active social media platforms and the internet in general. You can use a service like Get Five Stars to manage all your patient reviews on the web. Search engine friendly Search engines like Google also play a very big part in getting your website in front of the world. People search on Google for great dentists every day, a lot of it, and if you’re at the top of the search rankings for most of their searches probability is more than they’ll click on your website. Your social media activity, a relevant website filled with useful content, successful blog, online reviews and a plethora of other ranking factors are taken into consideration for ranking your site on Google's SERPs. While these are the most basic and equally popular methods to enter into the online sphere with a bang, they still require a lot of efforts to execute perfectly and in sync. We understand that as a dentist, it may not be possible for you spend a lot of time in front of a computer rather than doing what you do best. ...
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What is Through Channel Marketing Automation? Full Guide
Brands heavily depend on indirect sales channels, like distributors, resellers, and partners, to access their target markets. Effectively managing these channels is crucial, but it can be difficult without the appropriate tools. Through channel marketing automation (or TCMA) is an excellent way to expand your brand’s reach. By utilizing your partnerships with various entities such as dealers, ISVs, wholesalers, resellers, and affiliates, you can enhance your presence in the market and simplify the process of driving more indirect sales. TCMA helps manage and distribute brand assets to channel partners, improving brand visibility and consistency. In this blog, we’ll explore TCMA, its benefits, and how to choose the best tools to support your channel marketing strategy. What is Through Channel Marketing Automation? Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) refers to automating marketing activities through a company’s indirect sales channels. Unlike traditional marketing automation, which focuses on direct-to-customer marketing, TCMA empowers and supports channel partners in executing marketing campaigns that align with the brand’s overall strategy. TCMA ensures brand compliance by providing customizable templates and resources that help partners maintain brand consistency while efficiently managing local marketing efforts. These platforms offer tools that allow brands to manage, distribute, and measure marketing content across multiple channels. These marketing automation services platforms facilitate essential channel marketing tasks by providing easy access to vital marketing resources. They enable partners to efficiently carry out their marketing efforts while adhering to brand guidelines. Key Components of Through Channel Marketing Automation Through channel marketing automation (TCMA) is a strategy that empowers business partners to market products or services on behalf of a brand. The key components of TCMA include: 1. Marketing Automation Platforms Marketing automation platforms are a crucial component of TCMA. These platforms provide a centralized hub for managing marketing campaigns, assets, and performance metrics. They often feature templates for localized marketing materials to ensure consistency across partner campaigns. With marketing automation platforms, brands can streamline and optimize their marketing efforts, ensuring their message is conveyed effectively to their target audience. 2. Co-branded collateral and Content Co-branded collateral and content are essential components of TCMA. Companies offer co-branded marketing materials such as brochures, presentations, and digital assets to empower partners in their marketing efforts. This facilitates easy customization of these materials to suit local market needs, ensuring the brand’s message is conveyed consistently across all channels. Co-branded collateral and content help maintain brand integrity and ensure that partners have the necessary tools to market the brand’s products or services effectively. What Are the Benefits of Through Channel Marketing Automation? Implementing a TCMA platform can provide several key benefits to your business: 1. Enhanced Brand Consistency Consistency can become a challenge with multiple partners handling your brand's messaging. A TCMA platform ensures that all marketing materials align with your brand’s guidelines, reducing the risk of off-brand messaging. This consistency helps build a strong, unified brand image across all channels. 2. Increased Efficiency Manually managing marketing efforts across numerous partners is time-consuming and prone to errors. TCMA streamlines this process by automating campaign creation, distribution, and management, efficiently distributing essential marketing resources. Such automation relieves your marketing team of time-consuming chores so that they can concentrate on more important jobs. 3. Improved Partner Engagement If your channel partners are provided with easy-to-use tools and resources, they are more likely to participate in marketing activities. TCMA platforms often come with customizable templates, content libraries, and campaign management tools that make it simpler for partners to execute campaigns. This increased engagement leads to better results and stronger relationships with your partners, enhancing partner relationship management. 4. Better Data and Insights Another major strength of TCMA is the possibility of monitoring and quantifying the effectiveness of marketing communications in all the media. Real-time analytics help you understand what is effective and what is not so you can make the necessary changes on the spot. This makes it easier for you to make the right decisions that will enhance the efficiency of your channel marketing. 5. Scalability TCMA platforms are designed to scale with your business, allowing you to easily add new partners and expand into new local markets without overwhelming your marketing team. Let’s break through your revenue hurdles We find your primary growth blockers, build expert-led strategies, and provide custom data-driven solutions to help you hit your revenue goals. Set up a 1:1 strategy call What Can I Do with Through Channel Marketing Automation? A TCMA platform offers a wide range of functionalities that can enhance your channel marketing efforts: 1. Campaign Management You can create, distribute, and manage marketing campaigns across all your channel partners from a single platform. This centralized approach ensures cohesive corporate marketing campaigns executed consistently and in line with your brand’s strategy. 2. Content Syndication With TCMA, you can easily distribute content to your partners, who can localize it for their specific markets. This feature is especially helpful in communicating your message across different demographics while keeping the brand image intact. TCMA supports effective marketing strategies by providing essential tools and knowledge to partners, ensuring consistent and efficient local marketing initiatives. 3. Lead Management TCMA platforms often include lead management tools that allow partners to capture, qualify, and nurture leads generated through their marketing efforts. This functionality helps close the loop between marketing and sales, ensuring no opportunity is missed. 4. Co-Branding Many TCMA platforms offer co-branding features, allowing partners to add logos and contact information to their marketing materials. This capability enhances the partner’s visibility while promoting your brand, creating a win-win situation. 5. Analytics and Reporting Marketing automation tools offer real-time analytics and reporting, which assist in assessing the performance of your marketing campaigns. It allows you to continually monitor engagement, conversion, and ROI to improve your approach. Implementing Through Channel Marketing Automation Solutions Implementing through channel marketing automation solutions requires careful consideration of several factors. Here are some key considerations: Choose a platform that meets your needs: Select a TCMA platform that aligns with your business goals and objectives. Consider the features and functionalities that are essential to your marketing efforts. Ensure scalability: Choose a platform that can grow with your business. Ensure the platform can handle increased traffic, data, and user activity as your business expands. Consider the cost: Evaluate the cost of the platform and ensure that it fits within your budget. Also, consider the return on investment (ROI) and potential benefits of implementing a TCMA solution. Evaluate user-friendliness: Ensure that the platform is user-friendly and easy to use. This will encourage adoption and usage among your partners. Consider integration with existing systems: Ensure the platform can integrate with your existing marketing systems, such as CRM, ERP, and marketing automation platforms. Evaluate customer support and training: Consider the platform's level of customer support and training. Ensure you have access to resources and support to help you get the most out of the platform. Measuring Success in Through Channel Marketing Automation Measuring success through channel marketing automation requires careful consideration of several key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some key metrics to consider: Partner engagement: Track partner engagement metrics such as login activity, campaign adoption, and content usage. Marketing campaign performance: Track the performance of marketing campaigns, including metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated through TCMA campaigns and the quality of those leads. Sales revenue: Track the impact of TCMA on sales revenue and the return on investment (ROI) of TCMA campaigns. Brand consistency: Track the consistency of brand messaging and branding across all channels and partners. Customer satisfaction: Track customer satisfaction metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and surveys. By tracking these metrics, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your TCMA solution and make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts. How to Find the Best Through Channel Marketing Automation Tools? The search for the perfect through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) tool begins by fully understanding your company's requirements. Look into the size of your operations, how many partners you're working with, and the range of markets you're targeting, including any specific language needs. Here are the key points summarizing the provided advice on choosing a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) solution: Prioritize Critical Functionalities: Focus on content distribution, lead management, and data analysis. Ensure easy integration with your current infrastructure and scalability to accommodate business growth. User-friendliness is crucial for partner adoption. Research and Evaluate: Explore user testimonials on platforms like G2 and consult analyst reports to identify leading TCMA solutions. Schedule demos with providers to assess ease of use and capabilities. Consider customer feedback for practical insights on effectiveness and support. Consider Investment vs. Returns: Balance the investment in a TCMA solution with expected returns. Let this balance guide your final decision in selecting a platform that aligns with your budget and business objectives. Engage Successful Partners: Involve your most successful partners in decision-making to ensure the chosen TCMA tool complements their processes and preferences. Their input can provide valuable perspective on what works best for them. Look for Innovation and Support: Choose a TCMA solution that promises continual innovation, consistent updates, and a clear future roadmap. Strong support throughout the product's lifecycle is essential for resolving issues and maximizing value. Integration and Future-Readiness: Select a channel marketing platform that seamlessly integrates with your current operations while preparing your business to meet future marketing demands. Ensure the chosen solution is adaptable and can evolve alongside your business needs. Let’s break through your revenue hurdles We find your primary growth blockers, build expert-led strategies, and provide custom data-driven solutions to help you hit your revenue goals. Set up a 1:1 strategy call Suggested Software Proficiency for Marketing Automation Specialists To excel in this role, a Marketing Automation Manager must be proficient in various software tools. These include: Marketing Automation Platforms: Tools like Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, and Eloqua are essential for automating various aspects of marketing campaigns. A Marketing Automation Manager should be well-versed in setting up workflows, segmenting audiences, and measuring campaign performance within these platforms. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Integration between marketing automation platforms and CRM systems is crucial for managing leads and tracking customer interactions. A Marketing Automation Manager should know how to use these systems to ensure marketing efforts align with sales strategies. Analytics Tools: Understanding how to use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Optimizely, or Mixpanel is essential for measuring the success of marketing campaigns. These tools offer detailed insights into customer behavior, campaign performance, and overall ROI, allowing the Marketing Automation Manager to make data-driven decisions. Social Media Management Tools: Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer help automate social media posts and track engagement. Proficiency in these tools helps a Marketing Automation Manager maintain a consistent presence across multiple platforms and track the impact of social media campaigns. Email Marketing Software: Managing email campaigns is a key aspect of marketing automation. Tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or SendGrid allow Marketing Automation Managers to create and automate email campaigns, segment lists, and track open and click-through rates. However, the role of a Marketing Automation Manager goes beyond simply setting up these tools. They must also develop strategies that leverage automation to achieve broader business goals. This could include increasing lead generation, improving customer retention, and enhancing the overall customer experience. The Marketing Automation Manager uses technology to make marketing efforts more efficient, effective, and measurable. Conclusion Through Channel marketing automation and partner marketing, automation has enormous potential to transform. These tools and strategies establish a fresh benchmark in channel marketing, emphasizing efficiency, intelligent automation, and, above all, the impact of collaboration. If you’re ready to take your channel marketing to the next level, Saffron Edge can help. Contact us today to learn more about how we can assist you in optimizing your channel marketing strategy. ...
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