Building a Hero Mission Content Marketing Strategy

Content isn’t king; thought leadership is king. In order to provide thought leadership, you must provide value that instills authority and trust.

According to Forrester, 60–70% of content created by B2B marketing organizations goes unused. This highlights a few potential problems: businesses produce content without a clear understanding of their customers' needs, the content is undiscoverable—collecting dust on a shelf—or the sales team does not see the value in the content being produced.

We need to shift the content strategy paradigm. My mission is to help you build a content strategy from the ground up, centered around understanding and addressing your Hero’s friction points, constraints, and desired outcomes.

Identifying Your Hero

Look at your best customers and customers you have acquired over the past year. Segment them by the specific outcomes they expect you to help them achieve and why they want to achieve those outcomes. Identify the group of customers based on motivation and outcomes that are the best fit for your business and focus your content strategy to deliver value to a personification that represents that customer group. That personification is your Hero.

Start thinking of your hero as a protagonist of their own story with challenges that your business must solve. View the world from their perspective.

The Hero's Mission

Understanding your Hero's mission is critical in aligning your marketing strategy to their needs. We need to understand the Hero's objectives, specific outcomes, constraints, and needs in detail, which can be organized into distinct chapters to guide your content strategy and engagement approach effectively.

Identifying Mission-Critical Objectives

Start by engaging directly with your heroes.

The Right Way: Engage through Voice of the Hero tactics. Remember, we are crafting a content strategy for our Heroes, so we want to make sure we are leveraging data from our Heroes. Use interviews, surveys, and data analysis to gather comprehensive information about their goals and the challenges they face in achieving them. This includes identifying what success looks like for them, the hurdles they encounter, and the solutions they seek. Yes, this is difficult, yes this does take work, but it is the correct way to do it.

The Less Right Way: Your sales team is on the front lines every day. They can offer a ton of valuable insight out of the gate to get you started on the Hero’s Mission.

Shameless Plug: We conduct Voice of the Hero interviews and in-depth workshops to facilitate the Mission-Building process between leadership, marketing, sales, and service teams. If you want to learn more, meet with me .

Mission Breakdown: Organizing into Chapters

To structure our understanding and content strategy, we divide the Hero's mission into six focused chapters, each representing a key aspect of their journey. For each chapter, we’ll organize the specific outcomes and constraints and define clear value opportunities your marketing can deliver.

Let’s look at an example so you can see how this might work:

1. Chapter 1: Awareness and Engagement Outcomes & Needs: Increase brand awareness, understand product offerings, and initial engagement. Constraints: Limited time to capture attention, information overload. Value Opportunities: Create engaging and informative content that cuts through the noise, using targeted messaging that resonates with the Hero's initial discovery phase.
2. Chapter 2: Consideration and Trust Building Outcomes & Needs: A deeper understanding of products/services, building trust, and seeing potential ROI. Constraints: Skepticism about product effectiveness and competitive comparison. Value Opportunities: Share testimonials, case studies, and data-driven evidence that establish credibility and demonstrate value, easing the decision-making process.
3. Chapter 3: Decision and Action Outcomes & Needs: Make the purchase decision and seek justification for investment. Constraints: Budget limits, approval processes. Value Opportunities: Provide clear comparisons, ROI calculators, and easy-to-understand pricing structures to facilitate decision-making and overcome financial hesitations.
4. Chapter 4: Implementation and Adoption Outcomes & Needs: Seamless integration of solutions into business processes, initial usage. Constraints: Complexity of implementation, resistance to change. Value Opportunities: Offer comprehensive onboarding support, training materials, and responsive customer service to ensure smooth adoption and initial satisfaction.
5. Chapter 5: Retention and Loyalty Outcomes & Needs: Continued satisfaction with the product or service, repeat purchases. Constraints: Emerging competitive solutions, changing needs. Value Opportunities: Develop loyalty programs and regular updates and engage through continuous improvement feedback loops to keep the Hero engaged and satisfied.
6. Chapter 6: Advocacy and Expansion Outcomes & Needs: Hero becomes a brand advocate and expands its use within their organization. Constraints: Maintaining long-term relationships and staying relevant. Value Opportunities: Encourage and facilitate the sharing of positive experiences, offer referral benefits, and identify upsell opportunities that benefit the Hero.

Turning our Chapters into a content schedule

Once we understand the mission our heroes are working on and the various outcomes, friction, and constraints, we can begin to build value-based content to help them be successful.

Let’s look at some potential content ideas around our chapter 1 example:

Chapter 1: Awareness and Engagement

1. Animated Explainer Video Title: "What We Do and Why It Matters for You" Description: A short, engaging animated video that explains your product's unique value propositions and addresses common pain points. The animation makes it easy to digest and visually appealing to capture attention quickly. Value: Quickly increases brand awareness and enhances understanding of product offerings through visual storytelling.
2. Interactive Infographic Title: "Explore Our Solutions: A Journey Through Success Stories" Description: An interactive infographic that allows users to click through different scenarios or case studies showing how your product has helped similar businesses. Value: Helps the audience understand the practical application of your offerings and engages them by interactive elements.
3. Blog Series on Industry Insights Title: "Navigating Your Industry's Landscape: Trends to Watch" Description: A series of blog posts providing valuable insights into current trends in your Hero's industry, highlighting how your solutions align with these trends. Value: Positions your brand as a thought leader while enhancing engagement through insightful content that resonates with the Hero's needs.
4. Social Media Quiz Title: "Which Product Fits Your Business?" Description: An interactive quiz shared on social media platforms where potential customers can answer questions about their business needs and challenges to discover which of your products best suits them. Value: Increases engagement and awareness of your product range, providing immediate, personalized value to participants.
5. Webinar on Best Practices Title: "Achieving Excellence in [Industry]: Strategies for Success" Description: A live webinar featuring industry experts discussing best practices and how your solutions facilitate these strategies. Value: Engages your target audience in real-time, providing them with actionable knowledge and increasing awareness of how your products can be applied.

Lead Generation Offer

eBook Download: "The Ultimate Guide to Enhancing Your Business with [Your Product/Service]"

• Description: An eBook that offers an in-depth look at how your product or service can transform businesses, complete with case studies, customer testimonials, and a roadmap to implementation.
• Value: Provides comprehensive product understanding in a format that users can refer back to, encouraging deeper engagement with the content. The download process captures lead information, such as email addresses, allowing for further targeted marketing communications.

These content pieces are strategically designed to meet the Hero’s needs in the Awareness and Engagement phase, ensuring they are both informative and engaging enough to stand out in a crowded market.

Refining the Mission Through Feedback

Use continuous feedback from your Heroes to refine these chapters, update the content within them, and add new content that adds additional value. Regularly update your strategy to reflect changes in or additional needs and market dynamics, ensuring that your marketing efforts remain aligned with their evolving mission and continue to add value.

Prioritizing Needs

Not all needs are created equal. Ranking these in order of importance allows you to address the most pressing issues first. This prioritization aligns your business objectives with your Hero's needs and ensures that your narrative stays focused on what truly matters.

Use data and feedback to keep this prioritization dynamic and responsive to the evolving narrative of your Hero’s journey.

Aligning Marketing Strategies

Your marketing messages should echo your hero's prioritized needs, add value based on your company's experience, and frame your products and services as solutions within the story of their success. Not all the value you provide should rely solely on the use of your products and services.

As you create your content, develop social and paid strategies that “Sell” the value each piece provides. As prospects begin to engage in your content, they will ideally be enticed by your lead gen offers and get into your CRM. (Of course, you added CTAs to all your posts promoting the relevant lead gen offer for that chapter, right?)

Once you have a visitor, you can start remarketing your content offers within that story. Given that we know their mission and desired outcomes, we should have at least six strong content offers that add value and are desirable for our Heroes to digest.

Share your content with your sales team. Don’t just publish content on your blog, and I hope the sales team will see it. Share it with them. Ideally, share it with them ahead of time and get a little feedback from them. You may also have Heroes who are Champions for you. Maybe send a content piece over to them before you publish it. Maybe they could add a testimonial or give additional insight that gives you a better understanding of their perspective.

Measuring Success

How do you know if your Hero Mission approach is working? Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be directly linked to your Hero's needs. Tools and technologies for tracking metrics such as engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction can help quantify the success of your strategy.

For your social media, look at impressions and engagement to see if your Value Hook is working. If not, test it with new creatives or rework how you communicate the value. Also, consider the channel and criteria. Are you casting your net in the right pond?

Look at sessions by source: organic, Social, and Paid. What is the bounce rate for each content piece? Which chapters are getting the most engagement?

What search terms are driving traffic? How are your posts ranking organically? Do you need to optimize them better?

Content is not a post-it-and-forget-it process. Keep nurturing your content, and it will keep nurturing your sales pipeline!