Digital Buying Behaviour: Awareness Stage B2B Content Marketing
Digital buying behaviour has transformed the B2B customer journey. Find out the content types your brand needs to attract potential customers at the awareness stage of today’s online purchasing processes.
In our last edition of B2B Billboard, we discussed how business leaders’ shift to digital buying behaviours transforms the B2B customer journey. This is the first of five follow-up editions explaining the content types your brand needs at each stage of this revamped online purchasing process.
According to Meta, digital buying behaviour calls for us to expand on the three traditional buyer’s journey stages of awareness, consideration and decision. They propose a five-stage approach including awareness, interest, desire, conversion and advocacy.
Your brand should tailor its B2B marketing content to each of these five stages to guide?customers through the buyer’s journey process. In this edition, we’ll cover stage one of?this digital process - awareness.
Awareness Stage Goal Is to Attract Attention
In the awareness stage, your goal is to attract the attention of potential customers who are unaware of your brand or how it meets their business needs. At this point in the process, your team needs to create engaging content that raises a prospect’s awareness of the problems and needs your product or services addresses.
If we review B2B marketing literature, a few content types stand out as the most popular for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), Demand Gen, LinkedIn and HubSpot all agree that blog posts, social media posts and videos are the top three tools marketers use to generate B2B brand awareness with a broad audience.
Blog Posts Position Brands as Helpful Resource
My own experience confirms this. By far the most common content format clients ask me to prepare for their brands is the blog post. Blogs lend themselves to almost any topic, and they’re easy for readers to share.?
You can use your brand’s blog to freely share information, drawing attention to typical business challenges and their solutions. Regular blog posts that share practical insights can position your brand as a helpful resource for potential customers.
The key to a successful B2B marketing blog is to create informative and insightful posts on a regular schedule. You want to get readers into the habit of looking forward to every edition.
You should choose blog topics that are insightful, helpful and practical. Your readers should feel that every blog post is time well spent and appreciate your brand for the tips and helpful hints you share.
Since this is the awareness phase, your main goal is to attract attention, so it’s vital to take the time to craft engaging headlines. Posts should also have eye-catching, featured images that relate directly to the topic and to the headline.
Videos Enhance Appreciation and Emotional Connection
Everything online is shifting towards the video format these days, including B2B marketing content. Explainer videos are a great way to take your brand's blog posts to the next level.
Just as blogs can cover a broad range of topics and position your brand as the go-to source for expertise, videos have similar advantages. They also add a face-to-face, more intimate feel, especially after all the remote meetings we’ve been experiencing over the last few years.
Videos help your brand enhance the appreciation and emotional connection that your blog posts already generate. Plus, they’re even more versatile than blog posts, because you can cover the same wide range of topics with more personal contact and demonstrate your helpful hints visually.
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Sharing Insights in Social Media Groups Builds Reputation
Although your brand’s website remains the focal point of all online content marketing, social media has become a prime contender for building B2B brand awareness. Social media posts offer a broader reach, more targeted engagement and wider distribution than most corporate websites can deliver.
Most of my clients use what I call an “all roads lead to Rome” approach with social media. That means all your social media posts should link the reader into a hub of related content on your brand’s website.
Social media posts are also the best way to encourage discussions and build a community that attracts new prospects. Freely sharing insights, tips and tricks in social media groups is a great way to build brand awareness.
Indispensable Platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube
As with blogs and videos, your brand’s social media posts need to grab attention quickly. Your team also needs to tailor social media posts to resonate with each platform’s culture and purpose.
Most B2B content marketers agree that the three indispensable social media platforms are LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Since business decision makers are usually our target audience, clearly LinkedIn is the place to be.
Twitter: Platform Where Industry Leaders Share Quick Insights
Even with the current dynamics and discussions about Twitter, its user base and potential for engaging B2B decision maker awareness is enormous. It’s the platform of choice where industry leaders quickly share and compare brief insights, making it and ideal place for your brand to promote thought leadership.
Since we’ve covered video’s importance for the awareness stage, it should be clear why YouTube is a natural fit for the awareness stage. Its platform combines the best features of social media and a video-based format.
Your team can use YouTube to attract attention and build brand awareness using webinars, product demonstrations, tutorials and interviews with your company’s thought leaders, for example.
YouTube: Brief, Tightly Edited, Visually Compelling Videos
Keeping in mind the “all roads lead to Rome” approach, your videos should also link viewers into a more in-depth content hub at your brand’s website. To attract attention, remember that?brief, tightly edited and visually compelling YouTube videos have superseded the traditional B2B “talking heads” approach.
According to a WHM study, roughly half of B2B decision makers find B2B advertising boring. Even worse, 82 percent of B2B decision makers wish B2B advertising included the creativity seen in B2C content.
B2B Teams Create Two-Thirds of Content for Awareness
Since about two-thirds of the content B2B teams create is for the awareness stage at the top of the sales funnel, our industry can’t afford to be this dull. By creating engaging content in formats that resonate with decision makers and influencers, B2B marketing content can take its proper place in our new digital landscape.
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