Help Your Content Marketers See Customers Clearly

So how did your B2B marketing change during the pandemic? More webinars? More SEO? More content? With your salespeople now less likely to ever be in the same room as your prospects, those are all worthy things to have done, but there’s a major piece of low-hanging fruit that seems largely unpicked, an opportunity to remedy what may be the single greatest weakness in your content marketing – on which you now depend for so very much.?

Content People Don’t Meet Customers

If you work in B2B content marketing, you’re a funnel filler, plain and simple. The answer to every question is “leads.” It’s not a bad thing to be. It’s certainly very necessary. But the funnel doesn’t really lead all the way to the bottom for you. If you’re a content marketer, once those leads start coming in, they seem to swirl down and disappear through a drain in the floor, after which they’re someone else’s problem. ?

Indeed, it is entirely possible for a full-time in-house content writer to work somewhere for years without actually meeting or interacting with a real-life customer. And what’s more, their contact might be very limited with people who do have a first-hand understanding of customers, or even second-hand. Content people also typically lack incentives to do much about this. They're largely paid to write, not to talk.

Your content people might talk to the sales department occasionally, but that’s usually when salespeople need something, not when content people need something, with spontaneous requests from content to sales often ignored by busy salespeople. And even if you’ve got a very patient salesperson willing to put in some time with your content people, salespeople, and the people they deal with, tend to be cut from a different cloth than the average content writer, so what salespeople think they’re communicating about customers won't always be the same as what writers actually hear.

Of course, content people might have access to SEO information, but this is hardly a complete customer picture. It only tells you what customers ask, not who they are, while largely focusing on top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) questions, not the questions that get asked later (which content is increasingly being asked to address today). ?

Outside of that, the other sources of customer intel your content people might have access to have largely second-hand knowledge themselves. Product owners can tell you customers’ technical needs. Marketing managers might have access to research, and what the sales department tells them. But both sources are still mostly second-hand – interpreting an interpretation.

This makes the customer a mere silhouette in the content marketer’s mind. Shaped like a person, but lacking in any nuance or detail, leaving the writer free to project whatever shit they’re inclined to on what is essentially a human-shaped inkblot, and to make assumptions about them (which are the mother of all fuckups).

Perhaps even worse is when the customer is merely viewed as an industry (i.e., a set of product features meant to solve a certain set of problems). This can be a safe way to think about customers, but it can really suck the color and authenticity from your content, making your brand look like a bland silhouette to the people you expect to buy from you.

Can a skilled content writer do their job without first-hand exposure? Sure, they do it all the time. But if they don’t really know the customer, their content pieces will basically be darts thrown in the dark. They’ll hit the board consistently because there's a well-practiced writer behind them, but they’ll hit few bullseyes, with the bullseyes that do occur largely a matter of dumb luck.

So What Can Be Done About This?

The good news is that with sales interactions becoming increasingly digital, customers are becoming increasingly accessible. Sales calls can be witnessed live, or recorded and viewed later, by anyone at your company, including your content people, for whom the benefits are two-fold.

First, this will help them understand what kinds of people your company actually deals with. Knowing the problems your product solves for a particular industry’s rank & file users is one thing, but it’s not the same thing as knowing what types of people rise to become that industry’s decisionmakers. Are they nerds? Are they working stiffs? Are they MBAs?

And second, your content people will get to see what real-world customers ask, and want to know, about what you’re selling. It’s not always the same as what a product owner or marketing manager says it will be.

Product owners are often very much down in the weeds. They might know what customers need, in a technical sense, but customers don’t always know their own technical needs. Marketers tend to view customers in terms of pain points and problems to solve, of which customers may be aware of some, and completely unaware of others. And what's more, if what you sell is digital transformation, this is often not just a new solution to an old problem, but a completely new way of doing things – creating a need for a more comprehensive persuasion approach.

Customers will also sometimes ask questions that seem random and weird to product experts. They also need helpful metaphors, for-dummies explanations, answers to 101-level questions that you thought were answered already, and easy comparisons to competing products (which content writers might not even know because they’re not encouraged to make comparisons).

Recordings of these sales conversations will certainly work, but having your content people in the same room, or on the call, will work better for them, since having it happen live will better focus their attention, and give them a chance to ask the salesperson questions immediately afterwards about why they did this or the customer said that. But, of course, a live audience introduces risk, so it all boils down to what the key players trust and are comfortable with.

And you’ll also want your content people to see several of these conversations, not just one. You don’t want them stereotyping based on a single exposure to a single customer (which can degrade the quality of what they write as much as no exposure at all). Your content marketers need to see and be aware of the full spectrum of who they're addressing. Give them this, and you can create a real competitive advantage in B2B marketing, where we've largely dehumanized and abstracted what is still the art of human persuasion. ??