Stephanie Tilton is a member of the blogging team at Savvy B2B Marketing. Earlier this week, I followed the breadcrumbs from one of my LinkedIn groups to her blog post, How to Squeeze the Most Life From Your Content. In it, Stephanie tells us about an Executive Benchmark Survey of B2B marketers conducted by Bulldog Solutions and Frost & Sullivan, which discovered that, “Nearly half of marketers don’t think (or aren’t sure) they have enough content to fill their marketing needs.”
What really caught my attention was a suggestion from Frost & Sullivan’s Director of Global Marketing, “In addition to mapping content to the buying process and buyer personas, you need to understand how long your assets can reasonably deliver value.” According to Stephanie, he divides the general buying process into the following three stages:
- Gain Permission
- Overcome Objections
- Support Decisions
When it comes to lead generation and conversion — which is, after all, the purpose of your content — it turns out that not all information has the same shelf life. At the point you’re attracting prospects, plentiful, frequently refreshed content is critical. When you reach the second stage of the buying cycle — educating prospects to overcome objections — it seems that you can expect content to have a life of approximately 6-10 months. And this is when you’ll be concentrating on producing whitepapers, web content, thought leadership articles etc. The final stage — when your content serves as a call-to-action to convert opportunities — you should concentrate your focus on content like case studies, testimonials and references. According to the article, these content assets can last for years — but you should always update them to reflect changing industry trends.
There’s more great information in Stephanie’s article. Make the time to follow the link and learn how to give your content the squeeze.
Amanda O’Donovan is a Toronto-based freelance content creator who helps B2B clients get the most from their marketing materials. Talk to her at 416.456.3859 or amanda@amandaodonovan.com.
I’d never really considered segmenting website content to support different stages of the customer buying process but it makes perfect sense.
The idea of going from broad content to more focused case studies and testimonials is smart.
Great advice. Thanks.