These 4 questions reveal if you have what it takes to win. The stakes are higher than ever.
Content is playing a greater role in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) buyer’s journey than ever before. Great content has the ability to engage prospects early in the journey, build trust in your brand, generate demand, and even help your sales team close sales. In fact, your content is every bit as important as your product benefits for accomplishing these objectives. This is why it’s critical that you do a better job than your competition in every aspect of the B2SMB content game—strategy, quality, and distribution.
So, does your content program have what it takes to win? Unless your answer to each of the following four questions is “Yes,” the answer to the previous question is almost certainly “No.”
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Are you a go-to resource?
SMBs are looking for ideas or solutions to their business challenges, are you top-of-mind? Sure, they go to their peers. But they look for other resources as well. Is your brand one of them, or do they go elsewhere? Do you provide helpful information (best practices, customer stories) that shed light on how their business problems might be solved? And do they know that they can get these insights from you?
A side note: many SMBs don’t know what they don’t know. Make sure you have content that goes beyond the obvious search terms, and addresses things that SMBs should know about, but might not.
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Is your B2SMB content customer-centric?
That is, does it focus on creating positive business outcomes for your SMB customers, or is it product-centric—all about the features and benefits of your product or service?
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Do you engage early in the buying journey?
The SMB buying journey often begins with the need for ideas and solutions. This starts long before they’re looking for any particular product or service. The brands that are offering those ideas are engaging with potential customers much earlier than competitors whose content only focuses on their product, with offers for the small percentage of their market that is ready to buy today.
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Do you have content for the entire journey?
Once prospects become qualified leads, do you have content to support your sales team? How familiar is your sales team with your content? Do they know what prior content may have been consumed by a prospect so they can gauge the prospect’s level of interest? Do you provide content for the end of the journey to help them close sales, such as content that addresses common objections?
Here are 3 things to do to ensure your content wins:
- Develop and execute a content strategy that is customer-centric. That is where your content focuses on helping SMBs address the challenges and opportunities they face in running their businesses, instead of product-focused content that is just trying to sell stuff.
- Produce and distribute great content. Content that’s “good enough” isn’t good enough anymore. This means, among other things, using recognized subject matter experts (SMEs) who work with SMBs every day to add credibility to your content. Also, feature customer stories that show SMBs how their peers are addressing their challenges by using your product or service.
- Make sure your content team truly understands the SMB audience and the segments that are important to you. This means that your writers, and those people commissioning and overseeing their work, need to really know SMBs and what they are dealing with every day.
The SMB’s buying journey is largely self-directed. At the beginning, they’re looking for new ideas to help themselves compete in a dizzying business environment. Vendors who offer B2SMB content that delivers these ideas and nurtures the relationship throughout the journey will have a significant competitive edge. It’s time to realize that you’re no longer competing based just on your products or services. You’re competing in the content game, too.
Do you want to get more results from your content? Set up a call with me and I’ll show you how.
