Gartner reviews close to 1,000 pieces of content created by tech companies each year and finds most of it ego-centric.
Over 90% of tech company content continues to be focused on them (the products, capabilities, and company) instead of the customer [Gartner].
Here’re 7 questions to help you develop customer-centric content.
Let’s talk about why creating b2b content is challenging:
- Little clarity on the target audience.
- There’s no documented content strategy.
- Multiple stakeholder involved in the creation process.
- The buyer journey stage is not consider when creating content.
Before getting started, take a moment to answer the following:
→ What buyer personas do you want to target?
→ What steps of the buying process do your customers follow?
Next, come up with responses to the following question for each buyer persona and stage of the buying journey.
- What questions does the buyer want answered?
- What steps are they likely to take to find answers?
- What type of content they to consume to find answers?
- Which channels are they likely to seek answers from?
- What actions do we prompt them to take?
- What do we offer to encourage action?
- What’s the measures of success (KPIs)?
A B2B brand that wins with customer-centric content.
Let’s consider a best-in-class B2B brand that does the opposite of egocentric content.
Ahrefs, for example, does not hard sell its SEO tool to its audience. SEO is complex, and there are dozens of identical SEO tools out there.
Instead, their content (articles, videos, and courses) focuses on educating and empowering anyone to do SEO. The tools just happen to be a part of it.
As Ahrefs CEO, Tim Soulo puts it:
“We create lots of educational materials, because not only do we want to provide people with the tools that will help them optimize their websites and create content that will be discoverable, but we also want to teach them the fundamentals of SEO. And we try to promote the idea that SEO is not some kind of secret, technical, black magic, but something that can be learned by pretty much anyone.”
Looking at what customer success looks like and then crafting content around how you’ll help them get there is the first step to being customer-centric.