When faced with an intangible product, it is difficult to make consumers understand its usefulness and its advantages over other similar software. For this, it is essential to carry out a proper content strategy that can nurture and guide consumers, more specifically the buyer persona of the business, in its unique buying cycle, which can be long and complex on many occasions.
For this reason, it is essential to have a series of content pieces that can engage, facilitate the path to conversion and ultimately build customer loyalty. However, the difference in each of these pieces is their engagement capacity, their retention and conversion capacity in each phase, which depends on a number of factors that we will explain below:
1. Articles for your blog.
There are two reasons why the blog is a fundamental channel in your content strategy. First, it can solve a consumer’s doubts at every stage of the buying cycle, especially in the recognition and consideration phases. This content generated to answer the search terms of your potential customers can also be updated as needed and reused on other channels and in other format pieces.
But, secondly, this content, that is, each of the articles created for your blog can help you to better position your brand in search engines, especially Google, if you have previously conducted a research of what are the doubts, needs and inquiries that your potential consumers, your buyer persona, are making. This will give authority to your domain but also to your brand within your community. Now, what are the keys to generate articles with engagement?
– Know your buyer personas and their buying cycle. As we have already mentioned, it is essential to master the knowledge of your customers in order to generate the right content that can attract them. You don’t need just any type of user, but a more qualified one that is not only looking for information, but a solution that can lead them to your product.
– Keep the content educational but speak their language. The information you provide, the content you create is not for a few people to understand, it is to be clearly understood by using the right language, the language your consumers speak. If you know what search terms they will search for, this will also help you optimize your articles for search engines, that is, it will help you with branded SEO.
– Make content clusters. The articles not only have to respond to the buyer’s needs in each of their phases, but also be grouped by relevant content topics, leading to a pillar page where fundamental information is consolidated for the potential consumer. This is another way to send authority to certain pages, that is, to help the positioning of your website.
– Use visual elements. Here there is a clear design component, it is necessary to include visual elements that accompany and complement the text. Think that if you are looking for your potential consumers to digest well the information about an intangible product, not so easy to explain, it is possible that graphics and illustrations are necessary. Keep them corporate and don’t lose sight of your consumers’ preferences.
– Engage with other industry experts. Collaborative articles with other industry experts are critical to improving a site’s positioning and authority. Find those experts with whom you can exchange interesting articles and work to provide relevant, educational and entertaining information.
2. Postings on social networks.
On which social networks are your potential customers present: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Whatever the priority social networks where your potential customers are most active, you should keep in mind that posting original content on them is important to keep your community engaged because of it:
– Do more than just share content from your blog. While the practice of sharing your latest and older posts on these platforms can lead you to get a higher number of visits, and is something you should do, don’t limit yourself to it. As we have already mentioned, as long as we are dealing with updated content, it is possible to create different pieces, reconvert articles into videos, infographics, gifs, etc., visual formats that are much more attractive on social networks.
– Invite participation. If you want to boost engagement on these platforms, invite your community of followers to participate in surveys or by asking direct questions. The answers you get will not only help you to get to know your buyers better, but will also improve the vision and repercussion of your brand among the community. It is interesting that they discover that you are interested in them and that you are an active listener.
– Participate in the conversation. In addition to inviting them to participate, you can also participate in debates and important conversations around topics directly and indirectly related to your sector. This way you can also discover what are the interests and concerns of your buyer personas and get ideas to continue publishing better content.
– Generate original content. It is possible that some of the content is recycled, but when publishing on social networks you can always reserve certain information, certain promotions that may be exclusive to these platforms. For example, something you can do on these networks is to announce the progress of an upcoming convention, which leads us to the following type of content
3. Collaborative Webinars.
When it comes to educating a specific audience and providing information of interest to solve widespread problems experienced by buyer personas, conferences and more recently the virtual versions known as webinars have become relevant in many industries.
Consumers want to learn more about some of the technological solutions available to them, while potential customers want to see what others in the same situation are doing, while finding out how to solve problems and needs they were considering or didn’t even know they had. But to do so:
– Collaborate with other developers. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our clients, it’s that many of them don’t have a single solution to their own customers’ problems. For example, it is more than possible that some B2B technology companies dedicated to software development for tourism companies have a very good product and service to offer, but their customers have a major problem that needs to be solved from several perspectives. Whether it is this particular case, or simply similar, collaborating in these webinars with other technology companies that offer complementary products to yours can benefit you, since you would be presenting a more complete solution. The only thing you have to make sure in this case is that the values of the companies you are going to work with are aligned with yours.
– Study which topics are most current. It is possible that the topics you should cover in your webinars are related to how to solve current problems of your potential customers, those that you share with the other technology company or companies with which you are going to collaborate. An example would be how to provide technological solutions to consumers after the losses suffered in their businesses as a result of the pandemic. Not only would this be a current and interesting topic, but it would also delight a niche that wants to stay current in their industry.
– Take advantage of it to create conversion paths. On the other hand, no one has said that these webinars are completely altruistic. After all, the contents created for the different channels and events have certain objectives that must be set. On the one hand, webinars allow you to share communities and potential customers with your collaborators, but on the other hand, through different conversion channels such as the forms that can be enabled, you can obtain relevant contact information with which to work later if you have the all-important CRM. Obviously, this implies that the webinars are exclusive to those who subscribe.
– Use the most convenient streaming platform for participants. If you wish, you can conduct a survey on which one it is. Nowadays there are many options, so, depending on the requirements of the webinar and the preferences of the participants, you can choose one or the other.
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4. Interactive demos.
As we mentioned at the beginning, cold calls are no longer as effective as they were 20 years ago. Today, the product demonstrations that sales managers must work on need to be more interactive and visual to easily demonstrate something that is not really tangible.
– Research the buyer persona’s level of interest beforehand. If there is something that the sales manager should do before a demo is to investigate the degree of interest, that is, the previous engagement that the person who has requested the demo has had with the content and conversations. If, thanks to your CRM, you have seen the content they have visited and the steps they have taken in the buying cycle of this potential buyer, you can adapt the content and arguments more easily to encourage conversion. On the other hand, if you do not have a CRM with this capability, or if this user has requested a demo very quickly, ask a series of questions that allow you to know in what possible phase of the buying cycle he may be in so as not to overwhelm him with information.
– Take into account the pain points of these buyer personas. As we have already mentioned, the idea is not to overwhelm anyone with a 1-hour demo in which they end up with a headache. It is possible that they will not understand everything, so focus on their pain points one by one, dosing the information you offer.
– Reuse content that has worked. You can build on the articles and social media posts with visual materials that have had the best performance and engagement. Measurement is key, so you can take advantage of materials that you know in advance that work, that these potential customers have seen.
– Use interactive content formats. One of the best ways to work with demos, especially if you have to explain complex or simply lengthy processes or developments, is to transform this information into something entertaining, by creating a video, an infographic or an interactive development, for example. In many cases it will be important that these demos simulate the real experience that the person who is going to use the software will have.
– Show success stories. If your other customers allow you to do so, you may be able to show real success stories or graphs that demonstrate the growth of other customers. Nothing explains the benefits of an intangible product better than the success of other consumers using it.
5. Tutorials for VIPs.
There is nothing a customer likes better than feeling special and unique. While there are many ways to boost customer loyalty through customer service, the generation of visual, audiovisual or interactive content for current consumers of your product is, if anything, the most important.
– Instruct them in the best use of your software. If there were only one pain point in your potential customer’s buying decision process, it would be the inability to learn or instruct on how the software works. If you offer this exclusive information, not only to understand it, but to master it in an excellent way and get the most out of it according to your customer’s own objectives, you would be exponentially improving the LTV (life time value) of it, making him loyal in the process.
– Take advantage of the educational power of podcasts. In addition to video tutorials, it is possible that your customers (who usually do not have much time) may appreciate expanding their knowledge through podcasts. These are content formats that are easy to consume, anywhere, anytime. For this reason, they are a good idea to expand knowledge and keep your customers updated. This will generate greater trust in your brand.
– Dose the information. You may have already considered this from our previous comments, but remember that loyalty also has a cycle. It doesn’t end once you’ve already won the customer, so don’t overwhelm them with unnecessary content. Therefore, do not forget to dose the information so that it has a better engagement in each phase.
