Laser-Focused Content Part I
by A. Schrenk
Oct. 24th, 2019
Queen Palm Media Insights
Super targeted content is table stakes - not a waste of effort
After attending a Pragmatic Marketing training, Annie and I had the same complaint (one that expands beyond Pragmatic Marketing to marketing education as a whole): the strategies and examples are always geared toward B2C companies.
Like the ubiquitous Dr. Scholl’s example. In a nutshell, the shoe insole has been manufactured in the same way but repackaged to attract different buyer personas. The workman's boot insert, for example, is large and features dark "rugged" coloring and sturdy ridges. The women’s pump insert is actually just the women's tennis shoe insert cut in half. The point is that they're all versions of the same shoe insole made from the same materials and serving the same purpose: comfy feet.
The fact is that B2C buyer personas are more straightforward than B2B personas. You don’t have this effed up scenario in which the user and the buyer are not necessarily one and the same. But regardless of the twisted web of B2B buyer personas and journeys, we as marketers must focus on the specific buyer we aim to influence, hard though that may seem.
Where your buyer hangs out [digitally]
At Queen Palm Marketing, we had a client whose buyer typically fell on the IT side of the enterprise—a bit of a departure from the business-side personas we’d traditionally targeted. Annie and I spent hours testing messaging and visuals. We sat with the company's own in-house IT and development teams to understand where they went to find information and research vendors, and what grabbed their attention. Some sites were more obvious (Reddit), while others were more obscure (DuckDuckGo), and we learned that LinkedIn was the only social site they [somewhat] trusted for advertising. No shopping the Instagram ads, for example.
The content your buyer wants to see
Another surprise was the type of content IT buyers preferred/clicked on most on within these channels: tech-related imagery and video, themes related to sci-fi, comics and cosplay, and snap-judgment-worthy yet concrete examples of software and solutions. Videos needed to have captions, had to hover around less than a minute in length (because who has the time?), and—perhaps most importantly—succinctly get across the point. Extraneous words or concepts = immediate attrition.
Authenticity is queen
This meant a lot of work for us, not only to try our best to understand their perspective, but also—once we had a handle on it—to create content that would be authentic, relatable, and appropriate for both their social and digital channels of reference and for the client company looking to connect with them.
When we hit this level of specificity, we sometimes run into resistance in the form of doubt: will the investment required be worth the reward? Here’s the thing: the expectation today is that your content be relevant, appropriate, honest, and authentic (more on corporate authenticity here).
“78% of consumers believe that companies that focus on custom content are more trustworthy than companies who churn out generic content.”
- Crowdspring