If people are doing online research for a product or solution that you offer, but you don’t have any content available on your website, there’s a very good chance they may never find you. You could spend days and weeks cold calling different prospective clients, but unless you get lucky, you may not come across those researchers until well after they’ve made their purchase.
When people are researching a topic that you don’t have content for, that becomes the spotlight on the holes in your content strategy. That’s the Intent that we use to base our FIRE scoring methodology on, and it can tell you when people are interested in what you have to say. When that happens, it’s time to put on the thinking caps and get to work on creating a content plan around these areas.
Most companies utilize traditional methods of data collection to guide their content plan, and think that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. This old method says that if a product or service is an area that isn’t leading to conversions, then there’s no reason to waste time developing content for it. But, this just perpetuates the problem, because in reality, no content = no conversions, not the other way round.
And if you knew how many prospective customers were looking for a product or service you offered, you would no doubt create as much content as you could, just to bring them to your website.
Want to find your high-fit accounts? Request a demo of EverString.
How Should You Customize Your Content?
While it’s impossible to generate content for every prospective client, there are ways to understand the best type of content to create. And this is where you can customize your content. Not for every individual company, but for the different companies at each stage of the sales funnel.
If someone is exhibiting intent, but has yet to engage with your company, they either don’t know you exist or they’re in the early stages of research. This is the ideal time to start feeding them top-of-funnel content that gets them into your sales process and your CRM.
These can be your initial blog articles that introduce topics (like this one about fit and intent), or an ebook or white paper on your “101 level” topics.
As they get further down the funnel and understand what it is you do, you’re ready to give them content that pulls them in further. This can be the time for client case studies, white papers addressing different use cases, and any kind of content that gets the customer imagining what your product can do for them.
Finally, it’s time to bring out the big guns, the bigger, most valuable content that can get people to commit to your company and product. This is where you can offer webinars about a particular topic and industry, invite people to your office for a special event, or even offer individually customized demos for your product or service.
A solid content strategy will vary from brand to brand, based on the size of your product offering, your customer base, and even the complexity of your different solutions. For example, Microsoft obviously does well selling their Office suite of products. But maybe they want to step up selling their Azure cloud computing service, because they see a lot of intent data around cloud computing and don’t have much content around it.
Related: How to Create Content for your ABM Strategy
When Should You Customize Individual Content?
When a company has high Fit and high Intent for your product, then what you’re trying to do, as a marketer, is ride that next level, which is Engagement.
For example, if you were to market for Azure, and one of your ideal prospects is Procter & Gamble, a large multi-national company, and you see them surging on Intent for cloud computing, you want them to engage as quickly as possible. You want to have as much specific content about Azure that you can send them.
This wouldn’t be sent directly to them that communicates that you knew P&G was conducting research on cloud computing, but simply allows the marketing team to target P&G with their information. “How can a large multi-national company use Azure cloud computing?” and “How to use cloud computing to manage thousands of personal care and home care products.”
As a marketer, your overall content strategy should focus on promoting your core products, your value propositions, and other areas, but then utilize the intent data to highlight the gaps. This data can show you where there isn’t enough content even as prospects are looking for it, helping you customize your content for their particular needs.
If you would like to learn more about how to use Intent to help you customize your content offerings, request a free intent assessment.
