Some people can live in a mess, but I’m not one of those people. If I open up my closet door and see dirty clothes on the floor, hangers askew and way too many shirts crammed in next to one another on the rack, I immediately feel overwhelmed and frustrated. Even worse, such a disastrous view means that my closet is no longer useful to me. I don’t know what I have in there, or where to start looking.
Maybe you’ve never thought about it this way, but this is exactly how many B2B buyers feel when they get to a website and want to find relevant content. Yikes, right? Just like you might clean up or hire organization professionals to transform your closet from dirty and crowded to clean and useful, your content might need a similar makeover. Keep reading to find out how organization can lead to content excellence.
Get From the “Before” to the “After”
The “before” of your content transformation, which is the status quo in B2B organizations today, looks like this. You invest in endless data sources and invest heavily in channels, but then ignore the destination. Whether someone just learned about your company or has known about it for years, and whether they came to you through a social ad or direct sales, they all get dumped into the same place with the same piece(s) of content.
The “after” looks drastically different. Buyers want a streamlined path to purchase, with as little of the heavy lifting on their shoulders as possible. To deliver that, B2B organizations must embrace a simple framework for go-to-market (GTM) excellence: 1. Use data to identify the accounts that should buy from you, 2. Attract those accounts using a variety of channels and 3. Engage those accounts with content destinations (e.g. a landing page).
Become a Proud Tagger
You might be thinking that of course it makes sense to identify, attract and engage. You might even think your company is already doing that. But if so, I’ll challenge you to really consider the third component. Are your buyers truly engaged? Or have they just clicked on a link once or twice? How you define engagement matters and many organizations don’t realize how disengaged their buyers actually are.
Wherever your audience falls on the engagement spectrum, there’s something that every team can do to amp it up: tag your content. This works because buyers will only engage with content that is relevant and valuable to them. If your content isn’t tagged, who knows what you’re sharing with them and whether it’s applicable to their persona, buying stage, pain points, etc.?
Consider Netflix as an example, a company we can all agree has high customer engagement. Netflix employs “taggers” to watch upcoming content and help flag it into proper categories (e.g. “indie movies with a strong female lead” or “critically acclaimed TV dramas”). Taggers choose words from a pool of 1,000 to best describe the program. These tags then interact with the larger algorithm that generates personalized recommendations for viewers. Adopting a similar approach with your content and becoming a tagger at your own company not only sounds cool, but also will certainly improve buyer engagement.
How to Get Started
Remember the three-step framework we talked about above? Let’s revisit that to help you on the road to content tagging and, therefore, content excellence.
First, make sure your content is organized in a content experience platform or another way that works for you. Then, reframe the question of “which accounts should buy from us?” and think of which buyers (within given accounts) should buy from you.
Next, get busy tagging:
1. Identify buyer personas (persona, role, title,etc.) and the stages you use for the journey, the typical funnel is an example.
2. Plan how you’ll get these buyers’ attention, whether it be direct mail, email, SEO, PR, events, etc. These tactics will be your channel tags.
3. Finally, where are you sending buyers who click on your ads and emails? As you figure this out, you can create general content tags like format, product, problem, solution, competition and more.
Once you’re done tagging, you’ll be able to easily (and quickly) pull the right content every time, like when you want to create a personalized campaign experience. By taking these steps and using content tags, you can transform your content experience and achieve better results. Best of all? Your buyers won’t feel like they’re stumbling into your dirty closet, too overwhelmed to think clearly or take action. Give your buyers something better; use content tags.
Randy Frisch Bio:
Randy Frisch is the Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder of Uberflip, a content experience platform that empowersmarketers to create content experiences at every stage of the buyer’s journey. He has defined and led this movement, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and truly put their customers first by focusing on the experience.
Randy is also the host of The Marketer’s Journey podcast, was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers in the world by Marketo, and is the best-selling author of F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience (yeah, he swearssometimes).
