Lead nurture strategy that ties buyer needs to your products within your overarching content marketing strategy is the most effective approach to maximizing results within your customer centric marketing plan.
In my last post, “Turn Buyer’s Worry into Marketing Leads”, I explained some of the benefits of taking a needs-based approach to campaigns. I pointed out that it’s neither feasible nor effective to produce campaigns for all your products and services. A best practice approach is to build fewer campaigns around the shared needs of your target audience and connect buyers to your products using valuable content. In this post I will describe a simple process for mapping a portfolio of products to three or four hot buyer needs you can leverage for the greatest impact on campaign performance.
Step One. Conduct research to form a starting point: At the end of the day, the issues that are keeping your buyers up at night are the ones you’ll have to connect with for successful demand creation. Persona interviews, market research, win/loss interviews, keyword research, SME discussions, social listening and conversations with sales will give you a pretty good idea what high level issues are trending among your buyers.
Step Two. Map your products to the needs they solve: Make a table in an excel workbook. I’m using some of my agency’s services as an example. Place your products across the top of the spreadsheet and the universe of issues you’ve uncovered from research down the left column.
Identify which needs are relevant to which product/service – and whether it is a primary reason for purchase or a secondary benefit.
For example: The first need on the list is “Understand Buyers”. Our first product, Persona Centric Strategy, is a persona research service that delivers all the insight a marketer needs for effective strategy. It makes sense that its primary function is to help understand buyers.
By the same logic because our lead nurturing solution provides insight in the form of buyer-stage identification, persona content preference, contact data collection etc., it is considered a secondary solution to delivering greater understanding about buyers. It’s relevant to the issue. But, not as directly as persona research.
Step Three. Add them up: Next count and sort-rank the needs to determine with which ones your product portfolio has the greatest connection. I like to count the primary relationships before taking the secondary classifications into consideration because they provide buyers the most direct value between a need and a product.
Also, ask yourself if some of the needs are subordinate to others? Especially to current, trending issues. Can you combine needs to get greater coverage against your product portfolio? The top three or four needs are the likely candidates you should pursue as campaign themes.
To learn how to turn these needs into campaign themes see my next post: “Create Campaign Themes That Convert”.
The GetLift Effect: My agency helps companies transition from product-centric marketing to customer-centric marketing using these techniques. Whether you chose to do it yourself or get help from a company like mine, the benefits of this approach have a cascading effect that truly deliver a quantum leap in improvement.
Reach out directly with questions to my LinkedIn account or on twitter to@cosmomariano #ASKGETLIFT