Content marketing is close to my heart. It takes many forms and I see value in all of them – especially for B2B marketers.
It can be rewarding as a marketer to create a well-researched case study, white paper, e-book, infographic, or guide that escorts your B2B buyer along the journey and truly helps that person.
While it can be argued that lighter, more consumable formats work better for higher funnel stages (e.g. checklist) while others play better in the lower funnel (white papers), I feel it is more effective to categorize content like this:
Content that’s interesting gets clicks.
Content that is challenging gets engagement.
Content that’s discomforting gets conversions.
It’s when your content illustrates that the pain of the same is worse than the pain of change, that you’ve really moved the conversion needle.
What does discomforting content look like in practice?
In my current role, I am marketing online training platform to IT leaders. Here’s how that plays out for us in terms of content pieces:
Interesting: Content piece called “28 ways to reward your IT team”
Challenging: Content piece called “10 trends in IT budgets”
Discomforting: Content piece called “Penetration Testing: Is your team doing enough?”
What’s the difference?
Interesting: “28 ways to reward your IT team”
Sure, every IT leader thinks about outings and events to keep the team happy. So, we offer up a content piece that provides ideas like doing a weekly Star Wars movie (in release order, of course) or a gaming night.
Challenging: “10 trends in IT budgets”
And every IT leader thinks about budgets. So we offer up a content piece that speaks to economizing your help desk or saving on classroom training with an online platform instead.
Discomforting: “Penetration Testing: Is your team doing enough?
But when I do a content piece on penetration testing, I know this is what is keeping an IT leader up at night.
For those not well-versed in IT, this is akin to hiring a former burglar and asking him to break into your home so you can locate and mitigate weaknesses.
Penetration testing weighs on the IT manager because there are many variables (internal vs. external testers, testing intervals, quality of testing, justifying the expense, choosing attack surfaces, etc.) It’s the kind of thing that you can bury your head in the sand about, but you know it’s looming.
Thinking about pen testing gets IT people worried. The pain of the same (not knowing if your networks are safe) becomes worse than the pain of change (researching, budgeting for and scheduling a pen test). This pushes people to act, which is exactly when they will need my service.
So, why not only make discomforting content?
Interesting and challenging content has value. They bring people into the top of your funnel. You can nurture them down over time. You can’t be gloom-and-doom all of the time.
But when it’s time to shoot for the bottom of the funnel, my money’s on challenging content…and making people squirm a bit.
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