It’s Easy For Prospects To Get Stuck In This Stage; Learn How To Move Them Along And Closer To Close
Article after article, videos, podcasts, opinions, best practices, e-books, infographics, self-proclaimed experts, small companies that look big, big companies that look small — it’s impossible to know what is going to be helpful and what is going to be hurtful.
Who has the answer? Who do you believe? What advice is relevant to your company, your industry and your services? What best practices are going to help you drive up numbers? You are trapped in a cyclone of information and content.
How did you get out of it? What triggered you to move on toward making a decision?
More than likely it was someone who had something different to say, something that resonated with you for some reason or content that connected and made you feel like they understood you or your challenges. They offered you something that no one else had.
This is how you want to think about your execution for prospects in the Education Stage.
The big takeaway here is you have to cut through the clutter. We just described how inundated your prospects are with content coming at them in every direction.
Email, social, text, websites and chat — more and more channels are open to your prospects, and marketers are flooding these channels with educational content.
Your job? Come up with content that cuts through the clutter in both substance and format.
The first step is understanding your prospects. You have to understand their challenges, pains, concerns and issues. You have to understand how they buy and how many people from their organization are involved in the buyer process. Who do they have to sell up to? Who do they have to influence or persuade?
The more intimate you are with your prospects’ buyer journeys, the better your marketing tactics will perform during the Education Stage.
Once you’ve put yourself in your prospects’ shoes, then start thinking about thought leadership and creating a compelling story associated with your content. Why would someone want to read or watch it? What do you have to say to grab their attention, to shake them away from competing content and to hold their attention?
At Square 2 Marketing, we create remarkable differentiation strategies for our clients and translate them into stories. We then marry those stories with the questions our clients’ prospects have during their Education Stage.
Finally, we decide on format. If everyone is publishing e-books, we might go for an infographic or a video. If everyone is doing video, we might go for a podcast. Blogging still remains an important educational content tactic because you can leverage blog posts across the entire buyer journey.
What I mean by that is salespeople can use blog posts effectively in the sales process, delivering high-impact content in context to the conversations they’re having with prospects.
We might run a similar play with a pillar page, building it to rank on search to enhance a client’s website and to provide sales with more content to use during the sales process. Looking for ways to use content across tactics is key to a highly effective and efficient lead generation and revenue growth program.
One of the biggest mistakes is not creating any educational material that is unique. If you’re looking at what your competitors are doing, you’re making a mistake. Ignore what they’re doing. They’re not smarter than you.
Instead, do the exact opposite. If they’re talking about products, you shift and talk about client benefits and value. If they’re talking about client benefits, you should be talking about the values prospects should be looking for in a new partner.
One way to get ahead is to publish research that helps your prospects make smart purchasing decisions. Where is marketing going? What do you see in the future? What should they be thinking about in 2019 or 2020?
The next biggest mistake is publishing content that is not designed for people in the Education Stage. You see this a lot in sites with “talk to a rep,” “schedule a consultation” or “request a proposal” as offers. These are offers designed for people in the Evaluation Stage, not the Education Stage.
Finally, the last mistake is not understanding your prospects’ personas and not creating content in the format that works for their personalities. If you’re trying to attract engineers and you publish videos or infographics, they might not connect with that format as much as data sheets or research studies.
If you’re trying to attract marketing people and all you publish is research studies, you might be missing the opportunity to appeal to their creative side by using video, podcasts, presentations or animation.
A lot of this also comes down to testing. While you might have assumptions and opinions, data should carry a lot more weight. Who cares what you think when your data shows video converts twice as much as research? Use prospect data to make your case and ultimately make all of your decisions based on data, not who has the loudest voice in the meeting.
So many tactics can contribute to influencing prospects in the Education Stage, including some already discussed in the previous two articles on Pre-Awareness and Awareness.
Some of the tactics that work in Education from the previous two articles include email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns. Your website, pillar pages and the experience on your site are all going to be critical. If you have educational content, how easy is it for visitors to find it and get it?
We talked about blogging and guest blogging, two excellent educational tactics covered during the Awareness article.
Lead scoring was also covered and is important here. If you do lead scoring correctly, you might gain insights into when prospects move into the Educational Stage based on their browsing and conversion history on your site. Make sure your scoring algorithm is set up properly to reflect this behavior profile.
Here’s a more detailed description of some of the new tactics:
The nature of content and its relationship to the Education Stage means you’ll want to look at a ton of metrics. I’ve prepared a partial list here, and because they are all generally straightforward, I’m not going to go into detail on each of them.
The key takeaway is that your educational content should be performing better month over month, and if it’s not, it’s likely an indicator that it should be retired and replaced with something else.
Here’s what you could be looking at to measure the effectiveness of your Education Stage marketing tactics:
The best way to keep tabs on this in real time is to set up a handful of buyer-journey-specific dashboards and check in on the data weekly. In some cases, you might want to look at the data daily. For example, your campaign metrics for webinars should show increases every day leading up to the event. You’ll want to know how you’re tracking in real time so you can make adjustments as needed.
A lot of the technology designed for the Education Stage is focused on the production of educational content, which is fine as long as you don’t limit yourself to only this type of tech.
Here are the stage-specific software tools we’ve looked at, tested and recommend to clients building a rich tech stack around the Education Stage. Remember, these are all built on top of platform software like HubSpot, Marketo or Salesforce:
By now, you should be able to see that you need all four areas to drive results. You need strategy, tactics, analytics and technology. If any one of these four pillars is missing, the entire program collapses on itself, resulting in weak results and poor ROI on any of the money spent.
By smashing the funnel and applying a new map (the Cyclonic Buyer Journey map), we’re encouraging people to start building more buyer-centric marketing and sales strategies, executing tactics more thoughtfully, tracking the performance of everything and using technology to automate and analyze your results.
The business outcomes? Month-over-month revenue growth and consistent, scalable, repeatable and predictable revenue generation machines. Give it a try, it works! That’s why we guarantee results for our clients.