Guide to Conversational Marketing

You know the value your business brings to its customers – but are you sure?   One of the most common mistakes businesses make is to presume what customers value about them is constant, and the same as how they see it themselves.  It’s rarely the case. 

One exercise used to help companies understand their customers is for an external consultant to take business and sales leaders along to their own customers and interview them.  An independent consultant can ask ‘silly questions’ that business executives of a company are expected to know such as – “Why did you buy from this company?” or “How would describe what this company does?”

DEFINING MARKETS WITH ‘JOBS-TO-BE-DONE’

An important tool for marketers is to formalize the ‘job’ an individual wants to do, and to understand what prompted them into action.  A useful way of defining the value your products or services can bring to customers is to think in terms of – “What job did the person want to do and what were they looking to ‘hire’ to get the job done better?” Check out Jobs-To-Be-Done method by Clayton Christensen.

Another way to scope your customer value is to ask yourself and your team the simple question: ‘What SUPER-POWER do you give your customers?’ Then, you can get this validated by interviewing customers (without leading the witness!)

CREATING JOB STATEMENTS

Here’s a useful way of formalizing what customer value your prospective buyers are searching for – and therefore what your ‘tool’ or solution can bring them.  Use it as part of your customer interview process to capture their feedback in a structured way.  It’s called a job statement and it’s written down in the form of:

I want to hire a [product/service]..

…to [maximize/minimize].. 

…the [outcome]..

…so I can [gain reward/remove pain].

I always recommend that technology companies replace User Stories with Job Stories because they are so much more specific.  Listing out job statements will help your business to understand how to develop relevant content to articulate your offer and capabilities.  It will also help you to categorize prospective buyers into communities of buyers that share a common job interest.

YOUR COMPETITION

Following the logic of this ‘Job-To-Be-Done’ approach, it makes sense that your competitors aren’t solely those companies offering the same type of product or service as the one you’re offering, but ANY SUPPLIER that helps to get ‘the job’ done. 

For example, new competitors to office laser printers might include email, marketing service providers and other options that solve the same problem of communicating data in a different way.  Some—or all—of these might be perceived by the prospective buyer as relevant ‘alternative’ buying options.

Any solution that ‘does the job better’ and takes money away from your business in doing so, is competition.

If you want to attract new customers, you need to be in the right place at the right time.  When people search for products and services, they don’t do it indefinitely – such activities are time-bound.  So, next on our list is the subject of places.  Central to any inbound marketing agenda is an appreciation of the places people go to find answers to their questions, and the sort of media they’re likely to use.

The conversation you want to have can be carried in different forms of media and sometimes, the depth of content and subject-matter can dictate a certain format.  Snapchat, TikTok and animated gifs for example can be useful soundbite styled messaging—good for viral marketing—but if you need to explain a concept, perhaps a video is better – and, if it demands several minutes of explanation, podcasts might appeal more.

All businesses these days need to map out the places where they expect to engage with customers in conversation and build this into a plan of communications activities for each place.  Content components might include webinars and events, videos, social media, their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agenda and other such elements that contribute to their business generation and promotional efforts.

Conversations matter because they nurture and coach prospective buyers through every point in the buying process.  Designing a ‘conversational path’ for your business isn’t terribly difficult but it does help to become familiar with the key steps.

Conversational Paths are the central building block of B2B Conversational Marketing. As the term suggests, a Conversational Path is the subject-matter oriented thread that links the different stages of the discovery and buying process; leading to the eventual sale of an offering – and beyond.  Your Conversational Path is important because it contextualizes how prospective buyers navigate a sea of content to find your business and its offering.

DESIGNING A CONVERSATION PATH

A Conversational Path flows across the different stages of the discovery and buying process; leading up to the eventual sale of an offering – and beyond.  It’s important because it contextualizes how prospective buyers navigate a sea of content to find your business and its offering.  It’s arguably the most compelling competitive differentiator your business has, but has yet to harness. 

Steps to building your conversational path include:

1. Storybook—Answer the most important questions that curate the story of your business into something that everyone in your team can explain.

2. Lens—An exercise in testing your value proposition, to remove distortions in your understanding of your business offer.

3. Path—This is the point that your team works through the stages from events to offerings; formalizing its conversational path.

4. Map—Next, you will build out a summary visualization of your attraction and engagement articles; determine your best Call to Action (CTA) options.

5. Planner—And finally, you will produce a marketing plan that includes advertising and proposition, SEO, social, PR, research, sales method and product innovation.

For more detail on this process (and workshop notes), either contact us or read our e-book!

Content is King.  You will need to produce content that draws a focus on the key phrases your prospects and customers are searching for in order for them to find you.  It’s sometimes helpful to focus on no more than three key-phrases that you expect customers to be googling. Normally, the main key-words of the search are captured on web-pages (one page dedicated to each subject supplemented by guides, videos and blogs that tell the story you want to convey), always adding to your search optimization score!

EPIC CONTENT

There comes a point when you’ll want all of that effort that goes into creating and publishing content to turn into fruitful opportunities to engage with your audience – and that’s where your epic content article comes in.  It’s the premium content that presents your stem subject-matter-expertise to an adoring crowd of people who are desperate to listen to what you have to say and will hover on every word to ensure they haven’t missed anything – or at least, that’s what you’d hope will happen.  Check online and you’ll find there’s a tremendous amount of FREE content available to people online these days THEY DON’T NEED TO REGISTER FOR.  t’s a known fact in business marketing that the biggest challenge is to get browsers to become web surfers to become buyers.   How will you encourage your audience to commit to an action?   There are a relatively small number of potential epic mediums available to you, so you’ll need to decide which one is best for you. Let’s explore some of them now.

Examples of epic content might include:

eBook or Guide – Like this guide itself, you could produce a large content story that guides your audience through a topic they’d like to understand better.

Webinars – You might elect to produce a series of webinars that explain how your product or service brings value as the best solution to get a job done better, or provide insight into the subject at the heart of what you do.

Video Training Courses – You could create a string of video courses to create an ‘Academy’ for your audience, helping them to learn how to ‘get the job done better’ and maybe even showing them how to use your product or service to accomplish to task!

Podcasts – Depending on the nature of the content, you could produce a series of podcasts that dig into the detail of your subject.

Becoming an authority for your subject using blog articles and hero content

The content of blog articles, webinars, e-books and videos (etc.) should focus on the long-tail search terms, the very detailed long-hand description of what you offer that pinpoints the place in the market where you compete, where your offer is the strongest.

DESIGNING CONTENT AROUND SEARCH TERMS – CREATING CONTENT POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS CAN FIND 

In terms of a basic logic tree for your website structure then, you should be looking at a three-tier model:

1. Offering Solution Page – The page you use to promote ‘why you’ for your offer.  This page is all about you and your offer.   You can afford to be positive in your language exposing why you are the best solution for your customer. 

2. ‘Guide to…’ Authority Page – This is the page you use to explain the subject-matter content so you can be an authority on the topic.  That means your blog articles, videos, social posts etc. should be categorized into your subject themes and the category in question should be used to filter the relevant articles on your authority page.  It’s good to produce a one page guide for your subject because it can attract search engine interest (search engines like google can only index online content!).

3. Articles and eBooks – The pages you create to supplement your authority page.  One of the best options is to write an ebook on your subject and author an associated landing page optimized for the search terms found in the ebook.  This should then link to your authority page.

Your value proposition to customers has to be clear, and really get to the heart of what makes you special. This needs to be reflected in the conversational paths you create.

DESIGNING YOUR PROPOSITION

The outcome of any conversational marketing program should be a predictable sales pipeline and efficient sales and marketing processes that focus sales effort on the most profitable customer conversations.  That means, you will need to think about delighting and expanding existing accounts, not merely focusing on the creation of new customers – knowing that it costs five times more to win a new customer account than sell a new product to an existing customer!