B2B Brands Need to Rethink Their Content Marketing Strategy

In order to engage B2B buyers in a way that overcomes information overload and drives progress to a successful purchase, marketing leaders need to shift their content marketing strategy, according to Gartner.

B2B marketers must move away from a model built on “more“ (more content = more engagement = more progress), says Gartner. In a world where customers are struggling with too much information rather than not enough, the most successful marketers are focused on providing less information, specifically designed to make buying easier.

Brent Adamson, distinguished vice president at Gartner, explained how organizations need to focus on “buyer enablement“ and developing content that guides customers through critical buying tasks and helps them overcome challenges they encounter throughout the buying process.

“Buyer enablement“ is defined as the provision of information and/or tools to customers that support the completion of specific buying jobs throughout the purchase process. B2B buyers today will reward suppliers who make the purchase process easier,“ said Adamson. “Our research shows that customers who receive helpful information that eases the purchase process are three times as likely to buy the bigger, more expensive option, with less regret.“

According to Gartner research, there are two types of buyer enablement: prescriptive advice and practitcal support. The first type is to help customers understand what steps to take and how to take them. This information should be clear and credible with actionable recommendations specifically designed to help customers overcome buying challenges and complete each specific step along the buying journey.

Practical support means that they need to help customers complete discrete, job-related activities through the purchase process. This information represents the tools customers might use to follow through on the prescriptive advice. “By focusing on these two types of buyer enablement, marketing can engineer a complete content ecosystem designed to help drive high-value, low-regret deals and, ultimately, better support sales,“ added Adamson.

Shifting the commercial strategy to buyer enablement requires reallocating resources to producing a different kind of content altogether. Gartner says that there is an urgent need for marketers to move their content marketing portfolio away from thought leadership, industry trends and infotainment, which comprise the bulk of today’s content marketing fare, and toward buyer enablement.

To do this, marketing leaders should consider the following to ensure their buyer enablement content meets customers’ needs. On that account they should ease the buyer purchase process by building buyer enablement content aligned with critical buying jobs and providing either prescriptive advice or practical support. They also have to repurpose successful content by identifying pre-existing sources of buyer enablement from functions such as sales or customer service and modifying them for customer self-service.

Gartner suggests that B2B brands  need to build and deepen ongoing understanding of buying needs as they arise by implementing a buyer enablement system and strategy and also allow customers to self-serve by providing a consistent set of enablement resources across in-person and digital information channels.