🕵🏻‍♂️ Content topics your buyers won’t ignore

7 steps to successful content topics your buyers won't ignore

Written by Adechina Odjo, Content Marketer @Trenches

Hello ,

Here's a big mistake most companies make when planning their content: they base their decisions on keyword research and come up with ideas behind closed doors, using fictive personas (like “try-hard Tammy, the suburban mother of two…”).

When in reality, the key would be to identify the topics that their buyers are actually interested in. If you wonder how, then this newsletter is for you.

I’ll show you 7 practical steps you need to take to come up with content topics and ideas your target buyers won’t ignore.

Let's dive right into it.

1. Customer Research

From your deal analysis and customer interviews, extract:

⚡️What triggered them to start their search? Why now?

⚡️What strategic goals were behind it?

⚡️The challenges they couldn’t solve on their own;

⚡️The steps they took;

⚡️The information they sought for;

⚡️The critical questions, concerns, or doubts they had;

⚡️Their evaluation and purchase criteria

2. Map out the stages (beyond your funnel)

⚡️Triggers

⚡️Understanding the issues

⚡️Exploring different types of solutions

⚡️Evaluating vendors

⚡️Making a decision

3. Collect buyer’s questions and objections

For each stage, collect data about:

⚡️Who was involved

⚡️What they were trying to learn and what questions they had

⚡️The objections or concerns they had

4. Identify priority channels

Beyond the usual channels, include:

⚡️Industry influencers and thought leaders

⚡️Events and conferences

⚡️Partner brands

⚡️Industry influencers

⚡️Communities

5. Extract the most common topics and questions

Browse channels, communities, and events to find additional topics and common questions that your target accounts are asking.

Review influencers' posts and the comments and questions they receive.

6. Founder interviews

Interview your founders

  • What are the companies in the target market currently doing wrong? What can they do better?

  • Why did you decide to create the product? What is the gap you’re seeing in the market? Why do you think it happens?

  • How are your potential customers currently solving these needs? What are the alternative methods? Why do they prefer to use them?

  • What opportunities are they missing out on by relying on these alternatives?

  • What do most competitors get wrong?

  • What trends (technological, market, changes in consumer behavior, macroeconomic, political, regulatory…) make this switch urgent?

  • What is your product vision? Where do you see the product evolving over the next 5 years? What is the big next thing in the market?

  • What are the main ways in which different customers use your product?

  • What is the outcome they’re getting? How valuable is that outcome?

  • What insights do they get from the product — and how are these insights valuable?

7. Create a map of informational needs

Collect all the questions and topics (from 3, 5 & 6) in a map of informational needs. This is a document that summarizes all the topics, subtopics, and potential questions your buyers have as they move through the buying journey.

A Map of Informational Needs helps you avoid irrelevant content that gets ignored and saves you from staring at a blank piece of paper looking for what to write about.

The Content Distribution and Repurposing Flywheel

You can use a simple calendar of regular marketing activities to create a kind of “we see you guys everywhere” effect in your market.

How do you do that?

You can repurpose most of the content you produce. For example, one of your well-written and value-packed articles can recycle a minimum of 10 different LinkedIn posts that will surely resonate with your target audience.

Here is an overview of our repurposing flywheel at FullFunnel.io:

  • Andrei takes our best-performing posts and expands on them in our newsletter, which grew to 13k+ subscribers without any promotion, just because of the quality of our content.

  • Our LinkedIn content also helps us build key relationships with influencers, who we then invite to be guests on our live podcasts. We parley these relationships into speakers for our annual Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Summit.

  • We use Trenches, B2B Marketing Community, to distribute content, and promote our live podcasts and events, but also get insights into the most frequent questions our LinkedIn posts should answer

  • We then repurpose the most interesting discussions, live podcasts, and summit speeches as issues of the Trenches newsletter

  • We know what topics to focus on in our monthly webinars with 1000+ subscribers, and our in-depth articles where we share our frameworks and case studies

  • We promote all major events and long-form content via LinkedIn, our newsletter, and the Trenches community

Did you enjoy this newsletter? Chances are you have 1 or 2 colleagues (well, maybe 03) who’d enjoy it as much as you do. Help them by sharing it.

Upcoming Community Event

How to run ABM campaigns across the buyer journey [Fullfunnel.io & Albacross]

In a webinar this Thursday, 25th May, 4 pm CET - 10 am ET, Andrei will discuss how to run ABM campaigns across the buyer's journey with Viktor Carlsson, CEO @Albacross.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

⚡️What the modern buyer's journey looks like and the key steps in developing a buyer's journey

⚡️How to distinguish which accounts are at which stage of the buyer's journey

⚡️How to match warm-up and activation programs with the stage of the buyer's journey

⚡️How to match the buyer's journey with demand acceleration

⚡️How to customize your website for different accounts; and

⚡️How to reach your target accounts

Trust me, you do not want to miss this.

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO