This is a powerful article from The Harvard Business Review. Published February 1st, 2022, it captures the value of content strategy as a baked-in factor in designing customer experience. While focused on B2B, there are lessons to be had for all businesses, especially the importance of delivering information in a way that gives customers the best experience from their point of view.
“Helping today’s B2B buyers buy isn’t a sales challenge, nearly so much as an information challenge (or, alternatively, an information opportunity). The companies that best provide customers the information they most urgently seek, specifically through the channels they most clearly prefer, are in a far better position to drive commercial success in today’s rapidly evolving digital commercial landscape.”
While personal relationships remain the bedrock of sales, customers today want to research their options online. Often, people make up their minds based on what they research. It is incumbent upon companies today to create a competitive, valuable experience that includes:
- Great brand storytelling and visuals
- Relevant, authoritative, and helpful content and digital media
- Elegant use of marketing and sales technology to create a “branded content hub”*
- Real buy-in by the sales team as digital engagement is followed by targeted client interaction
So you can see why an effective content strategy provides information relevant to customers in a manner supported by a sales game plan. This includes a communication strategy, employee training, operational integration, and an ROI model everyone understands.
Moving a business to the cloud has many advantages as the world recovers from the shock of the pandemic – not the least of which is providing information in a way that provides customers a great experience and an agile workflow that enables customer-facing teams to work from anywhere regardless of the constraints.
Publio was founded to create integrated marketing content, PR, and sales strategies for clients seeking to leverage these trends toward online decision-making and purchasing behaviors – especially for complex products and services like technology, fintech, financial, professional and consumer services, as well as non-profits.
What kind of experience do your customers expect today?
HBR Summary:
Long the elusive objective of virtually every B2B commercial team, the time for sales and marketing “integration,” has passed. Instead, the most progressive B2B commercial organizations are completely reconfiguring commercial operations to better address today’s deep misalignment between how suppliers sell and how buyers buy.