Pipeline Engineering: Syncing Content to the Customer Buying Process

Godfrey FWD:B2B Marketing and Technology Conference 2015

It’s often been said that today’s customers are in the driver’s seat when it comes to selecting a supplier.  Certainly customers have more choices, more control, and more ways to access information and to connect.  As a result, marketers need a new way to attract and retain customers.  Enter content marketing.  Content marketing aims to create and curate relevant and valuable content that will change, enhance, and drive customer behavior.  The basic idea of content marketing is to deliver information that makes your buyer more intelligent.  As a result marketers everywhere are scrambling to develop content and leverage the myriad of channels as a way to reach and connect with prospects and customers.

Here’s the kicker, if you focus on producing content without taking the customer buying process into consideration your efforts may be for naught.   Content delivered in the right channel at the wrong time can be a wasted touch point. Content marketing is not the same as running a campaign. Content marketing looks more like publishing, where you serve as the architect of useful and compelling information that will inform, educate, engage and entertain customers and prospects. Content marketing is an ingredient in the marketing mix, not a substitute for it.

It’s a powerful ingredient in the recipe only when you can match the content with the customer buying journey and lifecycle.  To successfully employ this ingredient as a way to create a customer-centric pipeline takes a step-by-step process. In this session, explore the steps to applying content to the customer buying process and learn how to:

• Identify behavioral commitments associated with the customer buying process
• Map the customer buying process and synch content, channels, and touch points accordingly
• Create an opportunity scoring model and relevant metrics to prove marketing contribution