Marketing Comparison Tool

Marketing Comparison Tool Metrics — Why It All Matters

Modern B2B buyers want modern experiences. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that traditional B2B sales and marketing are becoming obsolete. There are so many factors that influence modern buying behavior and, to be successful, you’ll need a lot more than claims of being the best, a smaller price tag, and invasive marketing tactics to remain competitive. Below, we’ll explain why everything in the marketing comparison tool matters, to help you better understand why we do what we do.

Trust is a Critical Factor in Business, Especially in B2B

Usually, when people think of B2B buyers, they think of decision-makers who pursue decisions with rationale and no emotional involvement. Making the wrong purchase can be hard to walk away from, especially in environments where the investments can be in the six- and seven-figure range. Making a poor decision on a product because you get sucked up in the marketing of it can lead to massive losses for the company making the purchase.

If you’re in a space with a great product but relatively low recognition, building trust is far more important for you, as more established names have likely already gained the trust of buyers. And that’s okay because what you lack in recognizability, they may lack in innovation, speed, flexibility, and a personal touch when it comes to client services.

65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company, for the better, due to a piece of thought leadership. This is why we help companies create great content that not only gets them seen but trusted. Quality content that hits the target matters so much, especially because 63% of buyers also say that thought leadership is important in providing proof that an organization genuinely understands or can solve your specific business challenges.

They Can’t Join You If They Can’t Find You

When you’re an established brand that relatively few people know about, you’re constantly fighting an uphill battle. For some of our clients, they know that their prospects are looking to get away from some of the well-established names because they’re not a right fit for where their business wants to go. And they’re looking for what else is out there but they’re not coming up on the names they need to because bigger names have swarmed the digital spaces that matter, especially the first page of search engine results.

You know, like we know, that the name of the game is attention. And you can’t get the attention of prospects if you can’t get in front of them where they’re looking for solutions. That’s where you’re going to really increase your brand awareness and visibility.

Usually, that leads leaders to think about the most direct route they can think of: ads!

But if you’ve ever tried to compete in that space, you very quickly realize that:

This is incredibly costly, both in the short- and long-term, varying on awareness of the competition and the depth of their pockets vs yours, which means that...
It’s either a short-lived game or one that is incredibly narrow, as you target a handful of keywords and hope the landing pages attached bring in some big fish.

And the thing about ads is, the second you stop paying, the second the potential benefits stop.

But great content will organically climb to the top of search results, if you do it right. In order to do it right, you can’t just create blog posts that essentially repeat how great your product is. That’s not engaging for your audience. They’ve heard that same of similar pitch from other companies. Everyone is the best. The best is saying they’re the best. The 5th best is also claiming to be the best.

So you need something to differentiate your brand. Something that speaks directly to prospects and makes them pause. Something that shows them you understand the challenges and that you can solve the problems. That’s where you get to another essential: customer engagement.

Not Just Content, But Content That Resonates and Engages

Great content will be absolutely critical to engaging your audience. And you know why. You probably see it and experience it every day. Just think about it from the side of someone who might be a prospect. There’s just so much noise!

There are newsletters you didn’t sign up for. Competitors retargeting you from one place to another. Sales people following up to “check in”. They’re swamped. It’s no wonder so many B2B shoppers do most of their research online, where they can at least have levels of control as they do their due diligence.

When you create targeted content that shows you understand what your prospects might be experiencing, you’re instantly giving your brand a chance to stand out from the crowd. Maybe you’re bookmarked at first. The buying process is nowhere close to as linear as most B2B brands approach it.

This is why you need to give yourself opportunities to be found from multiple angles at various stages in the buyers journey.

Engaging content can help get you there because over time, as those prospects build trust in your awareness and insights, they’ll naturally become biased and inclined to your suggestions. That’s the part of this that takes patience.

But it pays off because, at the end of the road, when they’re ready to make a purchase, you have a much higher chance of them being biased towards your solutions. After all, you’ve already proven to them through content that you know exactly what’s going on.

Not Just More Leads, But Better Quality Leads.

We get it. You don’t want to be a great editorial website. At the end of the day, you want some new leads to engage with. Every now and again, we get prospects who become clients who start out thinking that what they want is more leads.

But really, what do you want?

Tons of leads who run your sales team in circles, in and out of engagements that last months or years or
Leads who have had more opportunities to get to know you so that when your team does engage with them, they’re already convinced that you have the expertise they’ve been looking for?

Of course, the latter makes more sense because more leads of poor quality means you’re spending valuable time and energy—and let’s be real, money—on leads that never materialize.

We hear it all of the time. CEOs, sales leaders; tired of tire-kickers. Tired of lengthy sales processes, that feel like revolving doors.

Inbound content marketing helps you set better standards and perception for your expertise that, when digitally visible, attracts leads who are looking to solve their problems with as much confidence in your ability to accomplish it as possible.

Great content doesn’t just repeat marketing points. It isn’t a sales pitch. It solves problems. It shows insight. It builds trust. And once that trust is there, business processes become exponentially easier.

Building that trust leads your organization to build a lasting rapport, one that defines your brand and your commitment. Building that trust leads your business to more recommendations. Building that trust helps you close high-value deals with greater ease.

So the question is... will you be there? If the answer is yes, then you need content to be there so that when they commit to that search, when they’re trying to understand their problems, when they’re trying to solve them, there you are, pointing them towards success.

93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies. A large part of that has to do with the connections that prospects build with your brand through the content experiences you create.

Welcoming New Customers. Keeping Current Ones Longer.

Initially, we often think about leveraging content to attract new customers. And it’s a great reason because we know that content marketing has been great for reducing acquisition costs. We also know that customer acquisition can cost up to 7 times more than selling to existing customers — while the probability of selling to a new customer hovers around a mere 5 to 20 percent.

What’s so great about content marketing—and you’ve probably gotten this from everything that you saw above—is that it’s incredibly versatile and has multiple benefits. By truly taking advantage of content marketing, you can give your business new opportunities to be found by putting content that is valuable to your customer base out there.

To make matters better, you’ll learn so much about your customers in the process—which topics they’re most interested in, which aspects of something they find most challenging—which enables you to not just attract new customers, but create content that can show your current customers how to maximize your services or products. This can be a huge source of revenue, especially since the likelihood of selling to an existing customer is 60% to 70%, compared to 5% to 20% for a new one.

Scaling to a Competitive Advantage

Last, but surely not least, is the scalable aspects of inbound content marketing. With a solid strategy, you can absolutely go from zero to hero when it comes to search result prevalence. This is where consistency is key! And it’s not just about dumping content out there. It’s about being consistent in the expectation that what you produce will be quality, targeted, and valuable.

Posting 16 blog posts per month will give you 3.5x more traffic than posting less than 4 blog posts per month.

Inbound marketing can help you scale your digital footprint with ease because each post serves as a digital asset that can be used for various purposes, at various points in the buying journey, and one that you can leverage in email, social, and search engines.

Online buyers go through about 57% of the buying cycle on their own without talking to sales.

Using inbound marketing at scale allows you to be more visible to potential buyers as they go through that buying cycle digitally. By being a valued source of insight, when it's time to buy, they're more biased towards your solutions after building trust in your brand through helpful content.

So What’s the Move?

If you made it this far, we’ll assume you’re tired of chasing leads and want to get to a point where the leads are finding you, becoming your brand ambassadors by sharing your content, and identifying you as a brand that represents great work, impeccable execution, and innovation.

If that’s the case you’re ready to enhance the digital perception of your company, let’s chat about what your possibilities can look like!