B2B companies face different challenges than B2C companies.

From which stages you target in

the funnel to how you measure your success to the team you end up selling to, content
marketing can be a horse of a different color when you're business-to-business. In this week's
Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his tips for successful content marketing when you're a B2B.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Let's start with the funnel.

The B2B funnel is very similar to a B2C funnel. In fact, marketing funnels in general work like
this. People become aware of a product. They have some consideration for whether it's
something they might actually want to buy. They do some form of comparison against other
solutions. They decide to convert or not. Then there's a retention element. Retention element
is less true in a lot of B2C fields, especially eCommerce one-time purchases. It's generally more
true in the B2B world.

Target the right stages of the marketing funnel

I think one problem that we have in B2B marketing is a lot of times we target the wrong part of
the funnel. This is actually really common. In B2C, usually things that hit on one of these hit on
a lot of them. The same things that create awareness about a product or a brand also help with
conversion, also might help with comparison because of brand affinity, and also might help with
consideration and retention. It's less true in B2B, not to say not true at all, but less true. So I
think one of the jobs that we have is to look inside our funnel and then identify which part
needs help versus which part works fine.
Another thing that is very important here: For the majority of your content, don't try to target it
at more than let's say two of these stages. I might say, "Hey, I've got a piece of content that I
think can work really well for awareness and consideration." Or it's much further down the
funnel. It's for people who already know us and are already considering us. It's really about
comparison and conversion or about conversion and retention. That's fine. I think when you get
into trouble is when you say, "Hey, you know what, this is going to help throughout the funnel
— awareness, consideration, and conversion." Well, that tends not to be the case. That's not to
say it can never happen.

Actually design your content for parts of the funnel that

need it

Try to choose. When you're creating your content, when you're designing the strategy for why
you're going to produce a particular piece, decide what it's going to help with. Point it at the
area of the funnel that is in most need of assistance.

Let me give you a quick example here. There's a company called PivotDesk. They're a fellow at
Foundry company. PivotDesk does something really cool. They help small businesses — in
particular a lot of startups and early stage companies — but plenty of regular small businesses,
to find office space. They're very business-to-business. They're talking to landlords and they're
talking to small businesses.

They have a great funnel, but they decide that they need more awareness, which is good. Good
job PivotDesk identifying which part of the funnel is the problem. If you've seen that lots of
people who are already aware of you and visiting you are converting and getting through this
part of the funnel, then you don't need to focus your content efforts there, or maybe less of
them. We could think about potentially saying, "Hey, let's say that awareness is our problem.
Awareness to whom? Is it awareness to small businesses or is it awareness to the landlords?"
Again, two different audiences. In this case, awareness to the landlords perhaps is the problem.

I'm making these up. I don't actually know if PivotDesk has these problems. If that's the case,
maybe what we want is an interactive tool that's essentially part survey and part comparison,
benchmarking metrics, that a landlord can go in and say, "My space is in Seattle. I have this
much square footage of AAA space, and the current price is $31 per square foot triple net," and
there's the average me versus what the rest of the Seattle market looks like. Fascinating, I am
undercharging or I am overcharging, or I have less square footage than most folks have, or I'm
missing these amenities or whatever it is. That could work potentially very well for this stage of
the funnel.
This is the process that I'd urge you to use when you're doing that B2B content strategy. Target
the right section of the funnel. Make sure it's targeted to the right audience, and then come up
with a piece of content that's going to move the needle in the right place.

When you're measuring success in B2B, it is pretty different than B2C. A lot of the time
unfortunately the metric by which you will be judged upon is number of leads created. B2B
tends to be very leads-driven. There are a few folks who are in B2B who are also self-service,
like Moz is. But for the vast majority, it's leads for the sales folks to follow up on.

Because of that, the classic metrics, like how many social shares you got across different
networks and how much visibility and raw traffic and engagement and those kinds of things
tend to be less important than quantity of leads generated. This is really tough when you get
into these areas of the funnel that are not the conversion point. If I'm trying to create raw
awareness among my audience, I can really get misjudged if my boss, my team, or my client is
only looking at the leads.

What I urge you again to do is to take note of what you're trying to improve and apply the right
metrics to it. Don't just take the same metrics that are used for obviously B2C and don't take
the same metrics that are judged on conversion for retention or awareness for conversion. This
is critically important, or you're going to focus on the wrong parts of the solution you're trying
to create.

The overwhelming majority of B2B transactions don't

just have a single buyer.

In B2C, it's really simple. I'm selling blue jeans. I'm selling them to a consumer. That consumer
tends to be the only person who's in on the consideration. Maybe their partner is also thinking
about it. For the vast majority it's just that one person I'm selling to.

That's not the case in B2B, not at all.

Oftentimes the person who ends up buying, who you interact with, who your salesperson
reaches out to and has the conversation, that person is just one link in the chain of individuals
involved from a corporate ecosystem in who makes the buying decision. For that reason, a lot
of times content marketing that reaches this person does a great job of reaching that buyer but
does a terrible job of reaching their manager or the CFO and the HR person who are all involved
in these decisions as well might be less successful.

This is why we need an overlapping persona analysis when we do our content. It's also why,
when we're thinking about the funnel, we can't think about it without regard for which target is
in which stage of the buying process. It could be that your buyer is all the way down here, but
you have no resources, no content that's going to help convince a CFO and an HR person up
here that they should even put you in the consideration set, because you have no comparison
against what are their other options and why do you help them save money and those kinds of
things.

Be careful with this. Target your content to not only your buyer but other folks as well,
especially if your sales folks are giving you feedback that that's where they're getting stymied.

With B2B, it tends to be the case that you can be much more aggressive with forms of
remarketing and retargeting. That means paid content. That means amplification. It means
spending dollars to promote the content that you've created. The reason that you can do this as
opposed to a lot of B2C is because it tends to be the case that your customer lifetime value is
way higher. B2B transactions, we're talking about usually many hundreds, if not many
thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per converted
customer.

Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC)

What you want to be looking at is not just the lifetime value but also the current cost of
customer acquisition, or CAC, as it's called. There's a ratio that a lot of folks look at in B2B,
which is the CAC to CLTV ratio, essentially how much does it cost us to get a new customer
versus how much value does that customer provide. B2C folks look at this too, but B2B folks
tend to be obsessed with it.

When I see the ratio is high or the CAC itself is low in comparison, this is, gee, $450 to acquire a
customer versus $3,780 CLTV, that's like a 9 to 1 ratio, something like that. I have a ton of room
to boost that. I could probably boost that. I could more than double it, and I'd still be fine with a
four-to-one ratio or even a three-to-one ratio. I might consider spending a tremendous amount
more money to get a customer. If I can see through my funnel that I'm measuring to see how
content performs as it pushes people down this funnel and gets them to conversion, if I can see
that for every 1,000 views or 10,000 views I'm getting a customer converting, well then I can go
and I can amplify through paid channels, through retargeting and remarketing.

I can pay a lot of money to go push that content to more places and to more people. I can
probably do things that I would almost never ordinarily do, like even buy paid search ads
against a keyword that is very content-focused, not very conversion-focused, that lives up here
in the funnel and I can still have success. This is something that very few B2B marketers are
doing but some very successful ones are.

Last thing that I'll cover here, most B2B content does this... I don't know. It's like every B2B
marketer reads from the same playbook. Look, I go through this process a lot because I'm
interested in a lot of B2B content since Moz is a business that I'm trying to grow.

What happens is that the content exposes very little for free. I might hear about something and
go, "Oh yeah, I am interested in the average lifetime value of self-service, software as a service
companies." That sounds super corporate and boring. I'm deeply interested in it. It really affects
Moz's metrics.

I might go look, and then I see I can't really tell what's in here, what's behind the wall. You're
not showing me very much.

There's supposedly this amazing content, but I don't see

anything there.

Then it asks me for too much in order to get access.

If you fill out all these 10 different form fields about your position at the company, and how
much revenue you have, and how many employees you had, and what was your growth rate
last year, and which other products in this field have you considered and so on, man, geez, I feel
like I just had to sign a lease agreement in order to get a piece of content.

Then, that content is not web accessible.

I have to download it, which is insanely frustrating if I'm on one of these. It sucks. It's a terrible
experience on mobile. It's even a bad experience on desktop. I don't want to have to download
something and open it back up. That makes it less shareable. It's very hard for me to amplify
that content if I'm interested in it. When I want to share it with other people I have to tell them,
"Hey, you've got to go to this download link."

What happens? I'll tell you what happens. Every single time I download it and then I attach it in
an email and I send it to every relevant person at Moz, that B2B company that made it only gets
one email address, and I unsubscribe from their list.

Insanity.
Insanity.

If you can, fix this process by making your content web accessible, making it so that you're
providing more of a teaser right on the page here so that more people are likely to go through
here. Ask for as little information as you possibly can. You can get more later. You can learn a
ton about someone once you have just one piece of information, their correct email address. If
you have that, you can learn a tremendous amount about them. You don't need this. You've got
tools like FullContact, where you can use the API plugin and email address and they'll give you
all sorts of persona-type data about that person. You can go then research the company and
get all the facts. Tons of stuff to do.

Then the last thing that I find that's oddly frustrating — I don't know why I'm frustrated about
it, but you should be frustrated about it if you're a B2B marketer — is you don't reuse the
audience for future content amplification. If you know that I downloaded this piece of content, I
think it is perfectly okay to follow up with a personal message the next time you produce a
piece of content like this and say, "Hey, we redid it and here it is again." That's not that hard.
Hopefully, you haven't auto-subscribed me to an email newsletter and I'm getting tons of pieces
of content that I care nothing about. What's far better is if you tell me, "Hey, we redid this
piece," or, "Since you liked this piece, you'll probably be very interested in this other piece."
That's going to work really well.

You can also do RLSA with this for more paid amplification. I can take a list of emails of all the
people who've downloaded this, upload it to Google, upload it to Facebook, and then have this
content accessible via these paid formats so that I'm bidding in Google and I'm showing the ads
to people on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff.

All right, everyone, hope you B2B marketers out there are doing some awesome stuff with your
content in the near future. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard
Friday. Take care.