Content to Conversion: Kickstand and Pavilion report
This week Kickstand and Pavilion jointly published an excellent report focused on the power of high quality B2B content in influencing buyer decisions (link at the bottom of this post).
The team surveyed 824 full time employees across North America and the UK during August 2023. All participants had been involved in a B2B buying process during the previous year.
Regular followers of this blog will know I am a huge believer in the power of high quality content that educates, challenges and inspires buyers well in advance of them ever speaking to one of your sales team.
This report puts some evidence around it.
“73% of B2B buyers surveyed agreed their purchase decisions were directly influenced by a brand’s content.
Providing buyers with the right information at the right time is no longer a nice-to-have; its an expected and integral part of the sales process.”
Buyers spend much of their time in the dark funnel.
Your buyers lurk in communities, networks and private discussions that you have no visibility of.
And while they are there, they are trying to educate themselves about the challenges their business faces, the opportunities available if they solve them, and how they might go about it.
In the report, 49% of content-influenced buyers agreed they’ve recommended a company to colleagues due to the content shared.
Think about that - your buyers recommending you to other buyers because the content you provided was valuable enough for them to share on.
Gartner talk about buyer enablement content as having a specific utility for buyers at each stage of their buying process:
calculators
assessments
benchmarks
recommenders
planners
This report backs that up with B2B buyers confirming that what constitutes high-value content includes:
Customisation to their specific industry and/or needs
Success metrics
Original research or data
Specifically, executives are particularly interested in original research and data:
Think back to The Challenger Sale - your buyers want some insight, they want your marketers and sellers to share something they didn’t already know.
Struggling to create high quality content that attracts and converts your buyers? Take a look at the Buyer Enablement Content Factory where I’ll work with your team to create a pipeline of high value content in 12 weeks.
Create content in multiple formats
The report confirms that different people like to learn in different ways.
Whilst a developer may want to watch a video walkthrough,
A project manager may want a project template
An exec sponsor way want a mobile-friendly blog article
Once you have a topic for content, repurpose it into written, video, audio and tool formats.
Get your content into the dark funnel
I mentioned the dark funnel - places where your buyers go to seek out valuable content and advice.
Great content gets shared into these channels. Poor content never leaves your website.
The report shows that professional communities (Pavilion, Slack channels, private WhatsApp groups), social, peer recommendations, partner websites are important destinations over and above your own assets.
Should you gate your content?
The survey was split - asking recipients to share an email or phone number will reduce the visibility of your content, but decision makers with influence confirmed they were 14% more likely to say they preferred gated content.
My experience, if the request for identification leads to additional value to the user of the content, then there is no issue.
Consider Hubspot’s Website Grader.
You have to tell the tool your website so it can grade it, and you have to tell it your email address so it can send you the personalised report. Easy.
Should you use AI to create your content?
This is a hot topic for me right now as I test out AI content for SEO purposes on this site.
Its important to know when to use AI and for what purpose.
High value content that is specific to your customer’s unique needs and shares insight that only you could know has to come from your team.
Indeed, just look at this survey - Kickstand and Pavilion have conducted some proprietary research, and here am I writing about it and sharing it with my network.
AI couldn’t have created this report for the authors.
Use AI for your low level, long tail keyword articles, and as soon as pages start ranking, apply human editorial to reflect your insight, experience and advice.
High value content drives buying decisions
The report reinforces that having a cross-functional team focused at generating high value content from across your revenue and product teams is critical.
It is too important to leave to your marketing intern with ChatGPT.
I recommend grabbing the full report here:
And if you would like help building high value buyer enablement content that converts then take a look at the Buyer Enablement Content Factory.
A 12 week program in which we’ll build a pipeline of high value, buyer-centric content and tools that your buyers (and sellers) will thank you for.
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