CHAPTER 6

CONTENT, ENGAGEMENT, AND BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP

Pulling the Social Customer Through the Online Sales Funnel

Social media, along with other revolutions in mass media and modern marketing, have without doubt altered the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Today's B2B and B2C prospects are self-educated, savvy shoppers who are increasingly influenced by their peers, turning to online reviews and social media channels for information and product recommendations. Particularly in the B2B market, the sales process, and especially its classic sales funnel, has been permanently altered as social consumers have redefined how they move through the buying stages.

The change in purchasing behavior has increasingly put more pressure on sales and marketing to use content to reach and persuade buyers long before they officially enter your system as a lead. Even with these changes, when you are accurately able to map the right content to both the buyer persona and to the purchasing stage of that buyer, you are often rewarded with shorter buying cycles and increased revenues. Content is used not only to educate prospects about your business, but also to engage them, or to provide the prospect with a reason to interact with or start a conversation with you. Sharing high-quality content through your social channels is the foundation for building a relationship with your prospective customers.

UNDERSTANDING THE CHANGING SALES FUNNEL

The sales funnel is dead—and content is king! This is the mantra now spreading throughout sales and marketing organizations everywhere. However, while there's a great deal of truth to this contention, it's only partially correct. The traditional sales funnel is by no means dead—but it is outdated. Representing the buyer's journey through your sales process, the long-standing model of the sales funnel is illustrated as an inverted pyramid. In the traditional model, the largest number of leads (albeit unqualified) enters at the wide top of the funnel. As they are pulled through the linear sales process from one stage to the next, more and more leads drop out along the way until only a small portion actually make it to the bottom, narrow part of the funnel to become loyal customers.

The traditional sales funnel, as illustrated in Figure 6–1, generally has four stages, starting at the top with the awareness stage (unqualified leads); then moving on to the evaluation stage (qualified prospect); and finally, as prospects make the decision to buy, entering the purchase stage and then becoming part of the loyalty stage (as customers). It is important to note that in the traditional funnel, it is the salesperson who controls or guides the lead through the sales process, educating and qualifying the prospect along the way until the purchasing decision is finally made. So what has really changed about this process?

For our purposes, the names of the stages will remain the same. But the behavior surrounding those four stages is markedly different. Perhaps the biggest change is that research indicates customers are now 57 percent of the way through the sales process before ever engaging with a salesperson.¹ In some cases, depending on the product type and whether it's B2B or B2C, prospects could be as much as 90 percent through the buying process before contacting a salesperson.² This is indicative of the level of consumer self-education that is occurring, or rather, it shows how (and how much) information is being consumed prior to a prospect making the first personal contact with a company representative. Remember, your prospective customer now has access to endless streams of branded and non-branded content, research, and opinions from websites, social networking sites, peer-to-peer virtual conversations, and even competitors. These highly educated consumers now enter the buying process much closer to the bottom of that traditional sales funnel as qualified prospects ready to purchase, which brings us to the other significant change.

FIGURE 6–1

In the traditional sales funnel, the buyer moves through the four stages of the sales process in a linear manner.

The salesperson is no longer in charge of the buying process and no longer the gatekeeper of the information that would typically move the buyer from one stage of the funnel to the next. Instead, your customer defines the buying process. She may want to engage with you early on, or she may not want to talk with you at all before making her decision to buy. In fact, the only time you may engage with the prospect is during very late-stage activities, such as providing product demos and price quotes. At this point, you may be one of several companies being considered by the buyer, yet your ability to influence the purchasing decision has long passed—without your ever having had contact!

For these reasons, experts say the traditional sales funnel has been phased out. There is no longer a linear movement from unqualified lead (at the top of the funnel) to loyal customer (at the bottom of the funnel). Even so, there has not been a consensus as to what the new, online-driven sales funnel should look like. I have seen it illustrated as a sort of French horn, a series of circles, and as a neuron (as in a neuron or synapse from your brain) with a central hub and lots of little tentacles sprouting from it. Although a replacement for the traditional funnel is difficult to envision, experts seem to agree on the following changes to the buying process:

• Buyers no longer depend on salespeople to provide information and educate them on products or solutions.
• Buyers have extended the number of places they get information and the way they consume it.
• Buyers are entering the sales process much later and salespeople have less opportunity to influence the purchasing decision.
• Buyers have increased the type of and the frequency of activities they complete before engaging with a salesperson.
• Buyers are influenced by content prior to becoming a recognized lead in the sales process.

The last point is particularly important to understand. Content, if delivered soon enough, often enough, and through the right channels, still provides sales and marketing the opportunity to engage and influence prospective customers before they officially enter your sales cycle.

DEVELOPING BUYER PERSONAS FOR YOUR SOCIAL CUSTOMERS

Ultimately, being successful in the social selling process requires you to build a relationship based on positive interactions with the buyer. Content is at the crux of the formation of that relationship. As a tool, content allows you to start a conversation, which may lead to a trusted relationship, which may turn into a sales transaction. But as you've seen from the changing sales funnel, this process can take much longer than it previously did. As analysts from Forrester Research have described it: “Engaging, throughout the customer's buying cycle, requires completely different thinking. B2B marketers must nurture prospects for months or years before they turn into sales opportunities, so it is critical to know how you are connecting with each buyer at each interim stage that buyer goes through.”³

As you put all of these pieces of information together, you see that in order to build a relationship and pull a buyer through today's online sales funnel it takes using content in the following five ways:

1. Promote constant top of mind awareness.
2. Provide useful information.
3. Establish trust and credibility as a legitimate resource.
4. Capitalize on peer-to-peer influence.
5. Target each buyer stage, each buyer persona, and each social network.

Understanding your typical buyer behaviors, or having buyer personas identified, is also helpful when it comes to knowing what content to use, and on which social networks, in order to pull your prospects through the online sales process.

Having a buyer persona, or profile, for your targeted prospects helps with the selling process. A buyer persona provides a demographic snapshot of your typical buyer. It can include descriptors such as job title, industry, or vertical market in which the buyer works; level of expertise; and geographic region in which the buyer is located. A buyer persona can also include gender, income, or level of discretionary spending; shopping preferences (where he likes to shop, or how frequently); and what most often influences her decision to buy (peer recommendations, advertising, discount offers, etc.). You most likely have multiple buyer personas for your products or services because there are many different types of customers, especially when more than one type of product or service is offered, and each of those buyer types is motivated by and responds to different influences and prompts. Your buyer personas will also be unique to your industry and your company (there is no one-size-fits-all model across all industries and brands). Understanding these subtle differences is key to providing the right information, at the right time, and to the right buyer.

Is a buyer profile different for an online customer than for a traditional buyer? Not necessarily. Instead, where or how the buyer prefers to shop, including her online social behavior, becomes one more piece of information that makes up the complete persona. The more you understand a particular persona's online preferences and activities, including information about their social networking behaviors, the easier it will be for you to engage with that buyer in his or her preferred communities (or networks) and build a mutually beneficial relationship. I suggest that you consider every one of your buyer types to be a social consumer, and be sure to include the details of online preferences as an important part of every buyer persona.

If you don't already have buyer personas identified, I would encourage you to take some time to tackle this project. It's a fairly easy task for a salesperson or marketer to complete. In most cases, creating a buyer persona involves interviewing a mix of existing, former, and prospective customers. Ideally, it's preferable to speak with a customer over the phone. It only takes ten or fifteen minutes to ask the buyer a few questions, including why he chose your product and what factors influenced his final decision. You can also put the same questions into a quick survey that can be emailed to both customers and prospects. The goal is to get enough information that you are able to form a clear picture of who your buyer is, but without so many questions that it is off-putting or overly time-consuming for the person taking it.

When developing buyer personas, a good tip is to always include a picture or image that reflects the buyer. For example, in the telecommunications industry where I work, we usually have two buyer personas that happen to be segmented by job roles: the IT professional, and the business executive or owner. But perhaps you sell video games in the B2C market. You may have one persona that reflects a preteen male buyer; a second persona of a teenage female buyer; and a third persona, the mother of the intended consumer. Having an image that represents each of these buyer types isn't necessary, but it often helps you, and your sales and marketing teams, better visualize the person to whom you are talking so that you better choose the type of content that is most fitting for each of these personas. You can use clip art or stock photography (images someone else takes and makes available for your use for free, or for a small fee) to go along with the written description you complete. Once you have buyer personas nailed down, you can begin creating content that is more likely to influence your specific buyer personas in each of the four buying stages that make up the online sales funnel.

CREATING CONTENT TO FEED THE ONLINE SALES FUNNEL

If content is indeed king, then you may wonder what makes it so special. Think of it as a tool. If done well, content has great persuasive power. As mentioned earlier, it is a device that is used to pull a prospect into or through a particular stage of the buying process. As a salesperson, you have been using content for years, whether it is a company brochure, a customer testimonial, a technical datasheet, or a product description. Content is the message inside an email, a call to action on your website, a case study, a white paper, or a chart comparing your solution to that of your competitors.

In addition to using social media to distribute the content mentioned above, pure social content can come in the form of a status update on your Facebook page, a 140-character message sent out on Twitter, a blog post on your website, a picture shared on Pinterest, a comment left in response to an online article, or a video uploaded to YouTube. The point is that content is everywhere.

Today, quality content is considered critical. Simply creating content doesn't make it good, and if it's not good it doesn't have value in the eyes of your prospective customers, or to the search engines that are responsible for sorting and ranking your content for online users. Most important, content that is not good is not very effective in the sales process. Poor content is a dull tool that just isn't capable of getting the job done!

What makes content good? It should be a given that text-based content must be well written and free of grammatical errors. Similarly, images and illustrations should be clear and easy to understand, and videos should be short and to the point. Content, in whatever format you choose to use, should also serve a purpose, which may include being informational, instructional (how to), entertaining, humorous, or inspirational.

In terms of creating content that helps you build relationships and ultimately sell, then “good” content is best described as that which resonates with your target audience. What are their concerns, problems, or interests? Share content that matters to them. For instance, think of the types of questions the prospect needs answered about your type of products or services. Or, consider the problems or desires your prospect might have that would lead them to want to buy from you. Develop and share content that addresses these issues and establishes a need.

Of course, content shouldn't always be based on your business. Since you are using content as a way to establish a relationship and build trust and interest, good content is also that which speaks to broader topics. For example, you might create content around industry news and trends, interviews with experts, obscure or silly facts, celebrity happenings, or current world events. Ultimately, in the world of social selling good content is not only that which your prospect wants to consume, but it's also something that she or he is then willing to share with their network!

As you hear experts talk about content, or as you think about the types of quality content you can create, there are several terms (or names of content types) that you want to know. You are most likely familiar with content such as a standard article, or blog post, or a video, but there are some other common types of content that can be useful to you as well:

• Evergreen: An evergreen is content—often an article or blog post—that never becomes dated. The information is as valid and accurate today as it was a year ago; and it will still be valid in the foreseeable future. That means it doesn't contain dates or other time-sensitive references (such as a coupon that expires or an event or holiday associated with a particular time of year).
• Topical: The opposite of an evergreen, topical content is often based on current news or world events. Because it revolves around a specific point in time, it may have limited shelf life and only be useful for a few days or weeks.
• How-to: Any material that is instructional, or provides information that trains you in a particular skill or process, is considered how-to. How-to content is often very popular online.
• List: Whether you use bullets or numbers to rank details or items, you are creating a list. You often see this type of content online as a “Top Five” or “Top Ten” list of what to do or not to do. In fact, I am using a list right now to describe the different types of content you can create; but when used online, the list (and perhaps an introductory paragraph) would comprise the entire article.
• Testimonial: A testimonial can be something as simple and brief as a single quote from a customer or much more in-depth, like a customer case study. Testimonials are meant to give you or your product credibility based on someone else's experience or opinion.
• Q&A: Content that provides direct answers to questions are referred to as Q&A, or Question and Answer. This type of content is used most often for reference. You might even have an entire page of content dedicated to answering a single question. This technique is often used to help your site rank better in search engine results, too. For example, a common question for a cooking site may be “How do I thaw a turkey?” You can create content that answers this question, thus potentially bringing more visitors to the site.
• Polls/Surveys: Considered to be one of the easiest types of content you can create, quick polls and surveys are a favorite for use online. That's because many of the social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, have built-in tools that let you easily create a poll to share with your network of fans and followers. If you use a blog platform, like WordPress, it also has this built-in capability for creating, distributing, and tabulating polls and surveys.
• Infographic: An infographic, a popular type of content, takes text and displays it in a visual manner using images. An infographic can also be easily shared by others on their websites or on their social networking channels, giving it the potential to “go viral,” the latest way of saying your content spreads rapidly across multiple social networks.
• eBook: An ebook is an electronic format for sharing almost any type of content—including images but not video (yet!)—and then delivering all of it in an online book format.
• Repurposed: One of the best parts of creating content to share is being able to take one piece, such as a white paper or case study, and then reusing, or repurposing, it in other types or formats of content, such as a YouTube video or a blog post.
• Curated: The best way to describe curated content is any type of digital information that is pulled together from multiple sources and then displayed to your target audience. Rather than providing the complete content, you summarize it and provide links back to the original source. For example, if you sell luxury travel packages, you might curate any type of content having to do with travel, such as planning a vacation, packing for exotic locations, or securing your valuables while traveling. Essentially, it is any related content that would be interesting or timely to your prospects; you are gathering the content from different sources and making it available in one place.
• User-generated: Similar to curated content, user-generated material is not created by you. You may have existing customers, vendors, or other partners and resellers who are able to contribute original pieces of content for your use. Often, you might see this used as a guest post on a blog.
• Decision making: Content that falls in this category is usually focused on pushing the prospect to make the choice to buy. Sometimes referred to as “convincing” content, it usually tries to overcome any final objections a buyer has or answer common questions that may be all that stands in the way of the prospect making her final purchasing decision.
• Credibility: Similar to decision-making content, credibility pieces focus on overcoming potential objections, but usually where those objectives are about the brand. This type of content is designed to show your brand or company is viable and trusted.
• Thought leadership: This type of content takes an in-depth look at a specific topic or trend that impacts your industry. As a subject-matter expert in the market you sell into, you may have an insightful view on a particular topic that could be useful to both your customers and your prospective buyers.

As you decide on which type or types of content to use for a specific purpose, you also have to choose whether or not the content will be branded or unbranded. In this case, I don't mean whether or not you include your company logo on the content, but whether or not the content is written about your company. Do you want the message in your content to be product-specific? Should it be information that is focused on only your business or services? There are times when you need this type of content because it may help create consumer confidence. Branded content can show that your company has been around for quite a while and that you have legitimate experience.

At the same time, if you only create branded content, or create too much branded content, the information becomes all about you and less about how your products or services can solve a problem for your prospective customer. As I mentioned previously, just as you want to create a mix of the different types of content, you want to strike a balance of how much branded content you create.

MAPPING TYPES OF CONTENT TO THE SOCIAL NETWORKS TO ENGAGE AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS WITH PROSPECTS

Now that you are familiar with the most common types of content you can create, I want to show you how content, social networks, and the various stages of the buying process relate to one another as part of your overall social selling strategy. And it cannot be said enough that effective social selling is rooted in quality content. It is your content that allows you to make an initial connection with your prospect, prompts continued positive interactions (i.e, engagement), and eventually serves as the foundation of an ongoing, trusting relationship. In essence, your reputation as a social salesperson is built on the content you choose to distribute and share!

To begin building relationships with your prospective customers, you want to first consider your buyer personas and how each might search for or consume content depending on where they are in the buying process. Remember, today's buying process is still focused on these main stages: awareness, evaluation, purchasing, and loyalty. However, your buyer does not necessarily pass through these stages in a linear manner, so you have to provide lots of content, over and over again, and make it available in all the places where your prospect may be looking for it (social networks, online communities and websites, and peers). After matching personas to the buying stage, you can then identify the most appropriate social network in which to distribute the content.

As I show you which social networks best match up to which stages of the buying process, understand that each of these social networks could influence your prospects, regardless of which buyer stages they are in at any given moment. But when matching social networks to buyer behavior as part of the updated online sales funnel, there are some buyer stages that are most likely to be influenced within each of these social networks. These include:

• Twitter: Twitter makes it easy to introduce yourself and your products to other members of this social network. The ability to easily search by keyword and track trends means it is ideal for the early and mid-stages of the buying process—awareness and evaluation. Because users of this social network are already utilizing Twitter for customer service, it also makes it a natural fit for ongoing customer support once your prospects become customers.
• Facebook: Especially useful during the purchasing stage, Facebook can be used to offer content that triggers final buying behaviors for existing fans, or can be used to reach and engage new fans as part of the awareness stage. Facebook is also a good venue for increasing engagement over the lifetime of the customer.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn groups are particularly useful in both the awareness and evaluation stages of the sales process because LinkedIn gives the buyer the ability to ask specific questions that can be answered by you, your customers, and your partners.
• YouTube: The visual component of YouTube is particularly helpful for product demonstrations (used during the evaluation and purchasing stages). Videos are also ideal for post-sales training, which can be beneficial to customers long after the decision to buy has been made (as part of the loyalty stage).
• Google +: Google + Hangouts On Air are live video chats that bring people together in one virtual room, and are particularly useful as content for both the evaluation stage and post-purchase stage. You can invite a small group to participate; but once your live Hangout is over, Google automatically posts the recorded version to your Google + page and your YouTube channel, making it easy to reuse the recorded version as much as you like. You can use Hangouts to conduct real-time training classes, hold real-time Q&A sessions, discuss product and service updates, provide product demonstrations, interview satisfied customers for video testimonials—I could go on.
• Pinterest: The nature of Pinterest is that it is full of window shoppers, but it is also conducive to impulse shopping. For this reason, Pinterest works well in both the early and late stages of the buying process (awareness and purchase).
• Communities/Forums: Communities and forums are set up to establish a network around a particular topic or theme, so they are made up of members with a similar interest. This means that any buyer stage—from awareness to loyalty—that is susceptible to peer influence can be influenced by these types of social networks.
• Blogs: Similar to communities, blogs are often created around a particular theme or brand (such as your company blog). And like communities, blogs have a great deal of influence in almost every buyer stage, including awareness, evaluation, purchase, and loyalty.

Now that you know which social networks are conducive to which buying stages, you want to ensure you are also accomplishing the goal of using content to pull prospects through the buying process (or online sales funnel). To do this, first take an inventory of all the content you have. Next, map the types of content on a chart to identify which buyer persona is targeted and in which social network it is most appropriate to distribute the content. To make it easy, I suggest using a visual icon or image of each buyer persona in place of using an “X” or a check mark in the appropriate columns. This gives you a quick visual of which buyer personas you are targeting. You can find a sample “Buyers’ Personas” chart on the website for this book (artofsocialselling.com), under the tab at the top of the site's homepage, called Exclusive Content.

You can also create content map for each month or quarter to help you fully track your content and evaluate how you are using it. This also helps you to see where there are holes, or where you may need another type of content to ensure you are reaching all of your prospective buyers at all the critical buyer stages. You can also find a sample Content Map on the website, by clicking the Exclusive Content tab, which features not only this map, but other content and tools you can download. By mapping your content this way, you are creating a content strategy for where and when and to whom you should distribute content.

Chances are, you will quickly realize that you need a lot of content to build relationships and keep the sales funnel fed! Repurposing the content you already have will certainly help, but you may be surprised to discover how quickly even repurposed content is consumed. One of the ways you can create more content is to outsource it, or pay someone else to help create new pieces of content.

There are tools you can use to make it easier to generate more content. In the next chapter, I show you these content creation tools, along with tools that help you find and engage the social customer.