To get leads from uneducated markets, go after potential buyers, not after learners
When I talk to business owners who struggle with content strategy, they typically have one of the following challenges:
- they get high traffic volume but not enough leads
- they get leads, but of poor quality
- they get leads who are genuinely interested in the service, but not willing to pay for it
It happens with both enterprise clients and medium-size companies, and in most cases, these are consequences of going after the wrong audience.
To get leads that convert, you need to go after potential buyers, not after learners. Unless, of course, your product is some form of educational material.
How do you know who’s a potential buyer and who’s just trying to gain more knowledge on a topic? A potential buyer uses specific queries when searching.
These queries are more likely to result in conversions because:
- the user is aware of the problem, so you don’t have to spend too much time educating him
- the user is actively searching for a solution
Now, what if you sell something so unique that the market is not even aware it exists? You may be tempted to put all your marketing efforts into building awareness.
If your target audience doesn’t know that such a tool exists, they will not look for it, so you can’t rely on search queries with high volume when writing your content or copy.
The solution for getting your product in front of them, without wasting time and money on awareness, is to hook into their story, to build on what they already know about.
Here’s what I mean. Your users don’t know about your tool, but they know:
- what their problem is,
- the approach they’re currently using for solving the problem,
- and that their current approach is failing
So what you need to do if you want these people to try out your tool is to hook into their reality and start from there. Present your solution as the replacement or alternative to what they’re currently using.
By approaching your content from this perspective, you shift from creating content for “brand awareness” to publishing content for the middle and the bottom of the funnel.
This type of content is more likely to attract leads from an uneducated market and it doesn’t completely exclude the brand building.
Thanks Andreea, for this insight. It's something I was thinking about lately a lot and this clarifies my thoughts a bit.
Great tips and a unique insight and perspective to tackle this issue.
Thanks for sharing, Andreea!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Hi, thanks for your comment and for sharing the link, this is indeed a great example for how to segment the target audience and adjust your message.
I'll give two examples, hopefully they will help you.
First one is from a tool that helps webshops improve their customer retention. This company targets both big webshops and smaller ones. For the big webshops, their audience is split in two main segments:
For the first segment, the content is tailored around increasing AOV, retention and receiving insights from customer data that can help them make better assortment & campaign decisions.
For the second segment, the content talks mainly about how the tool integrates with their webshop, how it receives the data, how it can be customized and so on. It's also presented as an alternative to manual customer segmentation, which is what a lot of these people do.
So in this case, we're hooking into this story: if you're analyzing your customer data manually, or using Excel, there's an awesome replacement (our product) and it's all automated.
Another example from myself: I write about content strategy and I target two audiences: first one is marketing managers, CEOs, owners, e-commerce managers, and the second one is content marketers.
For the first audience, I know that their main pain points are the governance, processes and the big picture - how content integrates in the digital marketing landscape.
With this segment I'm not wasting time explaining what is content strategy, because they aren't going to implement anything themselves. So I target them directly with the big picture topics: orchestration, frameworks, processes, governance models, CMS vision development and integrations.
With the second segment, my goal is to make them buy a course while teaching them how to go from a content marketer role to a content strategist role. So I'm giving them content that's taking what they know - for example, that they need a content calendar or a content plan, and showing them how this integrates in the big picture.
From there, I tell them about aligning goals with the business goals, developing a roadmap, interviewing stakeholders for identifying topics, content lifecycle stages and so on.
The first audience typically converts extremely fast, after 1 article or 2. The second audience typically converts after 4-5 articles, when they realize that it makes more sense to have all the information in one place instead of getting isolated pieces.
As I'm aiming directly for conversions, I don't cover general topics that attract beginners, so I don't write about what is content strategy or what is content marketing or x tips for creating better content.
Please let me know if I can help you with implementation!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.