According to Gartner, customers spend at least 45% of their time researching.
That includes:
- Identifying the problem to solve with software
- Exploring the software solution
- Narrowing down the suppliers
And guess where 51% of buyers are looking for answers? The internet. According to Andy Crestodina, CMO of Orbit Media Solutions,
“Content is the reason people visit websites”.
If you invest heavily in content marketing, you’re probably mad about analytics data. CTRs, impressions, views, traffic sources, engagement rate, and more. You probably have a pulse on how your content is performing across channels.
Having such a data-driven approach to content marketing means you’re making calculated moves. It also ensures your content is hyper-visible to your potential customers by securing the top spot on Google. Sadly, it isn’t what will get them to take action.
Then, what will? Content that’s value-driven.
What is Value-Driven Content?
Value-driven content is one part of inbound lead generation that uses blog posts, case studies, e-books, webinars, podcasts, and whitepapers to keep prospects on top of industry trends, provide expert knowledge, provide solutions to buyer problems and cater to their interests.
The goal is to help customers make quicker purchase decisions through unique, insightful, and relevant content while establishing trust.
Why Value-Driven Content is a Competitive Advantage
1. It Builds Trust
53% of consumers globally consider brand trust as one of the most important factors when buying from a brand. They assess a company's trustworthiness on three fronts:
- Can the brand deliver on its promises?
- Can the brand solve buyer problems?
- Does the brand share our beliefs?
And in the SaaS space, such trust is built predominantly in the research stage.
B2B buyers consume an average of eight vendor sources and five third-party sources. That means, if you can provide them with value at this stage, you’re more likely to join their consideration list.
And you don’t even have to produce content at scale. You can build trust in limited interactions as well.
When you constantly churn out value-driven content that solves your customer's pain points, there's a greater chance they will discover your content during the research stage. This does two things –
a) Builds brand recognition
b) Demonstrates your product expertise
Both of these build trust that eventually drives conversions.
2. Positions You as Authority
The new era of sales is all about digital word of mouth. Product recommendations made in Reddit threads, forum discussions, LinkedIn comments, and in other social spaces, are the ones driving most sign-ups for SaaS products.
And how do you make sure you’re part of all such conversations? You publish content to solve buyer pains instead of only serving sales enablement. That’s how you use content to build trust and position your brand as an authority in your niche.
Some brands are already using value-driven content to position themselves as thought leaders and share their unique insights. Here's how two SaaS companies are doing it.
Drift, an AI-based chatbot tool, created a whole new niche for itself by capitalizing on the term ‘conversational marketing’ in 2016.
They have an active blog that:
- Educates prospects about their products
- Gives regular product updates
- Gives insight into the functioning of the company
- And even informs customers about changes in the company’s vision and direction
Besides that, the company routinely conducts surveys, shares its findings through detailed and ungated reports, conducts webinars, and even has a couple of free podcasts with industry leaders.
Thanks to these efforts, the company today has a roster of over 50,000 customers.
BrowserCompany, an up-and-coming fast, secure, and minimal Chrome alternative follows a different approach with its content. Although the product isn't public yet, the company already has a content strategy.
First, the folks at BrowserCompany used their Twitter circles to soft launch their product and get beta testers for it.
For instance, the company's CEO, Josh Miller, leverages his massive following and routinely publishes Twitter threads (like this one) delving into the intent behind the product. After that, their company blog typically expands on these ideas and fleshes out the founder's unique viewpoint.
The tweets and the blog are extremely popular and receive incredible engagement. This reads as peer trust to prospects coming across the company for the first time. Thereby making them more likely to try the product.
3. Complements SEO Efforts
If you didn’t already know, Google ranks a piece of content higher if it fulfills the following parameters:
- Useful and informative
- Credible
- More valuable than other sites
- Is high quality
- Is engaging
Value-driven content is all of the above by design. And aids your on-page SEO efforts. This is why it is more likely to rank higher, even if you don't stuff keywords to improve its ranking.
How to Get Started With Value-Driven Content?
Now that you know about value-driven content, the next step is to get started. So here's how you go about it.
- Develop buyer personas for your customers and understand their motivations for purchasing a product and their pain points.
- Craft a value proposition that sets your product apart from your competitors.
- Create a value statement for your company to follow when engaging with prospects and make it public. This should shed light on the problems your product solves, the benefits of using the service, and the advantages for your buyer.
- Now craft content pieces that align with your value proposition and help your buyer with research. This will build brand awareness and trust and eventually nudge them to purchase your product.
Lead image source.