Dear Reader,
Happy New Year!
Nice to see you after a very long time!
Did you know?
Gartner’s future of sales report suggests that 80% of B2B Sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025.
With technological advancements and AI dominating the start of 2024 news, Gartner’s research points towards a continuous increase in business-to-business sales via digital channels.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, top-performing businesses conduct customer analysis, research, and reports on their audience to identify customer preferences, trends, and changes in the market.
Content Marketing Institute Research demonstrates that having digital channels helps identify information quickly through metrics. Building a subscribed audience, nurturing a subscribed audience, and generating sales require an automated flow relying on digital methods. More and more businesses are looking at digitally systemising sales. Gartner says buyers are spending 17% of their time meeting potential suppliers.
If more and more businesses will be working on their online presence, then writing well-researched content that will change customers’ lives is beneficial in the long run. Important and relevant information must be available and updated for clients ready to proceed via digital mediums.
Having valuable information on social media, websites, email, blogs, newsletters, and industry forums adds immensely to clients’ research before their buying decisions.
How can your content enhance, appeal to, and help your customer?
Create compelling and informative information that builds trust with past, present, and exploring clients by solving customer problems via practical solutions.
Some ways to create compelling, educational content:
- Create infographics, charts, images, ebooks, articles, whitepapers, case studies, or video demonstrations.
- Use plain, professional, and easy-to-understand language.
- Honestly, highlight the benefits to the client, how it will improve their lives, and how it can solve their problem. Leave nothing unsaid, and answer all their questions, especially the questions clients are burning to ask but do not have the time to call and find out.
- The content should be informative and have true confidence in solving the problem.
- Ensure that your resources are always current with relevant trends and developments.
- Optimise your content with SEO so that you can be found by clients looking for help. SEO helps a company become the first point of call or preference of clients because of a company’s position in the search results on the search engine.
- Always have a call to action on your content for the customer to follow up with you.
Business-to-business sales require a lot of research. Customers and potential customers review several pieces of content to present to the top-level team to buy into the solution and its compatibility with the company’s needs.
Due to the customer journey not being straightforward, ensure that when clients are ready with their buying decision, there’s helpful information readily available.
What does valuable content do for your business in the long term?
- It builds trust with clients.
- It builds loyalty when valuable information can prove results and show research.
- It strengthens a business’ authority.
- It conveys that the business cares about serving its clients and responding to their needs.
How do top-performing companies serve their clients and show that they matter?
According to the Content Marketing Institute
- They keep the relationship together and build a long-term relationship through nurturing subscribers and existing customers. How? Keep adding value to your customers, even in the smallest of ways.
- Top companies measure what is working for the client through metrics and analysis of the data, feedback and data gathered through digital channels.
- They measure their content and how it performs.
- Continue building a strong subscriber list.
- Keep producing quality high-value content, customise and personalise where necessary, and nurture all interests that come on the back of subscriptions and other avenues,
- Track but not obsessively. Clients may not consider you today, but as the brand builds more awareness, they are more likely to return.
- Companies that provide value and put their clients’ challenges first are on their way to becoming top performers through expansion and sustainable growth. By reaching a little further each time, they become industry experts because of addressing and alleviating the root causes of client’s problems.
AI is useful for quick technological or mechanical responses, to get ideas from tools such as ChatGPT, or for swift analysis. Human elements, such as problem-solving, trust, empathy, expression, building relationships and understanding human emotions are human skills businesses need. Companies need workers who have soft and hard skills to operate AI. Facing clients, their questions, what works, what doesn’t, and innovative solutions come from human intelligence insights that have the potential to resolve customers’ pain and challenges through understanding and feeling customer emotions.
Human elements create case studies, storytelling, and content that touch people to make a change in their lives. AI tools can speed up things in certain areas, however, AI doesn’t see the difference between style, expression, or human-to-human speech. It would shift out everything through a theory that it’s programmed to do, such as grammar, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation.
I hope this has been helpful, useful, and not the same old same.
Good Luck for 2024!
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
