Rebalance B2B Content Marketing for Buyer Enablement

Infographics. White papers. Case studies. Thought leadership. There is no shortage of content available to the modern B2B buyer. Although such content markets products and sells services, it does not help buyers buy.

That is the role of buyer enablement content — content that provides the information and tools customers need to more easily complete critical buying jobs such as identifying problems and selecting suppliers. Yet the content that most marketers produce does not focus on buyer enablement.

In a Gartner review of over 500 supplier content assets, only 20% of content was categorized as buyer enablement, while 42% was devoted to lead capture and nurturing.

Read more: Marketing’s Role in Buyer Enablement

As shown in the figure above, that content distribution reflects the digital customer engagement strategy most marketers currently pursue, where content consumption is seen as a viable proxy for purchase progression.

With so much online buying activity, most marketers need to move their content portfolios away from traditional content and toward buyer enablement. This shift in digital customer engagement strategy requires marketers to reallocate resources to produce different kinds of content altogether, including:

• Calculator: Provides a simple, structured way to analyze data
• Simulator: Demonstrates how the solution will work in the customer’s context
• Recommender: Provides a clear, prioritized set of options for a particular purchase task based on customer inputs
• Benchmark: Provides customers with hard-to-find data for peer comparison
• Diagnostic: Provides customers a useful framework for assessing performance or identifying their options

The benefits are clear: Buyer enablement content makes the purchase process easier for customers and dramatically increases the size of B2B deals while decreasing purchase regret.

Learn more: Marketing-fueled buyer enablement