B2B sales is a process. You have to take prospects from the initial moment of awareness to becoming a credible and trusted partner. Awareness marks the beginning of the sales process – people can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist. Unfortunately, in most cases simply being known isn’t enough to close a B2B sale.
One of the final steps in a sales cycle is credibility. This is the point where your prospects believe you can solve their problems. Only when your prospects trust you, your products, and your company are they ready to partner up. However, between these stages is a huge gap in the sales cycle where prospects need to be nurtured, reassured, and enlightened.
Previously, your sales team would step in and address this need directly. Today, however, 60-90% of the B2B sales cycle happens before a prospect ever reaches out to a potential vendor. To bridge this sale gap effectively, you must be providing consistent educational, insightful, and even industry-disrupting content.
More and more buyers prefer self-directed research and rely on content they find from trusted sources to inform their decisions. Therefore, your content must provide information that your ideal customer finds beneficial, and it has to reach them through a trusted channel. As a result, B2B publicity and generating positive press coverage are becoming essential pillars that growing businesses increasingly rely on.
Read on to find out why you should be educating your target audience to build trust, drive engagement, and boost long-term loyalty.
1. Educational Content Influences the Decision-making Process
It may feel a little scary knowing that your potential customers could go almost the entire way through the purchasing process before you even know they are looking. However, it’s only a problem if you don’t know how to solve it.
Let’s begin with the content itself and we will discuss getting it into the right hands below.
Your B2B buyer is looking for content that helps them solve a problem. Therefore, your content must deliver that in a story that is engaging and helpful. At the same time, that story needs to guide them (softly) to your solution.
This is a perfect place for sales and marketing to work together. What are some common sales questions or hurdles that have to be overcome to move a sale forward? Are there issues your prospects are grappling with? What objections are your sales team likely to encounter?
Once you have that list, you can begin to tackle the content.
2. Deep Dive into Your Prospects Underlying Issues
B2B purchasing decisions are fundamentally different from consumer transactions. They often involve multiple stakeholders, rigorous evaluation processes, and considerations beyond just price and features.
At the core of these decisions lie identifiable pain points—challenges or inefficiencies that businesses seek to overcome to improve operations, reduce costs, enhance efficiency, or achieve strategic goals.
One of the primary advantages of educating your target audience is that it allows you to identify and address these pain points directly. Educational content provides valuable insights and actionable solutions tailored to your audience’s specific challenges, positioning your products or services as viable solutions, without the sales hype. This is where you will want to explain your value proposition and differentiators as solutions and benefits – not as products and features.
By presenting well-researched data, industry trends, and real-world examples, companies can demonstrate their understanding of the challenges faced by their target market.
3. Educating your Target Audience Builds Trust
This is where it gets tricky and where most companies and PR agencies will fail. You have to create content that connects with the buyer as well as the other people who are influencing the purchasing decision – which could be the CFO, CEO, engineer, etc. Each of these groups may have different goals and it is your job to give them a story that clearly outlines the benefits for them.
Let’s be clear, no one wants to read a sales piece about your products – boring. They want you to tackle their problems for them and then show them a solution. Better yet is if you can show them how you solved the same problem for another company. For the ultimate story, get that company to do the talking for you.
It may be counterintuitive, but you don’t have to “sell” or convince a B2B buyer in most cases. Once they see the benefits of your solution, they will connect the dots and put you on the short list of people they reach out to.
Educating your target audience with insightful stories will go a long way in developing credibility and trust. This is critical in B2B relationships where needs are specific, markets are often niche, and decisions involve big investments and long-term commitments. By addressing common pain points and offering actionable advice, companies can nurture leads more effectively through the entire sales funnel.
Educational content plays a key role in developing this trust by offering in-depth expertise.
A Mini Case Study in Educational Content
As an example of how this can play out, we had a client who completely revolutionized the cybersecurity industry. Instead of confronting cyberattacks with more hardware and software solutions – a never-ending battle of spending more to barely stay ahead – our client decided to tackle the root of the problem, people.
According to Verizon’s annual cybersecurity report, up to 90% of all cyberattacks stem from a human failure. Therefore, our client created a customizable cybersecurity training program that utilized human psychology to curate course content around each person’s risk assessment.
Companies who used it greatly reduced their risk profile and were thrilled, but because it was new it was not always an easy sell to CISOs. The company lacked awareness and credibility, but it also needed to be able to demonstrate through unbiased content the benefits of its training platform to greatly reduce risk.
We utilized some of our client’s customers who had shown dramatic improvements in being able to thwart potential breaches and created articles around the use of behavioral science to combat cyberattacks. With their customers describing the issues they had, what they tried before that had fallen short, and how this new set of training was a game changer.
4. A Trusted Source to Deliver the Message
Now that we had the content, it was time to get it into the hands of the client’s ideal customers through a trusted source. This meant we could not rely upon simply putting on the company website, we needed it to be perceived as unbiased and credible.
Through a dedicated public relations campaign, we rolled out our insightful, educational, and in this case, very disruptive content and got it published in hundreds of target industry publications. In doing so, the client saw a windfall of inbound sales leads, and revenue skyrocketed.
Here is an example from Cyber Protection Magazine which published one of our articles featuring our client cyberconIQ. By effectively addressing a huge pain point within their audience, we helped their potential customers move through the sales cycle faster and more confidently.
This sharing of innovative ideas—from trends analysis and practical solutions to common industry problems—demonstrates your proactive approach to addressing current and emerging problems.
5. Educating your Target Audience Positions You as a Go-To Resource for Industry Knowledge
When your content addresses common industry challenges or provides unique perspectives, it becomes shareable and positions your brand as a thought leader in the industry. Educational content not only attracts potential customers actively seeking solutions but also increases your brand’s visibility among industry investors.
Thought leadership goes beyond showcasing expertise—it involves shaping industry discourse, influencing trends, and driving innovation. When a brand consistently offers valuable insights and solutions through its content, it earns the trust and respect of its audience.
Offering cutting-edge products or competitive pricing is great, but that alone does not adequately bridge the sales gap. Therefore, focusing your messaging here is likely where you are losing out on ideal opportunities.
While product features and pricing are important factors in purchasing decisions, educational content offers a distinct advantage by providing value beyond the transactional aspects. This is particularly advantageous in industries characterized by rapid innovation and advancements, such as technology, energy, AI, and cybersecurity.
Customers and stakeholders expect companies to be knowledgeable about emerging trends, disruptive technologies, and evolving regulations that could impact their operations or decision-making processes. Educational content plays a pivotal role in meeting this expectation by providing timely and relevant information that keeps audiences abreast of industry developments and provides them with a deeper understanding of how your solutions can address their evolving needs effectively.
6. Educating your Target Audience Drives Conversions
Nurturing leads and converting them into loyal customers requires more than just promotional messaging. One of the key advantages of using educational content in lead nurturing is its ability to demonstrate the value of your offerings.
Case studies that highlight successful implementations, how-to guides that offer practical advice, or industry reports that analyze trends show prospects the tangible benefits of choosing your brand.
Another advantage is that educational content is highly effective throughout the entire buyer’s journey. At the awareness stage, businesses can attract prospects with informative content that addresses common pain points or industry challenges. As prospects move into the consideration stage, businesses can provide in-depth analyses or comparison guides that help prospects evaluate their options. Finally, at the decision stage, educational content can offer testimonials, demonstrations, or free trials that encourage prospects to take the final step toward conversion.
Guiding potential customers through the buyer’s journey with educational content helps prospects understand the value of your offerings and how your product can address their specific needs better than any other.
In the past, product education was a supplementary tactic used by sales reps in the pitching process. Now, it’s clear that it’s evolved into a vital tactic in closing deals. If you are not empowering potential customers with knowledge and insights that help them feel safe and secure in their decision-making process, then now is the time to get started.
Ready to make educational content the cornerstone of your PR and marketing strategy? Reach out to us at Rankin PR; we’d like to help! We are a professional B2B PR Agency that specializes in amplifying awareness and building credibility through amazing brand storytelling.