Every business professional knows that the key to delivering best-in-class experiences is to truly know your customer.
But once you understand where your prospects and customers are and how they want to engage with you, messaging and content strategies become critical. Optimizing investment in your marketing content ensures you’re speaking your customers’ language, reflecting their needs, and offering solutions to their problems – rather than simply selling your products. Knowing exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with a particular piece of content is also necessary to get the most bang for your buck. Enter use cases.
Know your use case.
Carefully crafting marketing messages, designing digital experiences, or selecting communication channels will only lead to success when you understand both the requirements, motivations, and journeys of your target customer and exactly what your business is trying to achieve with that message, experience, or communication. This is why personas are only one part of the equation. Use cases enable marketers to align content to top business priorities increasing the likelihood of an effective campaign.
In our experience, B2B marketers typically need their content to do one or more of the following things:
- Drive top of funnel awareness for a solution, brand, or suite of offerings
- Assist with brand repositioning
- Help launch a new product, service, or solution
- Facilitate entry into a new or adjacent market
- Generate demand
- Facilitate storytelling at large events (in-person and virtual)
Knowing your specific use case is critical to a successful content strategy since it guides:
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Messaging
Marketing teams typically have a slew of messages at their fingertips. But knowing exactly what to focus on can be daunting. Use cases help narrow down the message to only what’s most relevant. When launching a new solution, for example, it’s critical that your content includes the challenges your offering solves. But, getting into the nitty gritty of solution criteria is often far too specific for a campaign meant to aid top of funnel awareness.
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Format
It’s true that audience is an important driver of content format – C-suite executives rarely have more than a few spare moments to be attentive, making short-form content a must. But use case should also be a factor when crafting your content. While a short, eye-catching video may be better suited to a large event where you want to quickly grab the attention of hundreds of attendees, thought leadership in the form of an eBook can serve you well as the anchor of a brand repositioning campaign.
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Activation
How you disseminate your content should also be shaped by your specific use case. Campaigns focused on demand generation, for instance, need to be more tactical than content where the goal is high-level awareness. Actions like gating critical content pieces, producing personalized insights with localized assets, or providing interactive assessments can help drive engagement while providing your sales teams with more qualified leads.
Use Cases in Action: The Big Village Approach
Big Village is committed to helping our clients create compelling content to achieve their business goals. One client, Change Healthcare, aimed to develop thought leadership content that would drive demand for its APIs. To uncover compelling insights around API adoption, usage, value and decision-making across the healthcare industry, we gathered perspectives from healthcare providers, payers, and healthcare technology companies via an online survey as well as eight follow-up phone interviews.
Big Village collaborated with Change Healthcare to design the survey and the follow-up questions to ensure the results would be of interest to the target audience. After executing the research, we presented the results, highlighting key takeaways Change Healthcare could leverage in its thought leadership efforts.
The project provided a clear story about the importance of APIs in the healthcare ecosystem, how organizations use them, the benefits of increased API maturity, hurdles to overcome, and trends in standards. Big Village designed select visuals to Change Healthcare’s requirement for external dissemination and delivered detailed charts, tables, and verbatims quotations to arm Change Healthcare with a library of material to leverage in its marketing efforts. Change Healthcare released an eBook and an infographic using these materials.
Need Help Moving Forward?
In today’s complex, omnichannel environment, how do you cut through all the noise to reach your audience and achieve your goals? Big Village can assist you at every step from determining the best approach to delivering fully designed content to activating that content as part of a larger marketing plan. Our methodologies can be tailored to your needs and audiences, and a dedicated team of B2B experts will provide a collaborative, consultative approach. For more information on how Big Village can help, check out our Content Marketing Solutions or contact us!
Written by Rachel Linthwaite, Senior Director, B2B Practice at Big Village