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ESG Tech Thought Leadership: Four Steps to Chart Your Path
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The environmental, social and governance (ESG) conversation is getting crowded. Capturing the market’s attention and getting your prospective buyers to embrace your vision for how to best tackle these issues is becoming a lot harder.
Content marketing is an invaluable tool for communicating your vision, the problems you solve, and why your approach to addressing ESG is better than the rest. In fact, 77% of B2B marketers use educational content as the primary method for nurturing their audience.
The best content engages readers, makes them smarter and gives them actionable advice and perspective to guide their decision-making. Here’s how to drive the most impact and educate your prospects with your content marketing.
1. Make your content a dialogue. Not a monologue.
If you’re basing your content off what you think is important, and not sourcing insights directly from your audience, you’ll struggle to gain meaningful attention. One-sided content doesn’t influence buyers to act.
Make your content more customer-centric by devoting time to research. Externally, there are groups and online communities where prospects are actively seeking advice from their peers. They’re essentially spelling out what type of content they’re looking for. Visit these groups to better understand the topics and content formats that will most resonate with your audience.
Internally, it may be helpful to connect with other departments in your organization, those that regularly interact with customers and prospects, to get their take on the content before releasing it to the public – perhaps they can share insights on what they think will resonate based on their market conversations and areas of expertise.
2. Address the big topics top of your prospects’ minds.
Forrester reports that 74% of B2B buyers do more than half of their research online before making a decision. Many buyers do this same level of research before deciding to even reach out to a potential vendor. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects – what might they need to learn from your site right away?
We typically think of sharing content with our audience iteratively as they progress through the buyer’s journey. But there is value to publishing key bottom-of-the-funnel content on your website so folks have access to it earlier on in their journey. One scenario: a prospect might need to know price estimates to see if a potential solution is in the budget before their supervisor will let them move forward with the process.
The top five topics most prospects are actively thinking about:
- Pricing
- Deployment timing
- Impact on existing data
- Time to ROI
- Customer references
Prospects shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to understand how you can help them in these areas. Make product demos, pricing details, ROI information and customer case studies easy to read, find and digest. If you don’t provide this level of education up front, you can bet one of your competitors will.
Interested in learning more? We recently released a full report on ESG tech PR and marketing. Give it a read and learn how you can get your content marketing and PR efforts to shine.
Looking for a little help? Request a complimentary marketing consult.
