Content marketing for building materials manufacturers works just like all other B2B marketing today where educating the buyer becomes the top priority. The reason dispensing information to buyers is important is because it’s very difficult for many of those buyers to differentiate between you and your competitors. B2B buyers simply don’t want to have to make an educated decision on who to contract with without having definitive data available to weigh the options.
Most Buyers Learn About You Online First
Much of this gets done through content marketing, though how do you make it synonymously educative and entertaining? You probably think that educating a buyer is impossible without being overly dull and ponderous in listing specs of your products.
This isn’t necessary, especially when you better understand what your buyers need. You have to do one important thing before you create content. Then you can create content that’s more personal, which is still a missing element in B2B marketing.
The Process of Buyer Personas
Evidence continues to show how effective creating buyer personas for marketing is to make your content more personal. For the building materials industry, it’s even more imperative because your buyers are going to want different things. If you start creating content without knowing exactly what they’re looking for, you’ll waste time and effort while ruining the higher ROI you hoped would happen.
Creating buyers works similarly to creating fictional characters, except you’re cobbling them together from existing information you already have on your main demographics. With personas, you determine certain behavioral information and what their typical buying habits are.
Most importantly, you also determine how specific buyers react to content you create. This helps you narrow down what type of content marketing you need to do and what type of media you should use.
When developing content, imagine that you are giving advice to a friend. You would be truthful and explain the pros and cons of your product to help him make the best decision. In other words, you would be credible.
You would also tell what to watch out for or how to be more successful which may not have a direct relationship to your product. A good example of how to do this is Exteria Building Products.
The Best Sources for Conveying Information
Perhaps you’ll determine in your buyer persona creation that many of your buyers prefer visual content while learning about building material products they buy. This isn’t necessarily surprising when you consider how popular videos are now for all content marketing.
You open a wider creative palette with videos because you can convey information while also being entertaining. Plus, personalization is possible because you can talk to a buyer almost like a close friend during narration. Your only challenge is how to approach your video content.
A good method is giving a personal tour of your manufacturing plant so prospective buyers see exactly what you do in producing your materials. This includes introducing some of your employees who put everything together. As a result, you open a door to transparency, especially if you do one other thing: a demonstration on how your products get made.
Yes, there isn’t anything more enticing than proving that you use environmentally friendly procedures and use high-quality materials when making your products. Even if you have to break up your videos into short segments, showing the actual production process in real-time is one piece of information buyers appreciate.
Regardless, it still doesn’t leave room for more detailed product data.
Other Outlets for More Detailed Specs
Videos aren’t always long enough to provide the detailed specs buyers also want. A video, though, is a potential call to action for buyers to check out more information in other media forms. This means an e-book or a whitepaper you create that provides every detail the buyer needs to know.
By using this progression in marketing, you lead buyers from an entertaining visual medium to text-filled material giving more dry information. At least by this point, you’ve established the strongest points in content marketing of being personal and informative without putting viewers to sleep.
Contact us if you’d like to learn more ways to grow your sales.
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