Shift Your Focus: How Outcome-Centered Content Converts to Higher Sales
Now more than ever, customers want to find the answers to their problems before they even ask. For businesses to successfully deliver on that need, they must prioritize strategic, outcome-focused messaging over product-focused messaging.
Across all industries, it’s this approach that’s driving customers through the sales funnel. Below are some steps you can take to embark on a similar path of outcome-focused messaging and higher sales conversions.
Uncover customer pain points
Content that increases engagement and generates more leads is almost always centered around customer motivators.
Where product and service-oriented, “me-me-me” centric messaging historically lacks the essential intelligence customers need to make confident decisions on complex matters, while outcome-focused messaging compels customers to take action.
Start with a series of strategic content exercises to identify key customer challenges. Five of the most common steps in journey-mapping exercises include:
- Developing customer personas
- Identifying customer goals
- Mapping customer touch points
- Uncovering customer pain points and aligning them with your solution offerings
Leverage surveys, your own data, and third-party research to clearly understand what will create a meaningful dialogue with customers.
Shift your content strategy
It’s no secret that need fulfillment motivates customers to make purchases. For content to convert successfully to sales, marketers must start with persona research that gives a clear understanding of current and future customer needs.
In a recent example from DemandLab, attendees of our client’s geostrategy event were included in a drip-email campaign that spoke to the supply chain disruptions we knew concerned them most. We leveraged insights from the event’s key highlights to engage our client’s audience and take them a step further into the sales funnel. This campaign marked the beginning of a shift in our client’s ability to meet new sales goals, and it enabled them to transition from one-off content pieces to strategic messaging aligned with their customers’ journeys.
Stress solutions
If you’re not willing to make a big deal about how you can solve your customers’ problems, someone else will. Not only is it essential in today’s competitive landscape to market the ways that you specifically solve customer problems, but you must also make it easy for customers to find that information.
In the early stages of research, it’s important to:
- Listen to how your customers express problems and goals
- Use the customers’ language to communicate back to them across all channels
- Reinforce “customer-first” values by identifying solutions to stated challenges
In our client’s example, highlighted above, they used phrasing that was already familiar to the audience, related to global threats, competition for resources, climate justice, and localized conflict, to bring attention to the fact that their organization was dialed into customer concerns and providing solutions to problems our client’s customers needed help addressing.
Build a foundation for profitable, future customers
Providing an optimal customer experience is the responsibility of the entire company, with marketing taking the lead as the one team engaging the most with customers through longer and more digital journeys. When we promote just our own products and services, we are missing opportunities for long-standing customer relationships and — ultimately — revenue. By developing a content framework around customer challenges, marketers show audiences that they understand them, care about their needs, and define priorities based on those needs. It becomes about partnering to solve a problem, not just getting the next sales target through the door.
Do you need proof of how strategic messaging can produce revenue? Read how a global market intelligence enterprise did it in just 18 months with DemandLab.