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The persuasion.

Persuading someone of the value of your products or services and explaining those offerings to them are two very different things. Understanding the difference between them – and using them appropriately – is a critical skill for any marketer.

Introduction

I started my career in PR.  

The people we were trying to influence had (probably) never heard of the client company authoring the article or knew anything about how it might impact their working lives. Indeed, persuading them of the relevance of my client’s technology was the point of the whole exercise: you can’t sell medicine to someone that doesn’t believe that they’re ill.

I am therefore comfortable with having persuasion as an objective for my content. But, my more recent experience of B2B marketing suggests that most of the copywriters in it cleave more naturally to explaining. I’m not arguing that one is better than the other, merely that there is a distinction between the two that makes them suited to different parts of the customer journey.

By way of illustration, I recently had a brief on behalf of a low-code vendor to write about the use cases of their technology for Customer Experience (CX) professionals. Now, most of these people neither know nor care what low-code is and spend precisely no time wondering how they might use it in their day-to-day lives – so explaining the technology to them is entirely pointless. However, CX professionals do need to respond to volatile business conditions by rapidly spinning up new online services and iterating these rapidly in order to remove friction from the process: this is something at which low-code excels, so the challenge was to persuade them of the veracity of this claim.

The Summary

It’s a funnel thing

Prospects in the awareness phase of the funnel need to be persuaded of the validity of your client’s product or service, typically through educationally oriented thought leadership materials (remember, they don’t yet know they are ill!) such as analyst reports, white papers and e-books. Once they realise that their symptoms can be diagnosed as an illness for which you have a cure, you can then push them along the funnel until they are ready to have it explained to them: case studies, ROI tools and product demos are among a host of different materials that do this job well.

(Caveat. As this Just Global blog argues, you need to enable the customer journey, not dictate it. Some of your prospects may prefer to look at case studies at the start of their engagement with you and study analyst reports at the end – that’s entirely their prerogative.)

The Takeaway

You need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand where they are in relation to their understanding of (and therefore need for) your (or your client’s) offering.

Are they yet to be persuaded of the relevance of that offering? Or has the penny dropped, and they are ready to have its features and benefits explained to them? You should know the difference and brief your writers accordingly.

This is an extract from “The Write Stuff: Six things every B2B marketer should know about content creation”. This provides muggles (i.e., non-copywriters) with practical tips that will improve their understanding of what great content looks like – and uplift their ability to contribute positively to its creation.

To learn more about what great content looks like, download the full version of the eBook.

To find out how Just Global can help you ensure that great writing is at the heart of your campaigns, get in touch at: [email protected]