How to Better Understand Your B2B Audience: Get to Know Their Content Intent

Have you ever gated a content asset only to find that out of 300 people who completed the lead-gen form, just a (very small) handful were genuine, qualified leads?

This is most likely because those who downloaded the asset weren’t ever really leads – they were searching for valuable content and willing to provide their email in exchange for it. Their intent was informational, not transactional.

When B2B marketers aren’t aligned with their audience’s intent, it can lead to disastrous results. So what are the two types of intent?

• Informational intent: Your audience wants to consume content based on their own research or interests. Informational content is meant to help your audience be more informed when they're ready to convert and make a purchasing decision.
• Transactional intent: Audience members take action with the purpose of completing a transaction. Content they’re seeking is more advertorial – showcasing how great you are and reinforcing that what you’re selling is what they’re looking for.

But it’s important to understand that only about 10% of your audience is at this lower stage of the funnel. For example, on LinkedIn, about 89% of the audience uses it as a research tool before purchasing decisions are made. Therefore, content on this channel should be aimed at satisfying the audience’s informational intent.

There are some other compelling reasons why you’d want to focus on content higher up in the funnel:

1. Most of the buyer's journey in B2B is spent on building trust and convincing, rather than converting.
2. Informational intent takes up about two-thirds of the average buyer’s journey.
3. Most audiences have informational intent when they’re consuming the most content.

Because we can’t predict when a customer requires informational or transactional content, all we can do as marketers is to be there with relevant transactional content – being “always on” when the customer decides to convert. Generally, it’s good practice to have slightly more informational-related content, and less transactional; however, there’s no one-size-fits all approach.

Read the source article on Content Marketing Institute.