"If you're only focused on designing your marketing content to make an isolated connection with a specific persona, you're not stretching your content strategy far enough," warns Ardath Albee in a post at the Marketing Interactions blog. As we all know, B2B marketers often have to sell to an entire team of prospects to get one sale through the pipeline. Therefore, simply creating a dialogue with one prospect isn't enough: "You've got to get your ideas into the conversations that happen between the prospect and other stakeholders involved in the decision," says Albee.

So, how do you get your company name "in the room" earlier in the prospect's decision-making process? "Content design," Albee says.

She offers these tips for "designing content that inspires conversations":

• Develop content to match your buyers' perspective.
• Address obstacles they may face in relation to people—not just technology, integration, or features.
• Enable prospects to visualize how their situation will change if they solve the problem.
• Remove the risk of failure with customer success stories that go beyond the boring versions that are solely about products. "Think user adoption, process change and other things that can lead to failure even if your product works perfectly on its own. Those are the things that really scare people," she notes.
• Help them build a realistic business case with tangible evidence they can apply to their own situations.

A key to designing all of the above is "doing the research and learning as much as you can about the people involved and the specific situations they're each facing," Albee concludes.

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