Here are some resources that might help with your marketing activities—they’re stripped-out/anonymous versions of the same resources we use with our clients.
We’ve kept them pretty basic so you can easily adapt and extend. Our suggestion is to use them as starting points or structural guidelines, and to make them fit your own specific circumstances and needs. Of course, please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about how best to utilize them or run into challenges!
Resource
Description
A buying barrier is anything that, from your prospect’s perspective, stops or slows their purchase (or adoption, in non-commercial relationships) of a solution.
Understanding buying barriers puts you in position to:
This Excel workbook lets you document and prioritize your own buying barriers, and includes a completed example.
You can learn more about buying barriers in How to Boost Your Business by Overcoming Buying Barriers.
Purposeful content, rather than content just for content’s sake, is a crucial part of most marketing strategies.
This Word document helps you create a purposeful content plan that supports larger marketing and corporate objectives.
Well-developed solution and use case messaging speak the market’s language and appeal to prospects’ desire to solve problems.
This Word document helps you plan your solutions and use cases, including documenting supporting information and identifying content gaps.
You can read about a real-world application of the Solutions and Use Cases Library in Bridging a Gap, which tells the story of creating a brand new solution and use case hierarchy for a client.
Customer success stories form an important subset of an effective marketing content library. They offer significant utility—they provide social proof/validation (important for crossing the ol’ chasm, because no one wants to be the first penguin in the water), they can address buying barriers, they’re very shareable, they can be transformed for use almost anywhere and in multiple formats—while being relatively easy to produce.
This Word document helps you gather and manage the information needed to write effective customer success stories.
For more related information, including explanations of why each question is important, check out Crafting Compelling Customer Success Stories—Asking the Right Questions.
Most content of any significance isn’t just pulled together and pushed out—instead, it’s planned with a goal in mind, it’s circulated to a handful of reviewers, and it might have many dependencies.
This Word document gives you the best chance to succeed with your content by capturing a goal, an owner, reviewer responsibilities, deadlines, and dependencies.
You can read more about some of the issues this resource is intended to help you avoid in How to Avoid (or Escape) the Content Review Doldrums.