Content marketing is booming. According to the 2017 B2B Content Marketing Trends, 39% of companies are increasing investment in content marketing.

And yet most companies are not creating effective content. Want proof?

Two of the leaders in B2B funnel benchmarking, SiriusDecisions and Forrester, will tell you that inquiry-to-closed-won conversion ratios are often below two percent in most industries, even for those who follow best practices. Of course, if you go upstream of lead capture, the conversion rates of clicks or traffic to closed-won business are absolutely microscopic.

There are many reasons for these low conversion ratios. The competition is growing more intense every day, with avalanches of new content sliding into the market. And let’s face it, creating compelling content is hard.

In short, the market seems to believe that content creation, in and of itself, will win the day. It won’t. You really need the right content. Mastering the five critical steps below will increase the quality and effectiveness of your content significantly.

Step 1: Define Where You Can Win

Our own egos often lure us into the crazy idea of expanding our target market. I must have heard this type of sentiment a thousand times from otherwise thoughtful, intelligent people.

We do so in the name of economies of scale or because we fear missing out on revenue opportunities. Don’t do it. Focus, focus, focus. Start with a rigorous exercise of looking at your current customers for the solution you are trying to sell. Begin with qualitative intelligence-gathering. Talk to the best salespeople, the product team, the post-sales team, and the sales engineers:

• Who are your most profitable accounts and why?
• Which accounts have the greatest longevity and why?
• What do these accounts have in common?
• What accounts are unprofitable and why?
• How can we avoid them?

Step 2: Understand Your Audience

Once you are clear on the kinds of accounts, you want to attract and the value you offer, it’s time to understand the decision dynamics for your solution in those accounts. While you will want to look at the entire path to purchase, let’s focus our attention on the top of the funnel:

Who is most likely to buy the idea?

Not all everybody get to vote. You are really looking for one of those rare people inside an organisation who can influence others. Many try. Few succeed. Think about the functional role, the attitudes, the personality type, the credentials, the likely beliefs, and so on. This persona is who you are speaking to. Even when your message reaches others in the company, as it probably will, they will often find this person for you. Let them know who to look for.

What events trigger interest?

Trigger events can be positive or negative. These events can happen within a company or externally. They can happen on a day or over a long period of time.

The point is that those events often trigger companies into consideration for your solution. In many cases, these are problems your company can help address. You’ll want to understand what those trigger events are, like layoffs, leadership changes, new regulations or rapid growth. You can then reference or otherwise leverage one or more such trigger events to help connect what your buyer persona cares about to the possibility your solution might make a material difference.

Describing these trigger events clearly helps build for your prospect a bridge from what he or she understands to what he or she hasn’t considered.

What unconsidered needs can your solution address?

Generally, for people to change, they must feel the status quo is unsafe. And to do that, you must help them see what they do not see.

If you can quantify the benefit financially, you will empower your buyer persona with the universal language of money, a language that everyone understands.

What evidence can you present?

Again, you are not trying to win the sale here. You are only trying to earn enough commitment to move the prospect from their status quo to interest in having a conversation with your company.

Still, you must present sufficient evidence to make the promise you are making credible enough to warrant taking the time to take a deeper look at your solution. To do so, you will need to marshal sufficient evidence to address the key beliefs your buyer persona must have, both about your solution and the viability of your company.Ideally, you are getting most of this information through direct interviews and/or focus groups, augmented with simple surveys.

Step 3: Clearly Articulate Your True Value

Duh! Right? And yet how often do you see words like “leading,” “exceptional,” “largest,” “greatest,” and other unbelievable, vague, vacuous claims? One reason social media has become so popular is that people want another source of information they can trust: information from their friends or really anyone but the vendor and their media conspirators.

Part of the problem is that there is a LOT of things you can say about your solution and your company. But verbosity is confusing and boring. And if you really research your market, you’ll have a far more to share than you will need at the top of the funnel.

To find your value, you need to look at your solution through an honest, competitive lens and through the eyes of your customer. When doing so, you are looking for something your ideal customer wants badly that your competition doesn’t have.

Step 4: Define Your Objective

It’s important before you start to create content to consider your objective. It’s not to build your brand. That can certainly be something that happens as a by-product of your efforts, but it’s not the goal. The role of content at the top of the funnel is also not to generate clicks, traffic, inbound calls, or even leads, either. It’s also not to sell your product or service. That may be the endgame, but it’s not the objective at the top of the funnel.

I like to think of the objective as going to a party. Yes, you might secretly be hoping to meet the man or woman of your dreams, but you don’t go around asking someone who appeals to you to get married.

Rather, you’re just trying to spark a conversation, typically by being observant and interested in the other person. That’s the goal with demand generation. Show enough insight and interest to spark a conversation. Within the demand generation framework, each element must support that objective.

Step 5. Love Your Prospective Customers

This one may seem obvious, but there is a reason sales and marketing often have bad reputations in the public square. Loving your customers starts with being respectful and empathetic toward them. And that means being authentic and honest, even if your tone needs to be playful. Treat them the way you would want to be treated. To the best of your ability, you want to climb behind the eyes of your would-be champion and experience the world the way she does. The more deeply you connect with them, the more effective the story you will tell.

Of course, with these five steps, you still need to create the content and adapt the content to the most appropriate method(s) of contact.

You’ll also need to make sure that the content and messaging at the top of the funnel is congruent with what comes later on. But you’ll have a sound basis for breaking through the noise in the ever changing market because what you will offer will be rare, honest and true.