| Amanda Hicken 
As children, we learn how to ask questions, share our opinions politely and work well with others. Of course, mastering the art of conversation is a process that never ends. We each have our own conversational roadblocks to overcome, and the only way to do that is with constant practice. The same can be said for the marketing and PR industries, as we find ourselves challenged by the impact of buyer 2.0. Until digital channels opened up new avenues for discovering and sharing information, the interactions that businesses had with potential customers revolved primarily around the transaction. The sales pitch and advertisements ruled the day. However, today's customers are researching their options, eliminating potential vendors, and making decisions on their own. By the time someone contacts your organization to discuss a purchase, most of the buying cycle has already occurred. Don't look at this as a problem, though. Our white paper Understanding How Buyer 2.0 Impacts Your Approaches to Demand Generation lays out the incredible opportunity we face as public relations and marketing professionals. "Buyers favor what PR firms and departments can best deliver—informative, story-driven content," it reads. "But PR professionals must improve and rethink the way they create and distribute their messages, aligning them with the buyer's journey." To understand your buyer's journey in a way that's truly productive, the sales pitch must be replaced with conversations backed by data and research. All day, every day, your organization is interacting with potential and current customers. Face-to-face meetings, phone calls, online interactions, and industry events are all powerful tools in learning how to create and promote marketing content that connects with this audience. In turn, the content you create based off of these interactions can even be used to enable future conversations. The point of every conversation – be it direct (call, email, etc.) or indirect (online content) — is to establish and develop a mutually beneficial partnership with your audience. Discover what will be beneficial and relevant to your audience by asking questions and listening to their answers. What does your audience care about? The first time you meet a new person, you say hello and learn something about them. These early exchanges provide context that will inform future conversations. Similarly, you need to gather background information about your brand’s target audience by asking them who they are and what they care about. Background questions to ask your audience can include: - Can you tell me about yourself?
- How do you go about your day?
- What challenges do you face?
- What does success in overcoming these challenges look like?
Note: ‘Can you tell me about yourself?’ should be broken down into more specific demographic questions.. What are your audience's plans for today and tomorrow? With the above information in hand, you can begin to assess your audience's state of affairs and where they want to go. Your audience's current and future plans can uncover content ideas that help them achieve their dreams. Ask questions such as: - What are your goals and what are you currently doing to achieve them?
- What sort of success have you been experiencing?
- What has been keeping you from achieving the success you want?
- What do you want to achieve in the future?
What resources are currently available to your audience? Your audience has resources that may enable — or limit — certain buying decisions. Understanding what those resources are will help you provide content that speaks to solutions within their resources range and offer reasons to indulge additional resources. - What tools are you using to achieve objectives?
- What is your budget?
- What are your time constraints?
What's needed by your audience to move forward? Round out your intel by understanding what else is needed to convert audiences from interested prospect to happy customer. - Who else has a say in the purchase decision?
- Who else will be affected by the decision?
- What communications channels and content formats do you prefer?
- What are reasons and roadblocks for not proceeding with a particular solution?
With answers to these – and other – questions, you can begin to build buyer personas and map content journeys that appeal to your audience's informational needs and preferences. Pair this research with analytics to provide a truly satisfying customer experience. As you publish and distribute content across your owned, paid, social, and other channels, dive into analytics to identify what's working and how to improve your approach in the future. In his CMO Essentials guide, PR Newswire's Senior Vice President of Marketing Ken Wincko recommends looking beyond page views and click-throughs. "Shift your focus to build analytics on the elasticity of content performance (how content converts vs number of views it gets), velocity (when and how it is consumed, along with next steps taken), and contribution to pipeline and revenue," he writes. "Ultimately, you need to be able to track who is consuming what, where, and when they're consuming it, and how it's impacting the buying process." These insights will help you create a compelling narrative around your product or service, offer the experience buyers want, and deliver the revenue results you need. If you're attending next week's Marketing Nation Summit, you can hear more about creating an excellent customer experience from PR Newswire's very own Ken Wincko. Check out the presentation schedule below for more information. Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit
Keynote Topic: The Future of Customer Experience
May 11, Las Vegas Author Amanda Hicken is PR Newswire's senior manager of strategic content and managing editor of Beyond PR. Follow her on Twitter @ADHicken for tweets about marketing, the media, Cleveland, and comic books. | 
