Touchpoints. They are critical to creating a successful B2B customer journey. But what content — the substance of many touchpoints — will create the awareness and engagement needed to drive consideration and sales? That’s the subject of this post.

Before we dive into content, it is important to recognize that the buying process is continually evolving. For example, today the B2B customer journey is no longer linear. It is a messy back-and-forth exploration where prospects jump between various steps in the buying process and take their own path from their door to yours.

In fact, according to industry analyst firm Gartner, customers often advance along the various steps in the buying process in parallel. Moreover, according to Accenture, most customers are 57% through their buying process before they meet with representatives of the vendors they are considering.

What this data makes clear is that organizing marketing and sales activities around the old sequential, linear funnel approach is no longer effective. Customers spend a great deal of time doing their own solution discovery and research — 45% of their time, in fact, according to a recent survey. By contrast, they spend only 17% of their time meeting with potential vendors, according to that same survey.

How To Tilt the Scales in Your Favor

This brings us back to content. As customers move through their journey to selecting a vendor, how your brand interacts with them is determinative. The content they encounter along their journey can create not only awareness and engagement with your brand but can also tilt the scales in your favor (or against you) well before the potential customer ever speaks with your sales team. In fact, 88% of corporate decision makers say effective content can enhance their perceptions of an organization, while 60% say such content can convince them to pay a premium for services. This is according to the most recent annual report on B2B Thought Leadership.

Yet I find that most company-generated content is created from the point of view of the company, not the audience for which the content is intended. This company-centric approach often leaves potential customers less than impressed. Consider: 29% of corporate decision makers say the content they encounter is “mediocre to very poor,” while only 17% say it is “very good to excellent,” according to the B2B Thought Leadership report.

So, how can you ensure your content will bias potential customers in your favor as they embark upon their buying journey, or even move them to share your content with other potential customers? The key is to understand the buyer’s perspective — their concerns, challenges and issues.

One of the most effective strategies for accomplishing this is to create digital audience panels built around your target customer personas. It’s worth noting here that such digital panels are really aggregations of real-time data from social media, blogs and online forums, and typically include hundreds or thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — of individuals who are part of a target audience.

Digital Audience Panels Unlock Topics of Relevance to Your Target Customers

You can create such panels using one or more of the social media monitoring tools available on the market. Such tools are typically used to monitor conversations about a particular brand, which enables the brand to respond to customer concerns and feedback. But if you reverse this paradigm, you can study the conversations your target customers are having among themselves. When used with skill and combined with careful analysis, these tools can provide valuable insights into the topics on the minds of your customers and prospects.

Leveraging these insights, you can join the conversation with content you know will be of interest to your target customers. Further, your digital panels will help you identify “superspreaders,” those people in your industry who love to share information. They have large followings, and people look to them for new insights and ideas. Which means they are constantly on the lookout for valuable information. If you customize your content to align with the interest of these influencers, you will become a valuable source for them, and they will be more likely to spread your content among your target customer personas.

Of course, that content must meet two criteria: It must be of interest to your target audience, and it must help you create perceptions of thought leadership related to the value your company delivers to the market.

To ensure this, before developing content, it’s important to have a strong positioning and messaging platform with value-proposition-based messages and detailed customer personas that accurately describe your target customers. These tools will help you make your content valuable to your customers and your company and ensure you are speaking to the right audience. The result will be content that attracts your targeted customers to your door.

Note: Originally published in Forbes -- by Bold Co-Founder Bob Finlayson.