The Real Reason Your Shiny New Product Isn't Converting

The Real Reason Your Shiny New Product Isn't Converting

You have a technically sound product, sure to disrupt the market. You've invested heavily in R&D, engineered something truly innovative, and you're confident in the value you deliver.

So why is your sales pipeline stuck?

For marketing leaders in B2B companies (particularly those in industrial tech, hardware, or software infrastructure), that scenario is frustratingly familiar.

Often, the assumption is that the market needs more education. Or that it's just "a long sales cycle." Or that maybe the product is too niche.

But after 20+ years in marketing and sales across fast-growing B2B environments, I've found it's rarely a product problem. It's a messaging-bottleneck problem.

And that bottleneck is almost always internal.

It's not that buyers don't get it, it's that we're making it too hard to understand

The deeper and more technical your product, the more tempting it is to lead with its functionality instead of its benefits.

You build a value proposition that makes perfect sense to your engineers, your internal champions, and your technical founders, but not to the people trying to buy.

And when your story doesn't translate, you start to hear things like...

• "We like it, but we're not sure we're ready yet."

• "We're still trying to understand how this fits with what we already have."

• "We need to socialize this internally."

Those aren't objections. They're signals. What they're saying is, "I don't fully understand the value, and I'm not going to spend the next two weeks figuring it out."

In a market flooded with options, clarity isn't a nice-to-have, it's a competitive edge.

Great products don't sell themselves, especially when they're complex

Working with brilliant engineering teams, innovative founders, and product-first organizations. The throughline? Everyone wants the product to "speak for itself."

But it won't. Not in enterprise. Not in manufacturing. Not in industrial IoT. And not in a world where your buyer has 10 tabs open and multiple stakeholders to convince.

If your product requires a 30-minute call just to explain what it does, you've already lost half your audience. Not because they don't care, but because they don't have the time, the context, or the technical fluency to connect the dots.

The problem isn't complexity, it's translation

Not saying your product needs to be dumbed down. We are saying your messaging needs to do its job at the speed of your buyer's attention.

That means:

• Your headline should pass the "10-second test."

• Your website should feel like a walkthrough, not a glossary.

• Your decks should be layered for multiple audiences, not one-size-fits-all.

• Your positioning should lead with outcomes, not features.

Because when buyers see the value quickly, they lean in. When they don't, they move on.

How are you positioning your product to customers?

Here's the part many teams skip: identifying the actual pain your customer is feeling right now and then building the story around how your product solves it.

Too often, messaging starts with what the product does instead of positioning the product as the answer to the problems the customer is struggling with.

Let's say your customer is a manufacturing unit manager in a high-volume facility. That person's team is constantly fighting downtime, juggling outdated monitoring systems, and struggling to prove ROI to leadership. If your product automates diagnostics or prevents failures before they escalate, that's not just a "feature." That's the relief they've been looking for.

Your job is to identify the customer's pain before you position the product. Try to create a storyline on how your product not only solves the issues at hand but also makes the customer a hero in the eyes of the stakeholders.

It's not about adding more features to the slide deck. It's about showing how your product removes the blockers standing in the way of your customer's success. That story is what gets remembered, shared, and championed internally.

If you're not solving an urgent problem your customer can recognize in themselves, no amount of technical excellence will carry the deal across the line.

Who's getting it right (And what you can learn from them)

Some of the most effective B2B companies aren't simplifying the product; they're clarifying the story.

Take the Interceptor suite of products, for example. Rather than diving into technical jargon, its messaging leads with a clear value promise: "The Interceptor product line is a modular platform designed to monitor, control, and automate critical functions across multiple industries."

The messaging doesn't overwhelm you with specs; it tell you exactly what the product empowers you to do.

Or look at Figma, which launched with "what you see is what you build." Members of its audience knew exactly what they'd get and how it would change their workflow.

The key takeaway: if your buyers can't, in one sentence, repeat what you do, they're not going to champion you internally.

Unblock your messaging in four steps

If you suspect your brilliant product is stuck in the funnel because the message isn't landing, start with the following four steps.

1. Test the 'explain it to a colleague' rule

Find people outside your function—Operations, HR, Finance—and ask them to read your homepage. Can they explain your value prop in under 20 seconds? If not, you've got work to do.

2. Map your messaging to stakeholders

Your technical buyer wants depth. Your economic buyer wants outcomes. Your champion wants internal credibility. Each needs a version of the story that makes sense from their seat.

3. Lead with the Why, not the How

You can always go back to how your product works. But if the "why this matters now" isn't clear in the first five seconds, you're creating friction that kills momentum.

4. Use the language your customers already use

This one is the fastest fix, and often the most overlooked. Spend time on support tickets, sales calls, and onboarding recordings. Pull the actual words your buyers use to describe the problem. That's your messaging goldmine.

You can't afford to let messaging be an afterthought, especially if you're selling a complex product. Buyers don't reward depth alone. They reward clarity, relevance, and confidence.

If your product is solid but conversion is soft, don't rewrite the road map. Rethink how you're telling the story.

Because in B2B the best product doesn't always win. The clearest one does.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 330-815-1803 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!

The 4Es of Video: How to Align Your Marketing Content Strategy With Buyer Expectations

The 4Es of Video: How to Align Your Marketing Content Strategy With Buyer Expectations

Although every business has its unique set of marketing challenges, all those challenges seem to stem from one root cause: the changing behaviors and expectations of today's buyers.

Customers want a sense of connection with brands, and most of that now happens digitally. They want to learn and engage on their own time, and they expect friction-free experiences when researching new topics or learning about vendors. They rarely want to block off time to speak with real people, yet they expect and crave a sense of personal connection to what your company does, and how.

In response to those shifting trends, video has emerged as a powerful content format for marketers. It offers new ways to show, rather than tell, how your product or service can help, and it can create more meaningful connections and earn the trust of buyers before they ever engage your sales team.

And, it can do all that in an on-demand format that respects the time and preferences of today's online audiences.

Effective video content marketing focuses on the unique attributes of video that can make it more useful than traditional static content—what is refered to as the 4Es of video.

The 4Es of Video

1. Education

Video is the best way to educate audiences who are searching for answers throughout their buying journey.

Video can explain complex topics, and it's more consumable and memorable than static content. In fact, the human brain processes visual information much faster than it does text.

You can use video content to clearly answer questions your audience may have, visually demonstrate how to solve a problem, or walk people through your product or service in a way that is clear, concise, and memorable.

Put your own preference to the test: If you wanted to learn about how a product works, would you prefer to read a guide, talk to a sales rep, or watch a demonstration online?

2. Engagement

Video is a great way to engage audiences, pull them into your story, and maximize their content consumption time.

Video uses visuals, audio, music, and creative storytelling to give audiences something relatable that piques their interest. Using video, you can create suspense, stimulate curiosity, and offer a tremendous amount of value in a short time.

And that doesn't apply just to video advertisements and promotions; you can make any topic more engaging with a thoughtful approach to visual storytelling.

3. Emotion

Video content can stimulate an emotional response from someone who is experiencing your brand for the first time—or coming back for more.

Whether it's a fun and creative social video, an inspiring interview, or a highly relatable customer story, invoking an emotional response will increase the chances that online audiences and consumers will come back for more content.

4. Empathy

Video can showcase empathy and create a human connection that goes deeper than messaging alone.

Empathy is important at every stage of the buying journey, as well as when potential buyers are looking for trustworthy answers to the questions they have. A short video featuring one of your employees, or one of your customers, clearly explaining a complex topic beats any text-based article for showing you truly understand your market and can relate to your buyers.

Using Video Content to Align Your Strategy With Buyer Expectations

Inbound marketing and content marketing have become a staple of modern marketing programs.

The premise of inbound marketing is to publish helpful online content as a means of attracting new visitors to your website, as opposed to using paid advertisements and other forms of "outbound" media to vie for their attention. The content you publish is typically aligned with the most common questions your prospects may be searching for, or the topics they need to learn about while researching possible solutions.

But the role of content has now expanded well beyond inbound marketing. To meet new expectations of the "on-demand" buyer, marketing teams are becoming responsible for an increasingly large portion of the customer lifecycle.

Those trends have spurred another important shift: the diversification of content mediums used to reach audiences, and the expanding role of content throughout the customer lifecycle.

When learning about new topics, particularly in the world of B2B, most people will choose to interact with a variety of content formats for both passive and active learning. Blog posts, guides, social media content, videos, explainers, podcasts, and even Clubhouse chat rooms may all play a role in how today's buyer self-educates and gets exposed to ideas and potential vendors.

As they dig deeper into potential solution providers, buyers increasingly prefer to consume on-demand, self-service content to better understand what vendors offer. Though that call with the sales rep may still be required at some point, most people prefer to learn on their own time for the majority of the consideration and decision phases of a buying journey.

That is exactly why savvy tech brand Marketo swapped its "Talk to Sales" calls to action on its website with ones that say "View a Product Tour." After doing so, the conversion rate on its website increased more than 1,000%. Engagement time on the website skyrocketed, and the time to qualify a new lead was shortened six-fold.

Of course, once prospects do become customers, their preferences don't suddenly change; and the way you treat them shouldn't, either. Well-planned onboarding videos and FAQ content can play a significant role in helping your customers realize value quickly and get off to a quick start.

Equally important, video content marketing demonstrates that you're willing to put in the time and resources to deliver the best possible experience for your customers.

It's an on-demand world, and business is becoming more and more virtual. The role of content is more important than ever: It is used to market, sell, and support your customers, and to do it all at scale.

And if your content strategy embraces rich media formats such as video, you'll find new opportunities to educate your prospects more quickly than ever, engage them with on-demand content that connects on an emotional level, showcase your empathy, and transform satisfied customers into raving fans.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 330-815-1803 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!

How to Build Marketing Automation Campaigns That Prompt Desired Behaviors From Your Leads

How to Build Marketing Automation Campaigns That Prompt Desired Behaviors From Your Leads

In business, most people view customer behavior as one-dimensional—something to be observed and responded to. As a result, marketing efforts become only a reactive process.

However, what if you could design your marketing to enable—to actually elicit—specific behaviors?

Marketing automation allows you to efficiently plan and enable the behavior you wish to see from your prospect.

It's about planning what you want from your leads—and designing campaigns to elicit exactly that desired behavior.

This article explores why it's important to build campaigns to elicit the behavior you wish to see, and how to do that effectively.

What behavior do you want people to display?

So, how do you create a campaign that initiates desired behaviors in prospects?

For most businesses, the desired behavior is conversion: leads' turning into paying customers. However, there are likely intermediate steps, such as...

• Reading certain blog posts
• Downloading lead magnets
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Clicking on email links
• Visiting sales pages
• Requesting specific information

It's possible to engineer behavior, proactively, rather than only observing and reacting.

However, you must first decide what actions you want your lead to take, so you can build a process—or journey that customers can go on—to get to that point.

You must be aware of the behavioral displays indicating customers are moving through the buyer's journey. That will allow you to identify any gaps causing leads to drop off; from there, you can intervene and optimize the process.

And we do all that by employing marketing automation.

What role does marketing automation play in planning desired behavior?

Marketing automation is the vehicle that allows businesses to seamlessly deliver the right content at the right time to drive prospects through the awareness stages. It's an effective way to move your leads from Marketing-qualified to Sales-qualified and convert them into paying customers.

Lead magnets are effective in driving demand generation in exchange for obtaining valuable information from leads. However, one of the biggest mistakes B2B businesses make is that they stop nurturing at the end of the initial lead magnet sequence.

The key is to educate your leads to move them along the awareness journey. Then, at each stage, give them the next thing they need to move them closer to purchase.

The role of awareness stages in planning desired behavior?

There are five stages of awareness in the customer journey, determining the content and contact your lead is ready for.

These are the five stages:

1. Completely Unaware: Prospects are feeling symptoms of problems they don't yet understand. They don't yet know who you are or how you can help.
2. Problem-Aware: Your prospect knows they have a problem; they are learning about it and looking for solutions. However, they don't yet know about any specific products or companies.
3. Solution-Aware: Prospects are now aware of the potential solutions to their problem, but they haven't narrowed their research down yet to specific products/services/companies.
4. Product-Aware: Your prospects are looking for specific products to fit their needs. They are exploring the marketplace to match products/services against their created criteria.
5. Most Aware: Your prospects are aware of and interested in your product/service. But they need to justify and validate the reasons for purchase, comparing against the alternative.

You must get very specific about understanding your prospects' awareness stage and use that information to engineer the behavior you would like to see. At each stage, your leads will need different types of content, so you have to design your campaigns accordingly.

You can use marketing automation to deliver that content and enable your prospects to move along the stages of awareness from MQL to SQL.

Here's an example:

Imagine you have leads who have downloaded an entry-level lead magnet called "What is marketing automation software." Chances are high they are in the problem-aware stage of awareness and so they aren't ready to commit to buying software yet.

At this point, it's your job to nurture those prospects through the awareness stages. And you can do that by designing a campaign that offers them the natural next step, and push them further along the awareness journey. The content you use could be another lead magnet, a product demo, or something else that caters to the next stage in awareness.

But, ultimately, you must tell your prospects what you want them to do next; that's the key to engineering the behavior you want prospects to display.

So, for example, if reading a buyer's guide will help make your lead Sales-qualified, you need to offer this guide at the appropriate time. Think about how you can get them ready and willing to download your buyer's guide, and plan your marketing automation around that goal.

What happens if a campaign doesn't result in desired behavior?

Here's your ideal scenario: A lead comes into your funnel through a specific campaign, consuming the content you follow up with (including blog posts, lead magnets, etc.). They move smoothly through the awareness journey and convert into a paying customer.

Sadly, that scenario isn't always how things work, especially for B2B, where the typical buying journey is long and more than one decision-maker is involved. So, in reality, each lead will require a hefty amount of nurture in order to eventually display Sales-qualified behavior.

In fact, in those situations, it's essential to design processes and additional campaigns that follow up with leads if they don't exhibit the desired behavior.

It's known as planning the "if this, then that..."

It's all based on the premise of certain behaviors' triggering conditional statements. In the case of marketing automation, it means putting in place sequences that plan for desired behavior, including contingencies.

Examples of how to use marketing automation to Sales-qualify your leads when things don't go to plan

There are numerous ways to salvage prospects who have not converted from MQL to SQL. Some examples:

• Retargeting
• Nurturing long-term
• Nurturing short-term
• Bringing Sales into the loop

Again, all these approaches aim to "catch" people—so, rather than losing them, you are just nurturing them differently.

Hopefully, the end result will be the same; you're just ensuring they get there differently.

Here's more on each of those four approaches.

1. Retargeting

Effectively done, retargeting can massively increase your conversion rates. In fact, according to Google, you can sell 50% more with a good retargeting strategy.

What does retargeting look like with marketing automation?

Again, it all comes down to understanding the awareness stages.

Retargeting those still in the early stages of awareness—those who don't know what solution they want—will likely be unsuccessful. However, retargeting those in the later stages of awareness (particularly the most-aware stage) allows you to build on the existing relationship and increase the chances of conversion.

2. Long-Term Nurture Sequence

Fully 96% of visitors who arrive on a website aren't yet ready to buy, and 80% of leads never translate into sales.

Even after an initial lead magnet and email series, prospects might not be ready to purchase.

However, we know that companies that prioritize and excel in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-qualified leads at 33% lower cost.

If that's the case, you should be moving leads into a long-term nurture sequence rather than letting them fall through the cracks. So, again, that's an automated email sequence that offers potential buyers a value-add.

Long-term nurture sequences are essential for B2B companies with a long sales process because they allow you to nurture and maintain a relationship continually.

Long-term lead nurture can be successful because it...

• Is a regular touchpoint with your customer
• Allows you to convey who your business is
• Engages your list
• Drives traffic to your website
• Increases conversions
• Increases customer lifetime value and customer retention

And, most important, it allows you to keep in touch in a meaningful way with prospects who are not ready to buy yet.

3. Short-Term Nurture Sequence

Is your prospect further along the awareness journey?

Instead of a long-term nurture sequence, you can first move them into another short-term nurture campaign.

This approach will target leads with specific content and campaigns based on what you've learned about them. So if you know they have a particular problem or need, you can address it.

If they don't convert, you can move them into a longer-term nurture sequence.

4. Bringing Sales Into the Loop

Imagine you downloaded a lead magnet about marketing automation software. The next thing you know, you're getting a call from a sales team.

It's probably the last thing you want. You want time to research yourself and move along the awareness journey before speaking to someone.

However, sometimes it's appropriate for your sales team to reach out to prospects to build relationships and overcome objections directly. Again, it's not likely to work in the early stages of awareness, but if you have leads engaging with your email marketing but not converting, involving Sales is a good final step.

It allows Sales to provide the insight for Marketing to address objections and answer questions that may be holding the lead back from moving forward.

Are you ready to plan the behaviors you want to elicit from prospects?

Many businesses view behavior as one-way: observing and reacting. But that isn't as powerful or effective as being proactive and planning your campaigns to elicit desired behaviors.

Marketing automation is crucial to delivering a campaign that results in the desired outcome. For example, understanding the awareness stages allows you to design campaigns that move leads from Marketing-qualified to Sales-qualified.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 330-815-1803 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!