This article shares Part 2 of a Q&A segment with content marketing expert Belinda Weaver during our May 2026 Content Marketing Friday Forum featuring the latest tips, tricks, frameworks, and more to improve your content strategy for better (and provable) results. If you missed Part 1, find it here.

These questions are from you, our MarketingProfs community, who attended Belinda's session and asked what was on your mind.

Check out your questions, answered!

I work for a B2B manufacturing company that is a supplier. There is a mindset that we don't need this in between content and we just jump to product-level information. How can I influence our team that this decision-guided content is necessary?

One of the things you can do is actually reframe it as a pipeline conversation, not a content conversation.

The problem is if there's lots of awareness content without the conversion content, you're filling up the top of your funnel, but you're losing people at the bottom because there's nothing to close the deal where there needs to be. Once they have all the information they need, they need trust and they need proof.

And so the question I would be asking your leadership team is: where are we losing people? Where are we losing the deals? Most sales teams can tell you exactly which objections keep coming up, which competitors keep winning, which questions buyers are asking just before they go quiet. That's your content gap—and it's usually costing significant amounts of revenue.

This is about showing your leadership team that you don't need more content, but you need content that bridges the gap. It's kind of like milestones on a map; if you just get people halfway there and you leave them to close the deal on their own, then you're absolutely leaving money on the table.

As soon as you couch it [as a pipeline conversation], that's a much easier conversation than just, "We need more nurture content."

But the thing about the product-level or this stage one content is it usually has more metrics. You can see likes and engagements and downloads and all sorts of things people like to track. But if it's a leaky bucket—if the deals are not closing—then that's where the real gap is.

We have a new company without proof or testimonials. So how do they navigate these stages three and four [of the content framework]?

You're certainly not alone in this scenario where you have no voice of customer related to your business. But you would actually be able to get voice of customer related to people in the same vertical.

So, your goal is to do research on people who you would like to be customers. How are they making decisions? And where possible, get them on the phone and do that market research.

• What kind of problems are you having?
• What kind of solutions are you looking at?
• Why are you making the decisions that you have made?
• Where are they failing you?
• Where are they serving you?

Even though you're not speaking to your clients, you're speaking to potential clients. And you're also trying to understand how the people you're trying to target are thinking about this kind of approach.

You might have testimonials, but one of the things I said for stage four was implementation content. What does onboarding look like? What is it like to work with you?

Whenever you don't have lots of proof from people you've already worked with, you can pull on proof for the solution category, but you can also lean harder into the process of working with you because that actually gives people a lot more security.

Testimonials are great, case studies are amazing, but if the experience of working with you is like a black hole, that's a real trust gap and a lot of businesses simply aren't creating that kind of content.

How do you approach voice of customer research if you don't have a big budget or direct access to customers?