If you truly want to contend well with your competitors, it is almost obligatory to produce content and be visible online.
These days, B2Bs lean heavily on content marketing to spread the word and gain visibility on the services they provide, and what their brand represents.
Yes, positive word of mouth is always fantastic promotion and is very effective in winning new clients. However, digital content enables B2Bs to widen their reach and amplify their voice on a much bigger scale.
Yet, many organisations seem to fail miserably at content marketing, and are quick to deem the whole thing quite ineffective.
So what exactly are they doing wrong, and why isn’t their content conspiring for them instead of against them?
The answer lies in a good content marketing strategy, also often called a content calendar.
You see, without one, businesses risk making things up on the fly, being disorganised, and losing focus. And this lack of planning can negatively affect the quality, consistency and accessibility of their content.
Let’s explore this more below…
What is good B2B Content Marketing?
Before we get into the benefits of having a good content marketing strategy, let’s explore what good content marketing is for B2Bs, and what function it serves.
Good content can come in the form of blog posts, social media posts, emails, newsletters, podcasts, videos and more.
For professional services firms, content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant content that connects and speaks to brands’ customers and prospects. With increased competition, comes an increasing demand for relevancy.
Gone are the days when businesses can throw out generalised content and expect to easily generate leads. Customers nowadays pay extra attention to the type of content they choose to consume, and are discerning based on how they resonate with said content.
Elizabeth Harr from Hinge defines good content marketing as thought leadership, or the creation of free, valuable and educational content.
For B2Bs, educational content is the best way to display their expertise and offer their unique services to the world. Content that is tailored to customers’ needs and challenges is more likely to build trust, generate new leads and nurture customer loyalty.
Why build a Content Marketing Strategy?
We now know what good B2B content should look like. But why isn’t that enough?
Content is only as good as the strategy behind it. Building a content marketing strategy essentially sets up a blueprint; mapping out a marketer’s objectives, goals and intentions behind the content they produce and disseminate.
Here are 5 strong benefits to building and maintaining a content calendar:
Set and Reach Your Goals
A content marketing strategy helps you define your goals and identify your priorities. You might already be producing good content, but if you haven’t focused it toward your target audience, for example, it won’t be as effective.
Setting goals also helps you zero-in on what services your brand provides, what makes it unique and how it stands out from your competitors.
If your content is too broad, it won’t speak to the specific issues your clients are looking to address, and won’t attract the valuable leads you seek.
Measure Your Progress
A content marketing strategy should include defined metrics relating to the goals you’ve set. By tracking your progress within defined parameters, you’ll be able to better analyse your success and room for improvement.
Some important metrics to keep in mind are
- Visibility: How visible are you to your target audience? Consider measuring your total website traffic as well as social media traffic.
- Expertise: How drawn is your audience to your thought leadership content? By measuring blog views, ebook downloads and other premium content consumption, you’ll be able to gauge if your customers are sufficiently exposed to it.
- Impact: Are you gaining many leads? What about sales-ready opportunities? Impact metrics include stages along the customer journey and marketing and sales funnel. Higher level metrics such as monthly revenue are also useful in analysing the effectiveness of your content marketing.
Avoid Extra Costs
Creating and distributing content without a plan can waste a significant amount of money.
By implementing a strategy, you can clearly indicate how much of the marketing budget will be allocated to each content marketing project.
Looking into what money should be spent on (photography, hiring writers, video creation) and being organised from the get-go will help you save costs in the long run.
Improve Accountability
A good content marketing strategy will allocate certain roles to certain people on the marketing team.
By creating accountability on who is responsible for what, your whole team will be on the same page on things like scheduling, social media management, content consistency and other important details.
Ultimately, improving accountability within your team will result in more productivity and work flow ease.
Create New Opportunities
Are you paying attention to new content creation opportunities? A strategy helps marketers always keep track of contemporary topics, what to write about next, and what media avenues to pursue.
By establishing a coordinated effort to research and look into how to constantly improve and reach more people, your business will create better and more accessible content.
Final Thoughts
Everyone can create content. In fact, we can argue that the current market is oversaturated with content. So what will you do to stand out?
Those that go about content creation and marketing methodically will ultimately rise above the rest.
Creating a content marketing strategy includes setting defined goals, schedules and deadlines, considering the relevance and quality of your content, and allocating your budget responsibly.
By being thoughtful and clever with your content marketing, you won’t just be throwing random content out there.
Instead, you’ll start creating excellent content, setting yourself apart from your competitors and ultimately attracting more leads.
Don’t just copy everybody else. Decide to be that rare bird that people seek out and utilise a content marketing strategy to always be out of the ordinary.