When leads engage with me for the first time and we talk about their marketing concerns, a top concern is improving their marketing content creation*.
Clients either find it difficult to write, don’t know what to write about or don’t believe in the effectiveness of content creation. These three issues can be vastly helped by having a content strategy that guides them.
A content strategy keeps content relevant and effective and should be designed to serve tactical business goals. It shouldn’t be too wordy or restrictive but offer enough guidance to remind you of its purpose. In this way, if it’s not working, the strategy is brief enough to change.
If you are struggling with a strategy that fits your own business, here are three broad categories for you to experiment with. Try to fit any piece of B2B content into at least one of the following:
- A lead generation content strategy
- A sales content strategy
- A business growth content strategy
If you keep just one of these strategies in mind when creating content you will at least be serving your core audience with a business-relevant message.
Lead Generation Content Strategy
This type of content is designed to get you on a buyer’s shortlist, not to get you across the sales finishing line. A lead-generation content strategy should focus on providing solutions to your audience’s problems rather than mission statements, feature lists or price bundling.
It is certainly not the use of ‘compelling’ or ‘persuasive’ copy – the kind that some business owners seek, convinced it will hypnotize readers into inquiring about their services or even buying. Instead, focus on problem-solving, problem-understanding, and problem-reframing, to show that you have the answer.
Sales Content Strategy
Sales-focused content should keep in mind two elements: your ideal customer profile (ICP), PLUS the customer journey stage they are at.
As an example, in my case, I write for small to mid-size B2B technical service providers. My ICP has between 11-200 staff, is often based outside of the UK, and was founded between two and eight years ago. They have between one and five marketing support staff, including full-time or part-time staff that are remote or on-site and ad-hoc freelancers. They may also have engaged small specialist agencies (for SEO, Google Ads, lead gen. There are other criteria but this is a level of detail that keeps me on track with most of my business writing. A broader ICP is sufficient.
The customer journey is often overlooked when creating content. I know this because the vast amount of B2B content writing is focused on top-of-funnel introductory texts or encyclopedic descriptions of what the business does or conditions within the industry. I call it being the Wikipedia of your sector. It’s something that I encourage my clients to avoid.
Instead of this, if you identify three, four or five broad stages each customer goes through before buying, you can adapt a content idea to speak to one of these stages and so encourage leads to move closer to a sale.
Business Growth Content Strategy
Why should you describe your business’ growth as part of a content strategy? Because your company’s story and the way it is run is a unique combination that will help you stand out in the market. This is also the content that investors or acquirers look for in terms of judging its subsequent value.
Finally, business growth content strategy is all about telling your company’s story and the unique way in which it is run. Rather than humblebragging (or simply bragging) about how your company is achieving phenomenal growth or disrupting the industry (meaningless to most customers), showcase your practices and processes that have enabled growth, such as purposefully growing staff or iterating services.
Instead, this is the content that opens your doors up and lets readers walk through the shop floor, observing your practices and processes. You show how you purposefully grow staff, your skills base, why you’re opening new offices or how you iterated your services.
*until I point out that the problem is usually not writer’s block but a more fundamental marketing issue like product positioning. My B2B Content Strategy Program will vastly improve your content output, focus and relevancy to your core audience. Have a look at the details.
Looking for B2B content strategy guidance?