The battle for your customers’ attention is fierce, and marketers are always looking for new and creative ways to engage their audience. Content Strategy is one of the most important weapons in a company’s arsenal because it can help them to build an engaged customer base. But what does Content Strategy entail? And how does it help with marketing efforts?
In this post, we’ll explain why content strategy is so important in business-to-business marketing and give you some tips on developing a content strategy that will increase customer engagement.
Why do B2B marketers need to explain more than features and benefits of their products?
A B2B company’s customers might not be familiar with all the features that a product has. A customer needs to be able to trust the business before s/he is willing to make a purchase. That’s why it’s important for B2B marketers to provide their customers with content that they can use before, during, and after the purchase process.
This content can help the customer get a better understanding of the product or service that you are selling. It can also improve your company’s overall visibility within your industry. Marketing content should not promote only your products or services. It should educate and inform your customers about the value that your business provides, its culture and bolster its reputation.
To find out why content strategy is important in B2B marketing, we’ll take a look at some of the challenges that marketers are facing today. In this section, we’ll explain what content strategy is and how we can use it to improve our marketing efforts.
What is Content Strategy?
Content Strategy is a framework for developing, organizing, and publishing content on websites and blogs. It also involves deciding what kind of content to publish, how often it should be published, and how company’s brand should be represented within that content. Content Strategy helps you to build an engaged audience by making your website or blog more useful to users.
What are the challenges that B2B marketers face?
A marketing strategy needs to follow a roadmap. The guidance offered by this roadmap will help you to understand what content your customer wants to see, when they want to see it, and how you need to promote that content. Content Strategy helps marketers create a roadmap for their marketing efforts so they can plan their future activities and updates. It also helps them understand which of the audience segments are more interested in certain types of messaging. They also know which audiences have the power to drive sales through word of mouth or social media interactions. This way, they can design their campaigns with the right mix of messages that will resonate with relevant audiences and help them achieve results.
Content Strategy is more important than ever. A successful marketing strategy needs to include a well-thought-out content strategy. We’ll take a look at how you can put together a content strategy that will help with your marketing efforts.
How do B2B marketers use Content Strategy?
First, you need to understand what kind of customers you are trying to reach. Answering these questions will help you determine what kind of content your customer wants to see:
- Does your target audience know anything about your business and the solutions that you offer?
- What do they already know about your industry? What are some of their favorite blogs and news sources?
- Do they have any misconceptions or misunderstandings about your product or service that need to be corrected? What are those misconceptions?
- What is the biggest pain point for people in your industry or niche? How can you address it with content marketing?
- Next, you need to figure out what kind of content is relevant for this particular audience. You can use data from an industry survey or research to answer these questions:
- What are the most important topics related to this industry?
- Who is your target audience? What are they interested in, curious about, or frustrated about? How can you give them the information that they need to make an educated decision?
- What is commonly searched for online by your audience? What types of content perform well with this segment of the market?
To answer these questions, you can use a tone analysis. You’ll take some of your own blog posts and compare them with similar articles that have been published by blog content providers in your niche. You can also compare them with articles on other websites that have similar audiences.
In order to create a content strategy, you’ll also need to consider your company’s brand. Your company’s branding team will need to define the brand image that you want to promote. This is important because it will help you define the types of marketing messages that will move your target audience to action.
To determine which content type is most suitable for your business, you’ll need to evaluate how much time and money you have available to create this content. You can use a simple formula called “Time + Budget” that helps determine the most effective types of content for your business:
- A quick, low-cost tactic is to reach an audience with an email campaign, or a social media post with a list of product features.
- Reach an audience with an email campaign, or a social media post with a list of product features. A steady stream of content. Create blog posts or articles that will be published once per week.
- Create a piece of educational content that is focused on solving one particular problem for your audience.
- If you want to create different types of content, you can also ask yourself how much control you have over the creation process:
- Do you have full control? You can plan the type of message, the tone and style, and create the actual content in-house.
You can plan the type of message, the tone and style, and create the actual content in-house or you contract content development and curation from outside specialist. Who are the decision-makers that will approve your content? Will your ideas be edited by an internal or external team that has more knowledge about your business?
Whether are working with a professional writer who is creating content independently, or developing it in-house, it must be created and compliant with your brand standards that you set up, so that it is aligned with your brand, its voice and marketing goals.
About Lisa Silverman: Silverman is principal of Brand-Device, LLC. As a senior account director, branding and content strategist for over 30 years, Silverman has stewarded regional and global brands with an unparalleled skill set and a proven record of success in team leadership, driving growth strategy, executing marketing communication plans and creating billions of dollars in ROI for healthcare and financial clients.
About Brand Device, LLC: Brand Device merges intelligent, strategic branding solutions with powerful, imaginative, and interactive creative driven by a team of leading healthcare marketing veterans with a rich history in promoting medical devices, hospital products, nutrition, health institutions, pharmaceuticals, direct-to-patient and physician practices.
