Written by Nikki Guevarra
Director & Head of Strategy
Starting a content marketing strategy from scratch can often seem daunting, but it needn’t be.
Pushed for time? Here’s how you can create a documented content marketing strategy in just one step, and from just one conversation.
Step one
Think of your perfect B2B customer, and the single person within that organisation that matters most to your company. Give them a call. Ask them about their information needs. Ask them about the type of content that they engage with most frequently, and the topics they would like to see covered in future.
Document this on a single page – and that’s your content marketing strategy!
Done.
A singular strategy for business growth
If you can develop content that your most important customer finds relevant, useful, and entertaining (while supporting your own brand proposition) – you’ll be serving three purposes:
1. Client development – added value delivered straight to your core customers ensures your brand is front of mind, and positively shapes client perceptions
2. Referrals – hitting the sweet spot with content that serves customer needs means it’s more likely your clients will share it amongst their peers, leading to referral enquiries and business
3. Engaging prospects – in the majority of cases your perfect prospects will closely match your existing perfect clients. Therefore, information needs, channel preferences, and content types will all be aligned. Your prospects will hang out in the same places, obtain and share information in the same way, and they’ll be connected through the same digital and social channels. So just deliver and promote content where your customers hang out. It’s that simple.
Overcome planning paralysis
As a B2B marketer, you’re faced with multiple audiences, global sales markets, a stream of complex products and services to launch, and thinly stretched budgets.
You may be responsible for content marketing for a business unit, division, or entire organisation, but overwhelmed by the complex strategic frameworks, step-by-step models, and the available content options and platforms.
Complexity leads to paralysis.
The Content Marketing Institute reports 63% of organisations do not have a documented content marketing strategy at all. They recognise the importance of content marketing, but they’ve somehow given up along the way. 51% feel their company doesn’t have the right technology to manage content – a portion of whom may be using that as an excuse for inaction.
Worse still, only 12% of content marketing professionals feel successful in their current efforts to strategically manage content.
We get it.
Just get started
The one step strategy above will enable you to get started, to build a strategy with purpose and clarity, and to direct content creators. If you start with customers at the centre, you really can’t go wrong.
Every content decision can be made with this single view of your customer: would it be right for them?
Build on insights
As your content strategy starts to scale, further insights will be required to cater for distinct audience segments with different priorities and motivations. At this point, you might need to engage a strategic marketing agency or research partner to build a clear picture of the drivers, barriers and preferences amongst those audiences, but the principle of your strategy should remain the same.
Build it and create it for customers. And it will be welcomed by others just like them.
Simple.