Even before COVID-19, there has been a steady increase in the consumption of high value content across many industries. With over 26% of US adults always online, and 77% of US adults going on daily, the amount of content consumed has reached incredible heights.
This is why you’ll find over 91% of B2B businesses leveraging content marketing to reach their customers. That leads to a whole lot of noise. And not all content marketing programs are pumping out good content. In fact, 64% of marketers want to learn how to build a better content strategy.
With most professionals working remotely and online even more so, quality content is even more important as companies determine the best way to speak to their audience during a time of uncertainty and instability. These are unpaved paths that we’re on give great content the opportunity to make or break brand trust to keep buyers coming back in the future.
Why Good Content Marketing Programs Matters for B2B Marketers
For those of you who are content “skeptics” who don’t believe there’s value in a good content program, or maybe you haven’t realized any revenue from your content programs yet — below is a timeline of a B2B startup in the nonprofit space from before implementing a content program to when they had the engine humming in March 2020.
The two shades of blue represent two different calls to action (or CTAs) being used to convert blog visitors. These two calls to action were a visitor survey template and a marketing planning document. Both were designed to address the needs of the company’s target buyer persona.
You’ll notice that the company in the example went from 0 leads to about 70/month before dipping slightly due to the impact on business from COVID-19. These leads have translated to tens of millions in opportunity value for the startup. All from just starting a blog and creating great content.
But how does one define high-value content, especially in times where results are dropping?
Good content is content that is not only relevant to your target audience and buyer persona, but also provides value to the reader in a call to action. In these times, many content marketers have had to pivot and question what that exact value might be.
But with this simple shift of putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes, you can succeed in taking….
Good Content = Useful Content.
The Path Forward for Quality Content in B2B Marketing
Going from $0 to millions in ROI from content programs is a step-by-step process. In this market, it’s not enough to have any content. You need to have high value content to generate any revenue to the business.
Here are the steps that I typically take to determine what high-value content would be for an audience.
Tips for Building a Good Content Program
Step 1 – Understand your buyer’s needs
Every audience is looking for something. Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask yourself: What information are they looking for? What would help make their day-to-day lives easier? For example, if I was marketing to Executive Directors of nonprofit organizations, I would start by understanding their work and find the answers to the following questions.
- What is their job title and core responsibility? This is obvious and helps you understand the type of content they may be searching for on a daily or monthly basis. I recommend looking at job descriptions of the job titles you are trying to reach to get an idea of what these types of roles typically need to know.
- What other responsibilities do they have? Just because a nonprofit manager is focused on driving donations and events for their organization, doesn’t mean they do not have other responsibilities. Things such as hiring staff, planning budgets, and even event planning may fall under the responsibilities of this person. Therefore, content related to these areas of focus would be relevant and useful for the target persona.
- What software, systems, technology do they use? Is this person using several different siloed systems for accounting, budget planning, marketing, and event management? Then, it may be great to create content that helps them organize and consolidate these systems. Try providing the target persona with “hacks” to help better organize their different software and tech systems, or alternative solutions for their problems.
- What are their most common problems they face? For our example, the Executive Director may face challenges for meeting budget deadlines, determining new donation strategies, public speaking at donor events, and reporting to a board. Content related to any of these topics would be considered as high value for the target persona.
- What processes do they have in place that may be outdated or inefficient? Again, using our Executive Director as an example, they may historically use spreadsheets or powerpoints to manage their various projects and reports. Offering them downloadable template versions of those is useful content that they will download because it makes their lives easier. Rather than creating reports/spreadsheets from scratch, they can quickly use your downloadable template.
- What are the most searched phrases relative to the above questions? Finally, I turn to Google to validate that my content ideas have merit. If you search for the asset or content piece you want to create and see additional search queries or popular searches that are relevant, then nice job! You’ve validated that your audience has an interest in what you’re creating. And be sure to differentiate whatever you are creating from your competition.
Step 2 – Determine your tone and style
Before you start creating content, I always recommend establishing some desired tone and writing style. Once you’ve determined if your writing style is going to be witty, professional, sarcastic, etc, then you can get to writing!
Note: You don’t always need to have the wittiest or world’s best journalists to create great content. Oftentimes, it’s more about creating something useful than the writing style (but if you have both that’s a huge plus!). For B2B marketing, I think the best starting point with tone and style is to be both educational and professional. It may not be the most exciting content, but you’re able to create with limited resources until you can bring on writers that are able to add extra “oomph” to the writing.
Step 4 – Choose the right medium or channel for your content
Where you showcase your content is another question that you need to answer. In B2B content marketing, we always focus on the value of a blog. Blogs are a quick content medium to get running, you can be flexible with the schedule, and they can serve as a multipurpose tool for marketing, sales and support. But this content marketing swiss army knife doesn’t have to be the only medium you choose for content marketing. Youtube videos, podcasts, email marketing, social media, and even TikTok can become valuable content marketing channels for your business with the right strategy. The key is to determine tracking and metrics to track from any channel that you launch on.
Step 5 – Ensure it’s useful to the reader
Earlier I mentioned that good content = useful content. What this means is that readers will be able to walk away after reading your article with at least one nugget of information that will help make their lives and job easier or better. Most professionals are always looking for shortcuts to optimize their time. These shortcuts help the leader with a need that hopefully ties back to a problem that your product in fact solves too.
Final Thoughts: Building a Good Content Marketing Program
Once you figure out what works for you, it’s time to get out of your comfort zone. Continuously test new content ideas and styles to see if you can improve engagement from your content. It’s hard in challenging times as the risk is high for content that doesn’t resonate or worse turns people off, but the steps above ensure you are taking all the precautions you need to take some educated risks to stand out.
Still need help getting started? Download our free content marketing strategy template.