How B2B Marketing Managers can create a successful content marketing strategy

Many overstretched B2B marketing professionals are being tasked with implementing a content marketing strategy but are unsure where to begin.  It all starts with a systematic understanding of your prospects’ information needs. Once you have this, it’s much easier to generate quality content quickly and speedily.

B2B firms across all industry sectors are recognising the importance of content marketing.  For many brand and product managers, it’s something of a new area – an additional task that has been added to their To-Do list. Understandably, they just want to know how to write content quickly and easily.

Whilst it’s possible to get to a stage where you can churn out quality content that gets results, time after time, you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of your customers first.

According to Peter O’Neill at Forrester, B2B firms are only finding content marketing useful for the lead nurturing stage of the sales process.  This may be because that’s where most content creation is currently targeted.  What Peter goes on to talk about is the tendency for many B2B organisations to remain internally focussed.  It’s a problem that many firms suffer from, particularly in larger organisations.  

It’s understandable that everyone within an organisation orients towards accelerating opportunities through the sales funnel.  However, for professional marketers to succeed, they have to become empathetic, look externally, and really understand what’s motivating prospects and customers.

An effective content marketing strategy will look at each stage of the buying cycle and prompt the creation of material that meets the information needs of the participants involved.  The buying cycle model may be broadly the same for each industry, but your company needs to develop content that’s unique, not only to counter competitor activity, but also to play to your strengths.

The sequence of steps involved in a typical B2B buying process might look like this, reading from left to right:

You need to understand, for each industry sector you target, who is involved at each stage and what they are looking for.  

So, for example, if you’re selling a software product that solves a problem in call centres, it’s likely that the first person involved will be responsible for operational management in some way.  In the “Need” stage, you should aim to understand not only what problems they are likely to be experiencing, but what the consequences of those pain points are.  

For the “Technical Requirements” stage, the operational manager may start to involve an IT decision maker. Between them, evidence suggests they will be looking for blogs and case studies that appear to align with their own problem, as well as articles and whitepapers on related trends.  By the time your prospect has advanced to the “Short-List Selection” stage, they may well have included department heads, budget holders, technical specialists and even someone from the procurement team in the process too.

This highlights the importance of understanding the different types of target audiences, or “Personas” you need to address.  Each will have different information needs at each separate stage in the buying process.  That’s not to say you need an individual item of content for each persona in each step; you just need to ensure their information needs are met at each point in the process.

You should take a structured approach.  Aim to create what amounts to a stakeholder matrix that identifies, by industry and by stage, the job description and title of each person involved, their information needs, and any known constraints, motivations or preferences.  You could start with a simple template like the one below and adapt it to suit your needs as you gather a more detailed understanding of your prospects.

To capture this information, you’ll need to gather input from Sales and Service Desk teams, personal interviews, research, as well as your own experience from testing and analytics.

This will identify who is involved and what information needs they have.  You can then use this as the basis of the brief to create unique and relevant content that aligns with the needs of your prospects.  It’s at this content crafting stage that you’ll need to interweave your key messages and competitive positioning.

Once you have this detailed level of understanding about your prospects/customers, you’ll be in a better position to generate a continuous stream of compelling content. And you should see dividends quickly.  Adam Sutton highlights in his blog an impressive example of a B2B firm that adopted a similar approach and increased lead volumes by 124%.

Having established some core content for each stage/persona, you’ll then be in a position to test different variants and discover how subtle changes to content will accelerate prospects along the buying cycle faster.

The challenge for marketing professionals is finding the time to dedicate to the task of content marketing and building-up the archive of content.  Brand and product managers not only have to administer the content marketing strategy, but the majority are also expected to create quality content too. Forrester indicates that 58% of B2B firms still generate their content using in-house resources. 

If you consider that it takes on average three hours to create an effective blog post, let alone a compelling article, the scale of the content creation challenge starts to become apparent.  What’s more, the time you make available for content marketing also has to compete with your normal day-to-day routine of meetings and interruptions.  

That’s why, with content marketing increasing in importance, it’s likely that many marketing and product managers will look to professional copywriters in the future to help them generate the content they need to succeed.  After all, it’s content that drives leads and ultimately sales orders, so getting it wrong could be a career inhibitor!

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How SMEs can improve success rates selling to large enterprises

Understanding the information that prospective buyers look for at each stage of the buying cycle can help firms correctly structure their content creation strategies. SMEs can now plan the content required that will help them win margin rich orders from large enterprises.

Respected publisher IDG undertook some analysis of the way IT decision makers in large enterprises used the web when they wanted to buy new products and services.  That analysis offers some really valuable insights into the way large enterprises buy in general.  It means you can now organise your sales and marketing content in a way that will attract and engage these buyers and influencers.  

In short, by following a few simple guidelines, you can significantly improve your chances of making sales to firms with larger than average cheque books!

The IDG analysis tracked the information decision makers looked for at each stage of the buying cycle.  The cycle as such is usually depicted as a five step sequential process. It starts with identification of the problem, moves on to evaluation and selection, until a purchase decision is reached.  Typically, the process looks like this:

IDG tracked 1025 decision makers to identify what materials they looked for in each buying stage.  The findings suggest that some content can be used across a number of different stages.  

This means you don’t need to create lots of articles, whitepapers and case studies to address each individual stage, at least not to begin with.  Instead, just ensure that the content you do create serves the information needs of your web visitors at each stage of the buying cycle.  Here’s a summary of what prospects are looking for based upon the IDG analysis:

Need:

• Articles and whitepapers on trends, strategies and different technologies
• Case studies and blogs of real examples.

Your prospects are looking to relate their own situation to one that might have been experienced by someone else. By comparing symptoms, your prospect goes through a sense-making exercise – trying to determine if his/her problem is a common one, whether there is an easy solution or if their situation is something more complex and unique.  At the end of this stage, prospects will have defined the nature of the business problem/need.

Technical requirements:

Having rationalised the problem/need, if your prospect is serious about resolving the problem, their attention will turn to understanding the different options available for a fix.  They will be looking for:

• “How to…” content
• Relevant whitepapers, articles and blogs
• Case studies and interviews with firms that have had similar problems.

Prospects will be looking to develop a deeper understanding of the problem, options and related consequences.  In this stage, they will begin formulating a short list of the different solutions that seem worth exploring in more detail.

Evaluation:

Each option identified will be quickly assessed for suitability.  Those felt to be most appropriate to your prospect’s specific circumstances will be investigated further.  They will search for:

• Product tests and reviews as well as industry news coverage
• Product demonstrations and literature
• “How to” content, whitepapers, articles, case studies and blogs
• Expert assessments
• Buyers guides and peer comment

Prospects will mentally start drawing-up a short list of preferred solutions.  The experience in gathering and reading through literature will influence which vendors are likely to be shortlisted for the next stage.

Short-list selection:

At this point in the process, decision makers are starting to take a more formal approach to information capture. Buyers look for:

• Product tests and reviews
• Product descriptions and technical details
• Expert research, reviews and interviews
• Supporting independent technical and industry commentary
• Buyers guides

Prospects are now building an objective comparison of options and identification of risks.  Price and other associated costs will come into play as preliminary business cases are formulated.

Recommend and decide:

Prospects are now looking to finalise a robust business case that suits their needs.  Bias may have already been introduced based on the experiences with candidate vendor web sites and downloadable materials.  They will be looking for:

• ROI tools
• Supporting case studies and testimonials
• Expert commentary
• Up to date product descriptions, roadmaps and technical information
• Most recent product tests and reviews
• Articles and whitepapers about future trends

Prospects at this stage are looking to justify the investment they want to make to internal stakeholders.  Given that personal reputations can be affected if large investments go wrong, prospects are looking to include content that is highly trustworthy and reliable, or offers a low risk exit option.

What comes out of this analysis is the need for you to create high quality, relevant content that meets the needs of buyers at each stage of the purchase process.  You can directly influence the creation of articles, whitepapers, case studies, blogs, ROI tools and product literature.  Just be sure that each item addresses the needs of prospective buyers wherever they are in the buying process.  Your ability to influence review writers and experts is a much harder task, and often requires a large dose of luck!

Given this knowledge, you should be able to review your sales and marketing literature and make plans to re-align existing content to each stage of the buying cycle.  You need to identify any gaps in your library and get them filled with suitable content.  Make this a priority for your marketing team or outsource the task to a professional copywriter.

The trick then is to test and keep the content up to date.  Testing is important as you’ll want to ensure that each item of content created is as effective as it can be in winning new business.  Simple A/B testing over time will help you to ensure this is the case.  

Keeping content refreshed is important too.  You need to continually look at what competitors are producing and ensure your content minimises weaknesses whilst playing to your strengths.  Good copywriting will again be a key ingredient in bringing you success.

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How small business agility, innovation and a network of professionals can lead to success in niche markets

Small businesses can often out-manoeuvre larger firms when addressing new market opportunities. Their ability to act and implement quickly are key areas of advantage.  Going one step further and building a network of supporting professionals, means you can often create an entry barrier that makes it difficult for larger firms to compete.


An inspiring story recently served as a refreshing reminder of how the odds can be stacked in favour of agile small businesses.  The key word here is agile.

Model Sounds UK was conceived and born in just three weeks and has gone from zero to a projected first year turnover of over £100,000.

Mark Thatcher, the MD of Model Sounds UK, became frustrated when he couldn’t find a solution to a problem concerning his model boat hobby.  So he patched something together himself that seemed to do a good job.  Thoughts soon extended to the sales potential as it was clear from Mark’s initial research that he’d found a gap in the market.

Mark quickly moved to set-up a functioning web site with his wife, and the Model Sounds UK business commenced trading just three weeks after the concept was developed in July 2012.

Mark started the business with less than £1000 and sold 53 units on his first trading day.  Six months later, unit sales had exceeded 800 units and channel distribution was showing promising expansion. 

This is a great illustration of small business entrepreneurship.  Larger organisations normally require new ideas to be formally approved in advance by at least one senior manager.  Such firms are locked into a planned programme of activities.  Procedures must be followed to ensure all necessary compliance and governance rules are met, otherwise their insurance cover could be compromised. The need to “manage” gets in the way.  This is why larger firms tend to be less agile.  Smaller businesses are able to be more innovative and can act faster. 

Innovation in small firms means having the right mind-set.  Successful entrepreneurs often consciously look for new ways to improve an existing product or service, or look for gaps in the market.  This conscious approach is a skill that small business owners can develop.

If you make a point of looking for market gaps or new ways to improve the items and processes you use every day, you will soon have a steady stream of ideas worthy of evaluation.  The majority will fall by the wayside.  Others will look more promising.  

As a small business owner, you will be better placed than a larger company to quickly refine an idea, build a prototype and take it to market.  It may not be a new business opportunity like the Model Sounds UK example; it might be an enhanced product offering or an improved service.  The outcome will help to differentiate your position in the market, and to do so before a larger competitor can act.

What you will want to do is make sure that you allocate tasks and processes in the most efficient manner. This will help to keep costs as low as possible and so create an entry barrier that larger firms will need to address when they finally start to react to your initial market advantage.  

So, for example, if you need to generate market awareness and leads quickly and cheaply but don’t feel your skills are in the area of blog writing or social media engagement, outsource the task to a professional at the outset.  It’s pointless developing a new idea, only for it to lose early mover advantage because you decided on a DIY promotion strategy; one that doesn’t communicate the key messages or lacks professionalism.  The same goes for technology support, logistics, parts sourcing and all other aspects of the value chain.  

By building a network of small business professionals for each of the areas that are outside your core competence, you’ll be giving your innovation a better chance of success.  Small business owners empathise with each other and will often work that bit harder to be part of a small business success story.


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Social Media: Make sure you’re using the right platform

New entrants into the social media arena offer additional opportunities to reach segmented audiences.  But which are best for your business?

Do you know which social media platform is best for your business?  Research undertaken in August 2012 by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute  provides some useful insights.  Whilst the survey base was B2B enterprises in North America, it’s likely that the UK and Europe will follow similar trends.

Some 87% of respondents claimed to use social media to drive content awareness.  As tracking and moderating social media feeds can be a drain on the time of key people in the business, it’s useful to understand which platforms warrant the most attention. 

So who’s tops and, perhaps more importantly, what are the trends?

B2B Social Media Trends

Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are pretty much equal with around 80% of respondents claiming to use them (up from around 70% in 2011 suggesting the trend is entrenched but maybe plateauing). 

One interpretation of this is that businesses are playing safe and posting to all three so that they don’t miss out.  If this is the case then we can expect a fourth to be joining the top tier soon in the shape of Google+ which shows clear growth.

The interesting trend is the appearance of many new entrants.  This could be the start of some serious fragmentation in the social media world.  Some of the strongest starts are among platforms that are “graphically” oriented.  It will be interesting to see if Instagram, Foursquare, Vimeo and Pinterest start to align more with particular industry types and whether they start to take share away from the likes of YouTube.

Of course, any trend towards more graphically oriented sites will require businesses to produce images and videos of suitable quality, and in sufficient quantity, to maintain a competitive presence.  This would mean diverting budget into a new area which, given current market conditions, might be a bold move for some.

If your business offering lends itself to graphical formats it may pay to create some appropriate assets and test the water.  These new formats certainly look set to attract new visitors over the coming year, but whether they generate sustainable business remains to be seen.

In the meantime, if time is limited, it looks like posting to at least one of the top three platforms will see your content distributed amongst the largest audiences actively using social tools.

Search for: 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks – North America, Marketing Profs, Content Marketing Institute.

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How small businesses can significantly increase PR visibility...with a little bit of extra effort

Press releases can give small and medium sized firms great exposure and help fuel rapid growth.  What’s more, recent research suggests they can significantly improve their chance of high visibility by working a bit harder and creating a fully supported press pack.

Using relevant trade press remains a reliable way of raising awareness and communicating your latest news amongst your target audience.  However, it appears the days of sending out a text based news release alone may soon be over.  Recent research suggests that including multiple media support with the text version can increase visibility up to ten fold! 

Before we look deeper into this, we need to be clear why using the press is critical for most SME’s in the first place.

Research presented by Nicholas Holmes recently found that over 60% of business owners had not spoken with a journalist in the last twelve months, many fearful of the outcome!  In reality, journalists, especially those covering niche markets, are keen to build relationships with business owners. 

Journalists recognize that they are more likely to get genuine information along with knowledgeable industry insight “…direct from the horse’s mouth…” rather than relying on agency spokespeople.  The natural passion for the subject that comes from a business owner can often inspire journalists to produce compelling coverage that can work wonders for a firms’ visibility.

So, how do you get noticed by a journalist in the first place?

Build firm foundations

Obviously, before you craft your press release, you need to be clear about your messages, not just about your new news story, but the “corporate” messages too.  Be clear about the strengths you want to emphasize but also be sure to have a clear position on how to respond if challenged about a market threat or business weakness. 

Use staff and colleagues to generate a list of positive and negative questions about your business and the industry.  Make sure the questions reflect the views of end-user customers, channel partners, competitors and pressure groups.  Building and maintaining this list, and formulating responses, will help enormously when it comes to drafting the press release itself and, perhaps more importantly, will help to build your confidence about engaging with the Press.

Draft your press release

Jerry Brown provides some valuable guidance on this subject.  Taking Jerry’s input, I see the steps involved as a series of hurdles.

Hurdle 1: Getting the journalist to read beyond your headline:

Stick with one key headline message.  It must be clear, concise, obvious and interesting to your audience as well as your target journalist (who will spend just a few moments scanning your headline before deciding if it is something he or she can use).  Writing the headline is harder than you might think which is why external PR or marketing support can really add value if your time is limited.  It is often the last part of the release to be written but the first hurdle to be cleared.

Hurdle 2: Getting the journalist to read the first main text block:

This is often referred to as a “nut” paragraph.  It is a really brief overview of your story.  What is the subject, why is it important to the audience, and how will a reader be better off after reading it?

Hurdle 3: Getting the journalist to read the main body text:

This is the story itself.  The who, what, when, where, how and why.  Always keep in mind the audience you are addressing and be clear about why this story is important to them; how will the information in the story help the reader?

Include one or two quotes from people directly involved in the story.  Keep the length of the release to two pages where possible.  

Remember to include a boilerplate as a final paragraph.  This needs to be a concise description of your business and include your contact details.  Avoid any sales pitch! This is all about communicating news, raising awareness and generating some inbound activity.  The selling should only start when readers react to your published article – the inbound activity.

But, there’s a problem!

So, you have laid a solid foundation and jumped the hurdles to get your press release in front of relevant journalists.  Alas, evidence suggests you now have another hurdle to jump, and getting this one wrong could hurt!

Hurdle 4: Getting your journalist to accept your article over others:

PR Newswire recently studied its press release data and found that text only releases are losing out to those submitted with multiple supporting media assets like videos, photos, slides and downloadable files.  It appears that including multiple assets with a text based release can increase published visibility by up to ten times!  The impact appears to apply as shown in the chart below:

Chart 1: How including different content assets can improve press release visibility:

It appears that including additional content assets along with the text based release helps journalists (and the publication’s design team) present news in a more visually attractive way.  It’s easier for them to present interesting and engaging content in their publication.  They don’t have to go and find visually stimulating material to support an editorial piece, it’s all provided for them. So it's not surprising that PR submissions containing multiple content assets are being considered ahead of many text-only submissions. 

Small business owners and in-house marketing professionals who do not employ a full-time PR agency will now need to create supporting content when they develop press releases and articles or risk missing out.  Relying on text alone to get visibility is going to be more of a challenge in future.

Marketing teams need to plan for the inclusion of the PR element of a campaign right up front as an integral part of the content marketing plan.  What's more, they will need to acquire the skills to develop and create a range of supporting content assets. Either that or use external support to help create the required content on time.

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Real World Content Creation

Three key set-up steps to help ensure you create content that makes a difference.

Much is written about how to create great content and much of it is sound advice.  However, many marketing professionals and small business owners struggle to get the results they are looking for.  The normal day-to-day demands of the job leave little time to dedicate to the task.  

Creating content itself requires much preparation, research, word-crafting and endless editing amongst other things. This article looks at why some struggle and how real progress can be made by ensuring the groundwork is in place right at the outset.

1 – Alignment with business objectives: what are you looking to achieve? 

Many pundits correctly say that the first step in any content development programme is to align with business goals.  That’s true, but it really needs to be specific.  It’s usually not enough to talk about aligning to the high level goals of an organisation.  It’s more about meeting the annual target for a profit centre – perhaps increase product Z sales by XX% in twelve months in the West region, or maybe cross-the-chasm from early adopter sales to run-rate order volumes of XXX.

Documenting the objective in these terms will ensure the correct focus and identify how success will be measured.  That is what the business expects of the content.  Succeeding here builds careers!

A dose of realism in terms of timescale is needed too.  Content may be required to build awareness, educate and inform, handle objections, and persuade someone to take an action…in an environment where the visitor is in control. 

Stakeholders need to be managed to understand that one item of content alone will not be able to compete with a face-to-face environment in terms of the speed of conversion / progression. 

Managers need to have a realistic understanding of how a series of assets can work with other parts of the business process in order to meet the stated business objective.  Getting agreement on this interaction should also help identify the KPI points so that each stage of the process is monitored and measured, and true accountability is introduced!

Getting these ground rules in place first will help smooth the development of the content that needs to be created.

2 - Audience Requirements:

This usually consists of two parts.  First, document your audience.  In B2B that tends to consist of at least one role at C level and many others at more operational levels.  It’s about identifying decision makers, influencers and any others involved in the procurement process. 

The trouble is, it varies by industry, enterprise size, and even “divisional personality”.  What do they need at each stage of the buying process?  How can this be provided in a way that maintains your competitive differential? 

It really is an art-form, gathering input from Sales and having it re-shaped by those with a more reflective, strategic focus.  Yet it is fundamental to the whole content development process, and it really does need to be written down!

Having created the audience requirements document, the second part of the process is to align existing assets / content to each player in the buying process.  Does each asset satisfy their needs?  What gaps exist?  Do the assets effectively handle objections at each point of the process? 

Testing is the only way to prove this but that requires time, budget and resource.  This will be unrealistic for short term projects but is a must in initiatives likely to last more than twelve months in a competitive marketplace.

3 - Content Plan and Delivery:

Most marketing professionals tend to be constrained by time and budget.  If your content is to be effective and measurable, a planned approach will be essential, otherwise odd bits of money will be thrown at tasks on a whim and unlikely to align with the overall objective.

As mentioned above, being clear about the objective and documenting the audience requirements are the first key steps to have in place.  When you then overlay the time and budget constraints, the hard decisions can start to be made about what assets, specifically, need to be created to address the most critical requirements and how they will interact with other parts of the sales and marketing process to deliver success. 

Finally, the relevant content needs to be “in place” and distributed at the right stage.  That may require training staff how to deploy it, considering media options, utilizing traditional events, webinars or any number of other communications routes.  It is surprisingly easy for great content to “fail” because it has not been made available in the right way at the right time to the right audience.

All three steps are interlinked and it is essential that the whole end-to-end process is managed like a strategic project.  The good news is that after you have followed this process successfully the first time, it will be easier and faster to apply the process again.  Much of the groundwork will be in place, staff will understand how it all works, and the business can become more agile.

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