Create effective B2B marketing content by first thinking of your audience
/Ever read something that you know was meant for you—but it just didn’t connect?
Leaves you unimpressed, right?
Imagine if that’s what your content marketing is doing to your B2B prospects. Like your prospects are reading your stuff and silently screaming at you, “You don’t even know me!”
Sounds dramatic, but this is what’s happening if content doesn’t land. And the best way to avoid creating dud content is by thinking about your audience, what they need and what you can produce to meet that need. That means getting into or staying in a customer-centric frame of mind.
The human condition: selfishness
What do people care about most? Themselves and their problems. Even if your audience is seminary saints, they still care most about their own problems (how can I save souls, etc.). Be useful by addressing these real concerns in your content marketing, whether it’s through case studies, blogs, white papers or email auto-responders.
That means you must get to know your audience—clients and prospects—to understand what they care about and what they want to read about or see videos on. Like maybe grammarians would enjoy reading an indignant argument about why English should conform to Latin standards on not ending sentences with prepositions—while copywriters would like the opposite argument. See how knowing your audience lets you guess whether your topic will flop or pop?
5 ways to come up with ideas for creating effective marketing content
Okay, know your audience and talk about what they want or need to know. But how? Good question!
Brainstorm
Personally, I enjoy any opportunity to bust out pens and oversized paper or to scrawl on an even more oversized whiteboard. Fun, right? Also: productive. Get your brainstorm supplies and a colleague or two and start pumping out your thoughts on “things we think our clients and prospects care about.”
In brainstorming, people like to say there are no stupid ideas but that’s the wrong way to encourage creativity. Lots of ideas are stupid—so set the stage for your brainstorming session correctly. Something like, “Throw out any idea, no matter how off-the-wall, because now’s the time to go crazy, not to evaluate.”
After a good brainstorm, you’ll have 3 months of useful content topics, plus the dread of having to produce it.
Collaborate with your sales and customer service folks
If your business is big enough to have teams, it’s big enough to have silos—the dreaded symbolic grain containers that keep one team from talking to another. Marketing, don’t let that happen to you! Instead, walk on over and talk to the folks who actually talk to your customers and prospects. Ask about what comes up, what issues they see and deal with, what they know clients are concerned about.
Boom! Two more months of topics for the list.
Talk to the sales team again
Prepare for some razzing. “Oh, it’s Marketing, crawling back to talk to us again…need our help?” Ever notice how great sales people like to laugh? Well, thank goodness. Now that you’re all buoyed up, ask the sales professionals what their top sales objections are by product or service and how they usually address them.
Prepare for another 20 ideas added to your brainstorm list.
Know your keywords
Using the right keywords throughout your web content helps your site—and your useful information—get found. You can find keywords with Google Keyword Planner or Keyword Tool. Look up questions associated with your keywords and start answering them in your content. If you know that’s what your prospects and clients are looking for. Don’t be wooed by fancy SEO techniques without first aiming to serve your audience with excellent content.
Look for social media comments and questions
Your clients and prospects may be telling you what they want to know on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn so mine those comments for questions or issues you can cover in your business blog, case studies and other marketing content.
If you do these 5 things, your list of ‘how to give our B2B clients what they need’ will be long. Perhaps overwhelming. Ignore the overwhelm for now. Because it’s time to celebrate—you’re putting your clients and prospects first!
And that’s how you make B2B marketing content that connects.
I'm Andrea Bassett, an executive ghostwriter and content marketing writer in Toronto and I’ve spent the last decade serving executives.
I write thought leadership content marketing for executives and/or their content marketing teams. My specializations are corporate wellness, benefits, employee assistance programs, leadership & coaching, encryption & cybersecurity and strength training for seniors.
To talk about a content marketing project, call me at 647-502-3187 or send a note to andrea@redsailwriters.com.
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A version of this article was originally published in the blogging for business series that starts here.