Having a hard time hitting your content marketing targets? You’re not alone. The recent rising star of B2B marketing is now bringing us all a new set of challenges. How to reach an audience suffering from severe content fatigue? How to draw up a content strategy that actually supports your business goals? How to efficiently scale your content operations? Have you already figured out (some of) the answers to these questions? Good for you! We too have learnt (the hard way!). And we’ve combined these insights and pieces of advice into a down-to-earth B2B content marketing approach with realistic goals.

The thing with content is, there is only so much stuff people will read, view and listen to on a daily basis. Time as the new currency for loyalty. Or some such philosophical perspective. But one thing has become all too clear: your audience can smell content crap from a mile away. Data-driven and tech-savvy as we marketers are, our initial response was to build technology to target ‘the living daylights out of them’. And to create all-encompassing KPI dashboards to track and prove our content success. Yes, these instruments have helped us sharpen our content axe, but they will only get you so far. It all begins with the underlying content program. This needs to be built on the right audience insights (big or small), on creative formats, operational scalability and distribution ingenuity. Let’s find out what these ingredients really mean and how we might help you to go from ‘now to next’.

Depending on your level of content maturity and/or the specific goals you have set, you could look into one (or both) of these two elements in order to give your content marketing program a serious boost.

1. Shaping your B2B content marketing strategy
   If you’re like most, then according to Gartner, it is very likely that you don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. However, if you do have one, CMI has calculated, that you’ve already increased your chance to succeed exponentially. But, assuming you do have a documented your B2B content marketing strategy, it’s likely that you have serious doubts as to if it’s the right one. What to do? Well, there’s a lot you can do. For one, you can start off by making sure your strategy includes concrete answers to a lot of questions on very different – but interrelated – topics. For instance, your business strategy (how does it support our commercial goals?), audience data and insights (who are we creating content for?), marketing strategy (how does all this support our overarching marketing plan?), creativity (how to stun our audience?) or operations (how to run smooth and effective operations?). To name a few ;-). It’s a hard, but fun and rewarding exercise finding those answers together with your team, believe us.
2. Executing it with confidence
   Successful strategy execution is probably one of the hardest things to master and the same is true for content. If all has gone well putting in place your documented content marketing strategy, the great news is that you now have a central content team with members (and agencies) that know all about their roles and responsibilities, the internal processes and guidelines, your documented strategy, the KPIs and goals you have set, the tools you use, the priorities you have defined and the budget available. Right. Now, let’s switch to a more realistic scenario in which you and your team managed to create those two webinars just in time (turning that event into a digital one nearly killed us!) and, to be honest, at this point you don’t have a clue about what’s next. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle (but don’t start asking details about this month’s content planning, OK?). Don’t worry, we’ve been there. Still are, actually. Together with our clients’ teams, taking small content steps a day at a time. But often considered as being giant leaps by the people we work with.

Want to have one of our content marketing experts on your team for a day or two per week? Or work with our content team remotely, on a specific project? Either way, our experienced B2B content marketing professionals are ready to go the extra mile for you. And we’re fun to work with, people say. Curious about our approach, client cases or just want to discuss your challenge in detail and in-person?