In B2B marketing, it is essential to create a content plan that reflects the patterns and behaviours of your target industry.
Drawing up an annual schedule might seem time-consuming and involve a heap of creative output, but there are a number of simple, effective ways to bulk-out a marketing strategy while ensuring that it caters to the specific needs of your business.
Here are our top 3 tips to get you started:
1) Use seasonality to your advantage
Seasonal content is a useful way to plan ahead in a strategy.
It’s not just about posting festive content in December, spring clean pieces in April or summer fun in July (although, they might all help).
It’s about knowing your customer’s priorities around specific periods of the year. What’s important in their life, or their industry at any given time? What’s consuming their thoughts in a certain month? When might they be more curious about what you do?
For example, pharmaceutical companies might create content focused on combating illness during icy weather, to promote flu and cold remedies, or health advice in anticipation of those new years’ resolutions.
The most important thing to remember is that this content must be beneficial to potential clients – and not be a hard sell.
If you create content around popular concerns within your target industry over a certain period, your brand is seen as knowledgeable and relevant. Your content anticipates what customers need, before they need it.
2) Dig deeper into your industry
Peel away at the industry (or industries) where your customers work, to try and find buried topics of conversation that your target audience is interested in.
Your potential customers will value intelligence, so the content you create has to build your authoritative voice within the field.
It’s vital that your brand content is up-to-date with the latest industry news and is engaging in the conversation; digging into forums, magazines, conferences etc. can help give you inspiration for insightful pieces. Your content could even be a write-up of a recent industry event.
Although this type of content is ad-hoc, once you immerse yourself into an industry, you’ll find certain annual trends. Quarterly reports, annual events, and various other announcements that occur regularly.
This will help you put some structure into your annual strategy, but it’s also important to retain some flexibility in content creation, so you can jump on a piece of big news and remain contemporary and present.
3) Get your content out there
Creating great content is one thing, but implementing it is another. Be sure to spend the time promoting and sharing your content with all of your relevant audience.
Seed this content through your social media profiles on Twitter and LinkedIn. Make sure you use assets such as images, photosets, links and link cards, so that your online footprint will become attractive and, more importantly, constantly active.
Use sales enablement software like Data Dwell to quickly push content to leads in your sales funnel and encourage reps to share these useful and insightful articles with prospects.
When potential buyers see you regularly contributing, they’re more likely to buy from you.
By creating layers to your profiles, and by posting seasonal and industry-related content, you’ll start to raise the profile and authority of your brand, and as an added bonus, generate more sales off the back of your great content.
