There are two questions businesses always ask about their content. When you advise a company to build up their content output, and tell them to target their ideal clients, the response is always the same. They ask:
- What do I write about?
- How do I target my audience?
What they don’t realize is that these two questions actually answer one another.
Defining Your Audience
Your desired audience for your blog, social media or video content is the same as your products target market. Every B2B has an ideal clients, your content marketing should be targeted at that client. If that sounds simple, it’s because it is. You already work on identifying ideal targets for advertising, you qualify and nurture leads and you tailor your entire process to fit a well-defined market. You can use that work to inform your B2B marketing content too.
Write For Them
The mistake most people make when they sit down to plan new content is the sitting down and planning new content. You don’t plan marketing content on its own. Idea generation for content should be ongoing. Whether the ideas come to you in the middle of dinner or in the shower, you never stop coming up with ideas.
Instead, you sit down and plan who you’re going to write for. What you’ll find is that by thinking about who you’re writing for, you start to get ideas on what to write.
Of course, creating B2B marketing content for a living it’s easy for me to tell you what to do. Let’s break the process down a little further and think about who exactly you’re writing for when you create B2B content marketing.
The Business
You’re a business that sells to businesses, so your first target is to write content that’s useful for the types of businesses that use your product. That often means content that identifies challenges or opportunities that are loosely related to your product. If you provide software solutions for example, you create content that offers advice in dealing with business software. Your content should offer broad help for anyone within a business. Even if the first person to find it isn’t the IT manager, they might get it as a second hand share.
The Role
You don’t have to hope that your content is shared to the IT manager though. You can write it specifically for the role you normally associate with your product. If you produce office furniture, create content that helps with common issues associated with the role of facilities manager. Lists of suggested equipment for certain tasks, or good training or policy samples work well for this kind of role.
The Industry (Theirs)
You may have a specific industry that you do a lot of work for; if your product helps with compliance you’ll deal with more heavily regulated industries like medical or education. Your B2B marketing content could comment on industry trends, or use examples of mistakes others in the industry have made in the past.
The Industry (Yours)
The SEO and keyword advantages of B2B content should also be considered, which actually makes your job easier. You can target content within your own industry. Create content that talks about topics you deal with every day. Your prospects will be searching Google (Other search engines are available) for those topics; you want them to find your content.
The Person
The often forgotten target on this list is the person. Every target on this list is also a normal person just like you or I, as well as being a compliance officer, CEO or CFO. To create really great B2B marketing content you should write about business topics for people. That means telling jokes, showing emotion and throwing in a bit of style. As I’ve said on previous blogs, nobody ever lost a client by making them laugh.
If you’re asking what to write or who to write for when creating B2B marketing content; just remember, the answer’s in both questions.
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