Take a look at your content plan (if you have one)
Is your content planning still driven by keywords and search volumes?
Does it feel like you’re writing about topics related to what you do – rather than for a defined set of readers?
Are you really getting to the heart of what motivates your market? Or dancing around the periphery and publishing the same stuff everyone else does?
Content planning demands more effort than it usually gets. (I know this because I’ve seen how much effort it gets). It shouldn’t come down to: ‘we’ve got to do a couple of posts this month, what can we write about?’
ChatGPT isn’t your saviour. It’ll spew out a list of subjects suitable for any industry within seconds. But it only knows what’s been done before. It doesn’t know your target customers. It doesn’t know your business.
B2B content plans lack purpose. It’s why more and more B2B marketing content treads the same well-worn path to mind-numbing mediocrity.
Think I’m being unfair or overly gloomy? A recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute found that:
- 58% of businesses rated their content planning as ‘moderately effective.’
- Nearly half of respondents struggled because their content lacked clear goals.
Bear in mind that the businesses on the CMI’s radar ought to be those that take content marketing seriously.
The value of a value proposition
There’s a simple choice when it comes to content marketing: you can do the hard work up-front and make ongoing planning simpler, or you can skip over the foundations and condemn yourself to a hard and unproductive slog.
It might sound blindingly obvious, but the point of marketing content is marketing. And all successful marketing is customer-driven.
Can the same be said of your content planning? Is it set up to reach, engage and convert the people who really matter for the future success of your business?
Beyond the general and the obvious there are specific things that your target customers value. There will be observations and potential advantages that will make them take notice.
A value proposition says: ‘here’s what you really want beyond the delivery of a product or service, and here’s how we help you achieve that.’
Customer wants can be varied. There may be multiple threads to your value proposition. That’s a good thing. It shows you’ve thought it through. It also gives you plenty of relevant subject matter.
When you map all of this out you start to build the framework of your content plan. No shortage of topics – and all with a specific slant tuned to your target customers.
Surely that’s better than just writing about stuff?
Who cares, and how much?
It’s well documented that around 95% of your market isn’t buying right now. No amount of educational and persuasive content from you is going to change that. Demand isn’t something you can force into being.
Instinctively, you might think that these people don’t matter (not for now, at least). Focus on capturing the people who are looking to buy imminently.
Big mistake. When buyers are ready to start serious research they begin with who they can remember.
How do you plan to get the attention of those folks and plant little memories in their minds? Don’t expect them to act. Give them something to remember instead.
How much of the content you publish currently is skewed towards buyers who are already in-market? Perhaps your content (however good it is) comes along too late to make a difference to their decision.
The big thing missing from most content plans
Let’s assume now that you’re talking to in-market buyers. There’s one thing you need to know.
Buyers don’t buy the best solution.
They buy the one that offers the most advantageous balance between commercial advantage and personal risk.
If your content planning is focused on features, benefits and value, it’s missing something fundamental: building trust.
You might be tempted to skip over risks and potential complications to concentrate on the sunlit uplands of successful implementation. But they’re very much a constant nag in the minds of your prospects.
Purposeful content planning
I guess the upshot is that to have any chance of success your content planning needs to be customer-driven and purposeful.
Drop me an email or LinkedIn DM if you want to chat more about how to do this.