Callum Sharman
Fail to plan and you plan to fail. It might be a cliché quote, but that doesn’t make it any less true – particularly when it comes to B2B content marketing.
Today’s B2B tech brands are constantly struggling to adapt to an era of diminishing customer trust, increasingly complex buyer journeys, and AI dominance. Yet, many still fail to invest enough time and effort into effective content planning.
The trouble is, without a plan, you’re just distributing content at random. You’re not taking proactive steps to build brand authority and trust with category-defining content, or responding to changing customer needs. You’re not consistently driving customers through the purchasing journey with genuine insights that help them solve their problems.
You’re just creating content and hoping for the best.
That’s not going to work at a time when AI is stealing clicks on search engines, social media channels are devaluing brand content, and buyers don’t know who to trust.
Content Planning Power Moves: Starting with Strategy
Great content planning starts with the right strategy. Your content strategy defines your goals, target audience, distribution channels, and the other essential elements involved in your marketing efforts.
Your content plan, on the other hand, will be the document you use to guide the execution of that strategy. Basically, think of it like your strategy is your marketing roadmap, while the plan is the vehicle you’ll use to make progress towards your goals.
According to CMI (the Content Marketing Institute), companies that have a clearly defined content strategy are 69% more likely to consider themselves as “top performers” in their industry.
For B2B tech brands, strategy is even more crucial than you might think. After all, in the B2C world, the content you create is typically speaking straight to the decision maker (the consumer).
In the B2B landscape, there are no impulse buyers. You’re trying to connect with a committee of decision makers throughout an ever-more complicated buyer journey. You need to consistently earn trust and drive multiple people through the buyer funnel. That takes a lot of work.
So, what do you need for an effective content strategy?
Measurable, Clear Goals: Your Driving Force
Clear goals and content planning should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, setting the right goals is tricky. First you need your goals to be ambitious if you want to move forward in a measurable way – but not so ambitious that they’re impossible to achieve.
Secondly, you need to be clear about how you define your goals. It’s not enough to say the purpose of your content is to increase brand awareness and reach. Be specific. For instance, a goal might be:
“We want to create blog posts and social media videos that will increase traffic to our website by 20% and increase our social followers by 30% in the next 6 months.”
While you’re setting your goals:
- Think about the picture: Setting SMART goals is about breaking your targets down into measurable pieces – but you still need a holistic view. Why are you trying to increase brand awareness, and why are you focusing on specific types of content?
- Look at your data: Take advantage of your data. Based on conversations you’ve had with customers, or feedback you’ve received, why is your content going to be beneficial to them? How are you adapting to current trends and buyer preferences?
- Plan for problems: What are you going to do if you don’t start to achieve your goals? Are you going to switch tactics or try a new marketing channel? How will you decide when it’s time to pivot?
Understanding your Audience: Creating Personalized Content
Next, you need an in-depth understanding of who you’re creating your content for. Again, this is tricky in the B2B tech world, because you’re likely to be trying to convert multiple decision makers. Fortunately, there are a lot of sources of data you can tap into.
Start by tapping into the data you already have. This includes any insights you’ve gained your highest-performing content (what currently connects with your audience), and the direct information you source from your customers.
Use AI to transcribe and summarize conversations with buyers. Leverage survey tools to collect insights into your customer’s buyer journeys, pain points, and preferences. Next, look at competitor data. Use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to find out how competitors are nurturing consumers throughout the buyer journey. What types of content, on which channels, earn the most engagement?
Finally, turn to your employees. Customer service reps, marketing teams, and sales professionals can answer crucial questions about your customers. Ask them:
- What questions do customers usually have about our products?
- What are the most common objections leads tell us about?
- Who in a buyer committee has the most influence over purchasing decisions?
- What frustrates our prospects or customers?
- What makes our customers happiest with our solution?
Finding Distribution Channels: Mapping the Buyer Journey
Once you’ve identified your goals, and have a clear view of your target audience, the next step is choosing where you’re going to engage with your customers. Don’t just pick the same social media channels and platforms as your competitors.
Thoroughly map the buyer journey, and take the current trends of the industry into account. For instance, if you rely on news reports to capture awareness in the early stages of the buyer journey, X and Facebook are no longer the best distribution channels. In the B2B industry, industry publications and video channels like YouTube are now more powerful for distributing news.
When your customers enter the consideration stage, they won’t just be comparing your products or services to competitors. They’ll be looking for evidence of your thought leadership, credibility, and unique expertise. Demonstrating thought leadership with videos about trends, roundtables, and other educational content can give you an edge.
In the decision stage, trust and genuine data are crucial. Sharing case studies, and access to live demonstrations could help you boost your conversion rates.
Don’t forget about post purchase opportunities either. Engaging your customers after they make a purchase, with onboarding strategies, loyalty programs, and community forums will help you to transform existing buyers into advocates for your brand.
Content Planning Pro Moves: From Strategy to Action
Once you have the core elements of your content strategy, you can shift your attention to content planning. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to approach a content plan, but in our experience, a few key things do make all the difference:
- A clear and consistent brand voice
- Engaging, powerful topics
- Omnichannel reach
- An editorial calendar
- Tools for tracking performance
Step 1: Identifying your Brand Voice
Every successful B2B tech brand has their own unique style and personality that shines through in their content. They use their tone and voice to humanize their content and forge connections with customers – setting themselves apart from today’s AI-driven posts.
Your voice highlights the personality of your brand. For instance, at Today Digital, we’re warm, welcoming, but also authoritative (or we try to be).
Your tone is more dynamic, and adapts to the topic you’re covering and the audience you’re trying to reach. You might take a more serious tone when you’re discussing a news topic, or a more informal tone when you’re giving your opinion on an industry trend.
Identifying how you’ll use your voice and different tones throughout your content, and on different channels (for specific audience segments) is crucial. It’s how you ensure you’re giving your customers a consistent experience when they interact with your brand.
Consider creating brand voice guidelines for your teams, templates to use on various channels, and even prompts that staff can experiment with when using AI tools.
Step 2: Choosing the Right Topics
Now you need to decide what you’re going to be creating content about. Again, this can be tricky. Our advice is to focus on relevant, up-to-date topics, that you address from a unique angle. For instance, everyone in your industry might be talking about AI right now.
You can use tools like SEMRush to search for high-volume, low competition keywords connected to AI, and relevant to your audience – but go further than that. Don’t just try to replicate what’s ranking on the search engines or what’s getting the most social media traction.
Think about how can infuse something special into the topics you’re covering. Can you share quotes from a customer you recently helped with an AI initiative? Do you have data you can share that nobody else has? Can you turn to thought leaders and influencers for their input?
Find a unique way to help your customers solve the genuine problems they’re facing in your industry, with information nobody else has. You can even use AI to help with this, feeding conversations with staff, stakeholders, and tech support into ChatGPT to generate new topic ideas.
Step 3: Planning for Content Reach
Next, take a look at your content strategy and pinpoint the touchpoints throughout the customer journey where you have the best chance to engage your customers. The chances are you’ll need to take an omnichannel approach to creating content. That means producing not just written blog posts, articles, and news reports, but videos, infographics, and even podcasts.
You’ll also need to ensure the content you’re sharing in different formats is tuned to the channels you’ll be using. The videos you create for YouTube, for instance, might not be the ones you share on LinkedIn, and industry publications.
So, how do you make sure you’re getting the most out of your assets? Again, this is where AI can make a huge difference to your content planning approach. AI tools can help you to convert content into different formats, from videos and images, to graphs and webinars, in a matter of seconds.
You can even ask AI to help you customize your content for different market segments, like customers in different regions, or with different priorities.
Step 4: Building your Content Calendar
We’ve covered the who, what, and where of content planning so far. Now it’s time to think about the “when”. In other words, when are you going to be promoting specific content across certain channels, and who will be responsible for each stage in the process.
Don’t just assume the best time to post your latest news report on your website and social media is “as soon as it’s ready”. Think about when your customers are most likely to be active, online, and looking for insights. Consider your “full content roadmap”.
For example, rather than just posting a news report to boost brand awareness, can you follow up with additional content that drives customers further through their purchasing journey? You could start with a news report, follow up with a video interview with a thought leader, post a blog on your website, and then launch a social media campaign driving customers to your new product.
Planning a content calendar with a step-by-step strategy for aligning connected content and creating “immersive” user experiences throughout the buyer journey will boost your conversions.
Step 5: Tracking Performance
Finally, identify how you’re going to track the results of your efforts. When we publish content on Today Digital, we don’t just forget all about it after it goes live. We monitor the results that matter. Primarily, our focus is on engagement. So we don’t just focus on reach and impressions.
We look at how often people are commenting and liking posts on social media, clicking through to other web pages, or visiting our client’s websites. Beyond that, we actively listen to our audience. This means regularly asking them questions about content, hosting polls and sending out surveys to learn more about what they really want.
Measuring the right metrics, and listening to readers is how we take a data-driven approach to experimentation and boosting marketing ROI. Remember, the more you learn about your content, audience, and the market, the more you can optimize your content planning strategy.
Prioritize Better Content Planning this Year
Content planning can be time-consuming and complex, particularly in the B2B tech industry. But, simply distributing content at random, without a focus, clear goal, or understanding of your audience could mean you’re wasting your marketing budget.
A comprehensive plan (and the right strategy) is crucial to ensuring you can continue to stand out in today’s age of content chaos and increasing competition. Don’t leave the success of your content to chance. Perfect your planning strategy, and upgrade your results.
