The Content Schedule Nightmare in B2B Marketing

The Content Schedule Nightmare in B2B Marketing

When it comes to building a content calendar, there are a number of snags in the road and ultimately this all starts with the type of content you’re producing. Whether you’re struggling to engage your audience or simply don’t know where to begin, there are a number of pitfalls that you could have unknowingly fallen into. Here is a quick guide to help keep you on track:

Pitfall 1: Covering too much ground in one piece.

The Content Schedule Nightmare in B2B MarketingIt can be easy to get carried away when writing content and it’s important to keep your pieces focused.

B2B decision makers are often looking for the ‘nitty gritty’ – detailed explanations of specific problems, legislation or areas of expertise, not a 5,000 word post that has a little of everything you need to know.

Breaking down the content cycle into more manageable chunks helps guide potential clients through multiple pieces of knowledge, which all have one common denominator – you. Moving a prospect or reader from one manageable piece of content to another is a much better way of keeping their attention and help direct them towards a conversation.

Pitfall 2: Attracting the wrong audience can be costly

The B2B marketing world operates in a very different way to B2C. The potential clientele is a much smaller pool of people simply because B2B products or services are more specialist and they carry a business investment, as opposed to a personal investment. Using an exciting hook to capture the reader’s attention initially can be a great tactic to generate leads with; this of course does have the potential to generate inappropriate leads trickling into your sales funnel – but once they are in, designing a way to further qualify a lead’s interest and criteria using content is a subtle but profitable skill.

Ensuring your content, if written for a wider audience, can be tailored back to your product or service, or supported by other formats or content down the sales funnel, can ensure your sales team doesn’t waste their time on prospects that aren’t valuable.

Pitfall 3: No plan

Making content for the sake of it is not a very good tactic. You need to be thinking ahead and planning how it’s going to be used, in what order and why.

By knowing the direction your content will take and how it will be shared and viewed, you’ll be able to tactfully control not only your business image but the readership you have.

The Content Schedule Nightmare in B2B Marketing

We will now look at the different types of content that can be produced and promoted, to generate leads at every stage of the buying cycle:

Top of the Funnel Content

Usually it’s safe to assume leads you have not spoken to or engaged before are looking for a solution to a problem they are facing. They may be simply researching the topic rather than being actively interested in buying a product immediately; more often than not, B2B companies can ‘jump the gun’ with their expectations and approach this part of the funnel with content that doesn’t help with this.

Using thought leadership is a perfect tactic to engage prospects. Creating your own eBooks and whitepapers help to establish you as a leader in your field and are the best types of content for engaging a prospect. If you can establish yourself as an expert and then provide a solution to someone’s problem, you’re building a more trustworthy and reliable relationship between you and your potential lead.

The key to creating excellent content at the top of the funnel is ensure that it entertains, educates or inspires. When done right, this can successfully move prospects through your funnel.

Middle of the Funnel Content

This stage is associated with a prospect understanding exactly what their needs are and they begin to educate themselves about available solutions. It bridges the gap between the initial intrigue or need to problem solve (top of the funnel) and the final sale (bottom of the funnel).

Case studies are perfect examples of middle of the funnel content and work well to both educate prospects of a solution to their problem, whilst giving you as a B2B marketer the opportunity to speak more about who your company is, what you do, why you are the experts and most importantly, how you’ve helped other people.

Middle of the funnel content, when used correctly, can continue to build a business’s reputation and sense of trust with each prospect to allow more open and frank conversations using bottom of the funnel content…

Bottom of the Funnel Content

By this stage the prospect should, if the nurturing process has worked effectively, be entering the ‘purchase stage’. After being able to monitor activity and see prospects progress from viewing and downloading top of the funnel content, through to the middle stage where their research progresses, this now becomes a point where marketers can think about bringing in product sheets (a useful tool for introducing features and prices points); free trials (to get the prospect using your product) and follow up consultations (with a dedicated Account Manager) or webinars (to speak directly to a prospect) via offline channels.

Bottom of the funnel content is fantastic way for a B2B marketing department to support an outbound sales team with the right type of information to secure to enable a smooth person-to-person conversation, to see how your company’s product or service can be adopted by the prospects at this stage

We hope this blog has been useful for you. To help B2B marketers with their marketing, Inbox Insight can help create content for you – to find out more, simply give us a call on 01962 835950 and ask to speak to Ross.

Amie Lovell

Meet Amie, Marketing Manager here at Inbox. She looks after everything from our content and blog articles to newsletters and social. Her passion is delivering engaging content that resonates with our target audience while promoting thought leadership, to drive brand awareness and trust in what we do.
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