Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
Laying the groundwork for effective content marketing takes serious effort and more time than some teams expect.
First, it’s important to get clear about why you’re in business, who you serve, and how your solutions deliver value to the customer.
Next, spend time fine-tuning your company’s brand. The various brand elements must be working in harmony to achieve maximum impact—and to evoke the emotional response you want to see from the target audience.
Then, turn your attention to those target customers. Define an ideal customer profile. Describe the buyer personas that make up a typical buying committee.
Finally, put yourselves in the shoes—and minds—of those personas, using buyer’s journey mapping to identify their needs, wants, beliefs, and emotions as they navigate a complex path from problem awareness to solution selection and implementation.
What will you gain from all this travail?
Primarily, a deep understanding of who you’re marketing to and how you can engage and support them with relevant, helpful information.
Secondly, an awareness of what you don’t know that could be helpful to your cause.
And thirdly, a matrix of key messages that you will want to deploy on different communication channels to reach prospects as they progress through their journey.
Phew. Pauses for breath and a swig of water.
At this point—usually several weeks into the process—I frequently hear the question: “So, how do we turn these messages into actual content…?”
It’s an astute question, because identifying the right messages to convey is only half the battle.
Your messages must be formulated into content that’s formatted appropriately for the channels on which it will be conveyed.
Those channels range from the super succinct (think: billboards and banners) to the deeply detailed (think: white papers and feature articles).
While the underlying message(s) might be similar, the style and tone of the content will clearly be different.
I find it helpful to organize your company’s key messages in a matrix, where each column represents a stage in the buyer’s journey. Then, use colors to indicate which messages are best suited to shorter- or longer-form content.
Some will clearly be destined for the company website, while others are perfect soundbites for social media posts. Still others will require detailed explanation and thus belong in a blog post, e-book, or white paper.
Take the time to make these associations before switching into content production mode. This is the transition point from homework to implementation of your content marketing strategy.
In this week’s post on the Framework blog, A B2B Marketer's Guide to Selecting the Right Format for Your Content, I explore eight of the most popular written content formats. I explain the advantages of each and when I see them working best within the buyer’s journey framework.
How many formats (and channels) you use will depend on the nature of your business and the resources at your disposal.
Nevertheless, picking the right format for the job will make a big difference to the way your content is received and its overall effectiveness in attracting, engaging, and delighting prospects and customers.
The B2B Builders Community
We’ve been working for several months to design and implement an online community for B2B growth professionals.
B2B Builders will be the place where leaders at small/mid-sized B2B companies meet, exchange ideas and experiences, learn from one another, and gain actionable insights to help grow their business.
We’re currently accepting applications from newsletter subscribers to join our priority waitlist. Those who join the community from that list will receive Founder Member status conferring discounts and VIP status throughout the life of their membership.
To learn more about B2B Builders, please read this prospectus. If it sounds like something for you, click on one of the embedded links and complete a quick online application to help us weed out bots and timewasters.
We’re about to kick off a private beta, where a small group of pioneers will test the online experience and collaborate on a content roadmap for B2B Builders to produce and host in the months ahead. If you want to join the beta, sight-unseen, drop me a line at b2bbuilders@messageup.com and I’ll share the details. The question is, are you comfortable being one of the first people at a party and setting the tone for what’s to come?
Reading and Taking Action
This week, our What We’ve Been Reading collection includes articles on:
Decluttering your marketing tech stack.
Aligning your marketing with new B2B buyer behavior.
How AI might herald a new era of audience-centric marketing.
The ultimate list of marketing statistics (2024 update).
All of these are great reads but this week’s star goes to Robert Finlayson’s article describing the pivot point he sees us reaching in B2B buyer behavior. He sees a world where B2B buying happens exclusively on digital channels, with little or no direct interaction with a sales team—something we’ve been coaching MessageUp clients to expect for some time now.
To round out this week’s edition, my One Step actionable tip encourages you to examine the content formats that your company is using and ask how appropriate they are and whether there might be a more impactful way of communicating some of your key messages.
Have a great week and I’ll see you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Mar 06, 2024 - A B2B Marketer's Guide to Selecting the Right Format for Your Content
Feb 28, 2024 - The Importance of Community Building to Achieving B2B Growth
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
Martech Stack Resolutions: Tips for Decluttering
"There's an app for that" quickly leads many of us into a sprawling mess—just look at your iPhone screen or computer desktop—and marketing technology is no exception. With over 8,000 martech applications on the market (and counting), it's easy to find ourselves with overlapping, and even entirely unnecessary, subscriptions. This resolution-driven piece by Ian Triscott for CMS Wire offers a candid look at decluttering and optimizing your martech stack.
4 Strategies B2B Marketers Can Use to Align With the New Sales Environment
Yes, yes, and yes! We wholeheartedly endorse this article by Robert Finlayson, founding partner of Bold Marketing & Communications, written for Forbes Agency Council. He believes we have reached a "pivot point" in the evolution of B2B buyer behavior, where B2B sales interactions will increasingly happen in digital channels without direct sales rep interaction. This is something we highlight regularly to MessageUp clients and we concur with the corrective actions Robert proposes.
Did Martech Break B2B Marketing?
This article by Bolaji Oyejide for Martech is part history lesson, part philosophy, and part recipe for improvement. He explores how AI might bring about the next great era of automated marketing, better serving the 95% of prospects who are not yet in market, in an audience-centric—rather than sales-centric—way.
The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2024
The latest update to HubSpot's extensive list of marketing statistics is a gold mine for those of you who like to sprinkle eye-catching factoids into your marketing strategy discussions or need some statistical reinforcement for recommendations you're making. It also makes fascinating reading for anyone who simply wants to geek out on marketing stats.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
This week’s One Step actionable tip continues the theme of picking the right format for your content.
Before you rush off to change things, take stock of the formats your company has been using and make a quick assessment of their effectiveness.
Here’s the playbook:
List different written content formats that your company has used in the past six months (refer to this week’s blog post for examples). If your company isn’t producing much content, you might extend this to twelve months.
Describe how, when, and where each format is being used—i.e., at which stages in the buyer’s journey, to convey what messages, on which channel(s), etc.
Score each format on how effectively you think it conveys the intended message(s). This will be neither scientific nor absolute, so choose your own scale for scoring one channel against another.
For the format or two to which you gave the lowest score, make notes on how things might be improved. This might include switching to a different format, using the format differently, or deploying the format at a different stage in the buyer’s journey.
This is obviously a subjective and qualitative assessment. Your next step should be to discuss your ideas with the wider team and to gather data to test your hypotheses about how well each format is or isn’t performing.
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