Building a B2B content strategy

Quotes

• “It really starts with understanding your customer and understanding how your sales, solutions, and software usually service the customer. What are you bringing them in terms of value, quality, and trust to help them build their business.” -Lillian

• “I am very passionate about understanding the customer journey. I believe this is the foundation for any content marketing plan. Through content, you have the power to educate in a way that influences them to bring them along to the product while they are still at a deciding stage.” -Lillian

• “Interviewing your customers, listening to your sales team and representatives who are on the ground, hearing what your customers are going through and understanding why they are customers in the first place, why they chose you and why they stay are all questions for future marketing prospects.” -Lillian

• “It is best to do this at scale. Once you start to do this at scale, you start to identify some patterns. For example, some companies would notice service is the reason. A lot of people buy based on emotion rather than logic, we justify the decision withlogic later.” -Lillian

• “I read an interesting statistic that half of all B2B buyers right now are millennials and generally they are doing the research themselves. They do not want to talk to someone and that becomes a key factor for us marketers, to understand our data.” -Lillian

• “We have these data checkpoints where we can interpret the signals we are getting. Then, you can take it a step further, if we are connecting this data from the website with a content marketing plan. By tracking what people actually type in the search bar, you can get some incredible clues on what is going through the heads that they want to talk to you about just yet.” -Lillian

• “In terms of setting up the foundation for a marketing plan, I cant help it but I still come back to the customer. If you have no customers and are flying blind, you need to go wide and broad and figure out what works. That would mean developing a plan with different content pieces and figuring out what resonates with your audience.” -Lillian

• “This scenario is for if you do not have customers yet because perhaps you do not yet understand what is so good about your product. If there is a comparable product in the market then you need to understand the competitors and there are lots of search data there.” -Lillian

• “It is a mix of a format and then of course, of what you are talking about in the content. You can have a topic that is not too broad, it should be specific enough that it should be relative to your target audience. You should at least know who your target audience is.” -Lillian

• “Underneath that, you can have sub-topics in there which is also split into the different stages of the journey. Underthis topic, the different types of mediums that you translate that same content into can be ten different mediums.” -Lillian

• “When you are in the awareness phase, you are doing customer education. Youre talking about the class of products, a little light differentiation. You are not specifically going to the features but you are talking about why there is a need for the class of product and your approach to it.” -Ben

• “Admittedly we do not have one piece of content that always brings in unlimited amounts of lead. We are always trying different things.” -Lillian

• “I think something that can be powerful is a Buyers Guide. It has kind of replaced the brochures of the past. It is not only technical documentation about the product, but its also about whatthe solution is, in its all-encompassing place. You can also create White Papers to generate awareness and build trust in the brand but a Buyers Guide is actually lower in the funnel.” -Lillian

• “My advice is to prioritize in terms of value. Going beyond just thinking, Hey, I think our customers would like this. It is coming way to the other side of your gut feeling and going straight to the data, figuring out what is their problem right now that I can solve with interesting content.” -Lillian