This is the first installment of our three-part workshop: How to Stand Up a B2B Marketing Program in One Quarter.
A valuable growth lever when deployed well, content marketing can help generate new leads, cultivate customer loyalty, and differentiate your company from the rest of the pack. For B2B startups in particular, content marketing can be an efficient and economical method of increasing your company’s credibility within a given industry.
While many fledgling startups try their hand at content, first attempts often fizzle. Many quickly discover that publishing a few scattered blog posts or sending out the occasional email newsletter doesn’t produce the returns they expect (or any at all). Unfortunately for those looking for a quick growth hack, content initiatives produce their best returns when well scoped, well executed, and well measured. Content marketing should be treated as an ongoing practice that works like its own distinct product - the content you produce should provide clear value to your audience.
Fortunately, standing up a content marketing program over the course of a single quarter is an achievable task for most B2B businesses - even if you don’t have a huge operating budget or a lot of in-house resources to spare. While there isn’t a copy-and-paste strategy that works for every company, this roadmap will produce a MVP content marketing program ready for iteration.
By prioritizing one task a week, you can stand up a content marketing program from scratch in a single quarter.
The biggest mistake B2B companies make when attempting content marketing? Using their content efforts to aggressively promote. Great content marketing should be treated like a product of its own - something that provides real value to real people - not like promotional content. Just as you would for any product, it’s crucial to understand your audience and their needs.
Week 1: Define your audience, understand their needs, and determine what value you can offer - and when.
Chances are, you already have a pretty good idea of who your target audience is. Maybe you’ve even gone as far as to do customer research, develop user personas, and generate qualitative insights. That’s a good start, but developing content for this audience requires a little more legwork. Start with the problem your core product solves for your target customer - then go up and down the lifecycle to find adjacent pain points. Where else can you offer value to that customer?
Are there points in their lifecycle that make more sense to focus your content on? Generating content that’s relevant before they make a purchasing decision can help prime people to enter your funnel - warming up leads for later. Generating content that’s relevant between purchasing decisions can help boost retention and re-activation.
Week 2: Determine which type of content type you want to focus on first, and get yourself smart on it.
Whether you have a massive budget burning a hole in your pocket or plan to keep things as lean as possible, focusing on just one content type at first will help focus your efforts and provide a foundation to build from. Choose one type of content to launch first - a blog, email newsletter, podcast, series of white papers, or even a course are all formats that can anchor a content program. To determine which type of content is best for your team, consider 2 primary things: 1) the resources you have on hand (budget, skills, and time) and 2) the channels that most align with your audience.
Once you’ve decided on the initial format, identify three content products you can draw inspiration from. For example, if you choose to start a blog, identify three other B2B blogs (they don’t have to be from the same industry) you think are worthy templates to inform your approach. Connect with a company that’s produced this type of content to inquire about how they structure their budget, which types of tools they prefer (such as Substack or Medium), and what kinds of collaborators contribute to their content program (such as writers, photographers, visual designers, etc).
Week 3: Formalize your objective(s), editorial mission, voice & tone, and frequency.
Armed with an understanding of your audience and a specific type of content to tackle, you’re now ready to assemble an actual strategy. To figure out which objectives make sense, combine the value you hope to offer through your content with one of your company’s growth goals. For example, “To become a regular, credible resource for small business owners to gain new HR insights” might be the content goal of a payroll software program hoping to generate inbound interest while also keeping customers engaged between sales touch points. Ideally, you’ll be able to narrow to one or two content objectives to keep your efforts focused.
An effective editorial mission should connect your content’s mission with your company’s mission. For example, Kickstarter’s mission is “to bring creative products to life” and the editorial mission of their content product, The Creative Independent, is “to feed and grow the community of people who create.”
Establishing voice & tone is as simple as referring back to your brand strategy work. Keeping content marketing efforts in lock-step with your brand voice ensures consistency and hones your identity. For frequency, it’s best to start slow and increase once you have a few months of content creation behind you. For example, if you dream of a blog update twice a week - start out with a weekly cadence. (And pro tip: I highly suggest not publicly committing to a frequency. Best to give yourself the flexibility as you get a program off the ground. And you don’t want to set expectations with the audience that you can’t deliver on. )
Week 4: Gather your troops!
Now that the broad strokes of your strategy are in place, you’ll need to assemble the team that will help you execute it. Determine the external collaborators you’ll need (such as designers, writers, photographers, or podcast editors) along with any internal resources that are necessary (such as product support, that customer service rep who can out-write everyone else on the team, time from your founder to host the podcast). Figure out a realistic operating budget based on your desired frequency and content type. Gather your troops and secure their availability.
Continue to the second installment of this workshop: B2B Content Marketing: Ideation, Creation, and Distribution
Jump to the third installment of this workshop: B2B Content Marketing: How to Amplify and What to Measure
As always, I'm available to chat about your growth, content, or anything else marketing related. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me at jamie@fuelcapital.com.