For some of our clients, we’ve been creating monthly content for many years. In some instances, you might wonder whether you’d run out of things to say but, the truth is, we really find that the longer we work with clients the more easily ideas come.
You’ll find a lot of agencies saying that B2B content is ‘boring,’ claiming that they can make it more exciting. We really don’t believe that B2B content is ever boring. The roles that our client companies play in providing vital services that keep the wheels of industry moving are, we believe, full of interest and offer many different routes to educate, inform and motivate a company’s existing and potential customers and influencers. Who could say that securing the safety of essential transport networks and buildings, or providing routes for the simple sharing of real-time business insights, or safeguarding an individual’s personal data was ever boring?
B2B companies across the UK provide vital services daily and our job is to put ourselves in your customers’ shoes and understand the ways in which your company can make their job easier or better. We do this initially through a series of workshops from which we can understand sales messages, strategic goals and product benefits so that we can create a strategic plan for content which connects with your target audience. There is often a disconnect between what companies want to tell customers, and what customers actually need to hear to be able to make a purchase. Our workshops aim to uncover what the gap is and then the strategic plan is created to address that.
This strategic plan sets out the intention of the buyer, the knowledge they already have, the messages they need to hear to convert them and other information that enables us to detail what content will be produced in the coming months and how. Whilst we would never claim to have deep knowledge of every sector, we do have processes that enable us to gather sufficient knowledge to facilitate the transfer of specialist knowledge from informed client to informed target, and to know the difference between a product feature and how this brings benefits to a customer.
In a recent meeting with an industry journalist, one of the reasons she gave for being unable to run stories provided by another agency was that the agency‘s staff didn’t understand the sector, so the content they created tended to be ‘dumbed down’ and insufficiently technical for the audience, who were clearly all specialists themselves. We make every effort to speak to your in-house specialists and, where appropriate, your customers to get a full understanding of the activity undertaken so that we can translate this into content which resonates with the right audience.
In our experience, working this way significantly reduces the amount of time our clients have to spend on content planning and creation, leaving them more time to focus on other aspects of their job. We like to have scheduled monthly meetings to discuss ideas for the upcoming months, then we shoulder the majority of the responsibility for research and creation. For some of our clients, this means that their involvement is limited to only a day a month – meeting, reviewing and approving content which can then be shared through newsletters, blogs, media relations etc.
If you are interested in creating content that will be valued by the reader, please get in touch.