Content planning for the long and the short
Balancing the long and short is vital for an effective content marketing strategy
What’s the point of your content?
Some content is primarily for SEO purposes and there are a plethora of sources of great information on how to produce content that will get you ranked. But what about the content you put out week after week for your consuming audience? What purpose does that serve?
There’s an assumption in the above is that your content is always for an audience, which is something that ought not to be taken for granted. A lot of content produced by B2B brands, even allowing for pure SEO content, is not, in practice, produced for the audience- it is produced for the author. You can see examples of this in everything from hyper-detailed product guides that include unexplained acronyms and product codes known only to the vendor, to esoteric thought-leadership papers that delve into niche academic areas of interest only to the subject matter expert who bylined the article.
It is vital that content is written with your audience in mind. Not only who they are and what they need, but what you want them to do. As Nick Westergaard writes in ‘Brand Now’, “Effective, standout content is both business-centric and customer-aware. You need to look at what purpose your content serves, but you also need to consider who it’s for. What are their needs?”
Needs are vital. The obvious flipside to the question of ‘Why are you producing content?’ is ‘Why are your audience consuming the content?’. There are many reasons why your audience consumes content, and the reasons will vary as much from person to person as from piece to piece. Some may be consuming to get an overview of solutions to a particular challenge they are facing, others may be consuming to prepare themselves professionally for the next disruption coming over the horizon, and yet others may be consuming either because they are personally interested in the topic or as part of their professional development to line up for a promotion. If you’re not writing for what your audience want or need at a given moment, then they are very unlikely to engage meaningfully with the resulting content.
This is why the recent statistic from SEMrush is so disappointing - when 1,700 marketers and business owners were asked “What factors lead to success in content marketing?” only 47% said researching their audience. It is a small study and not solely focused on B2B, but it reflects a frustration I’ve found in working with some of the top B2B tech and professional firms over the years. The majority don’t research their audience, which really begs the question of how likely it is that their content will be meeting audience needs.
Aside from the content being ‘customer-aware’, the other element of the Westergaard quote above is that good content is ‘business-centric’. It’s too easy to interpret ‘business-centric’ as meaning ‘focused on driving a sale for the product we’re pushing this month.’
‘Business-centric’ should rather be interpreted as ‘focused on delivering commercial goals.’ Commercial goals are both short-term and long-term. Good content absolutely can help you to hit a given quarter’s sales target, but it can also help you to establish your place in a new market, build your brand in the mind of future customers and set you up for growth.
There’s an oft-cited 2013 study by Binet and Fields for IPA, ‘The Long and The Short of It: Balancing Short and Long Term Marketing Strategies’. In it, the authors laid out the central thesis for balancing brand building and sales activation. Ultimately the two strategies serve two different ends but, vitally, one is not better than the other. You need a strong brand to enhance the effectiveness of your short-term activations and you need good sales activations to capitalise on a strong brand.
In the world of B2B marketing, this idea is talked about a lot. Binet and Fields posit that on average, the optimal split of brand vs. activation is 60:40 (although it is important to note that this varies a lot by sector and company growth stage – it’s an average, not a magic ratio). This is what we should understand by ‘business-centric’ content- a mix of content that builds brand and drives sales.
That B2B businesses need both long and short-term content strategies is widely recognized in marketing circles. However, it is very often not applied in practice. You don’t have to look far to find examples of companies that put out almost exclusively short-term sales-focused content. And it’s easy to understand why. In many cases, there is great pressure from sales and management to support a sales-driven culture. A sales-driven culture is no bad thing in and of itself. However, it causes problems when it prevents marketing from pursuing long-term strategies. The failure to pursue long-term strategies, in turn, has a knock-on impact on short-term sales effectiveness – it is much easier to sell into a market where you are known and where prospects have a baseline (positive) perception of your brand.
So, if you are in a business where the pressure is on to deliver sales-focused content, and you don’t have vast resources to invest in numerous content streams, how can you still build brand over the long term?
The answer is consistency.
By being consistent in message and format, you can address numerous tactical topics whilst still building your brand over time.
The key to consistency is being robust in your strategy setting, and then planning out your content carefully. In order to establish a robust strategy and plan there are three important steps:
1) Establish your brand messages
Start with one overarching message you want to take to the market that encapsulates your brand DNA, made in the form of a well-crafted value proposition.
Once you have defined the key message, you can break it down into supporting messaging pillars or sub-messages. In doing so you create a messaging architecture whereby your core message is supported by more detailed or specific messaging pillars. It is good practice at this stage to also align proof points and existing content to each messaging pillar as they’ll come in handy later. It’s also a good way of sense-checking that the messages are justifiable and supportable, rather than just being vague statements of ambition.
2) Map your messages to your sales plays
Having established your messages, you need to map where your messages intersect with your sales plays.
This is the part where a lot of content strategies fall down. And it is part of one of the classic effective marketing challenges- the lack of alignment between sales and marketing.
A good long and short content plan must be aligned with the sales plan. There is no getting around it. If your content does not support what sales are pushing, it will have a very limited impact on the top line in the short term. A lack of impact in the short term can wreck the reputation of marketing within an organisation and make the implementation of long-term plans and the realisation of a more ambitious long-term strategy exceedingly difficult.
Fig. 1 - Message Alignment Matrix
In Figure 1 above, you can see a simple tool we use for mapping which messages are most relevant for which sales plays. In many cases, all brand messages will, to a greater or lesser extent, be relevant to most sales plays. However, it’s about understanding which ones to dial up and down for each situation. For example, if you have a brand message around providing human-centric service and long-term relationships, and you have a sales play around selling in a support package, that’s where you would dial it up. If you have a brand message around having a long history and being a stable partner, and you have a sales play around increasing contract lengths at renewal, that’s where you would dial it up.
Having aligned with Sales on the core focus areas, you can make sure your content provides support to Sales, whilst also conveying each of your key brand messages.
3) Theming and content plan development
By this stage, you will have already aligned your brand messages and sales plays. Now you can begin to plan out your content.
If what your organisation says is just determined by what you want to sell that month, you end up a) failing to engage with your customers around their own challenges and b) missing out on one of the core ways of brand building- consistent storytelling.
A good way of tying your brand messages and sales plays into what your customers are interested in is by theming. The choice of themes should be research-based- they should be relevant and of interest to your audience. They should also build upon one another, quarter on quarter, to tell a consistent story.
Underpinning the themes will be a set of topics (monthly works well) and then underpinning those topics will be specific pieces of content.
As well as theming, you can ensure a level of consistency and familiarity-building with your audience through serialisation. By serialisation, we mean the portioning of your content into repeatable serial formats. For example, it may be that you run a regular series of ‘top tips’ in the format of a listicle that is published weekly, a monthly video update ‘view from the ground’ by the customer success team, and a quarterly ‘long read’ thought leadership piece. The use of consistent serialised content builds expectation and familiarity within the audience, allowing you to present brand messaging in a natural and consistent manner over time.
By structuring your content plan in this way from the top down you can ensure that each piece of content, whilst often supporting specific sales plays in the short term, is contributing to telling your brand story.