Articles by: "Jeanette Mulvey, VP B2B Content—Purch"

Creating content with intent

August 7, 2018 Jeanette Mulvey, VP B2B Content—Purch

Before bringing your “A” game, you have to know your end game.

With digital publishers facing an ever-increasing need for a constant stream of new and clickable content, it’s not surprising that content creation strategies tend to prioritize quantity above all else. But there’s a smarter way to create content – one that focuses on both quantity and quality while simultaneously developing measurable KPIs.

This process of creating content with intent means identifying what purpose your content serves early in the content development process. The key to doing that is matching your content format and distribution channels with your business needs and developing scalable processes for creating that content as cost effectively as possible.

While every company’s needs are different, the process for deploying this content strategy works no matter what your content goals are. Here are five steps to making it happen.

Get Outside the Content Bubble

Before you start developing a content strategy you need to fully understand what purpose content serves for your business. Delivering content to as many people as possible is not necessarily the most important thing for every publisher. For some, the main purpose of their content is driving revenue or leads. For others, content is mainly focused on brand building or customer retention. However, for most companies, it’s all of the above.

Identifying your goals requires involving all stakeholders in the early stages of the content-planning process. From sales and marketing to social and SEO, make sure everyone’s voice is heard early and often. It will result in a more solid content strategy that aligns with your broader business plan.

Setting Goals

Once you’ve mapped your content strategy with your business plan, you should determine early on what success will look like. If your goal is to drive traffic, figure out what your ideal traffic growth numbers are. If it’s revenue, do the same. Even if you don’t make your goals, setting them early on will give you something to aim for and help you measure your success later.

Keep in mind that your goals may change. You might discover that your intended audience is misaligned with the content you’ve created for one purpose, but in the process discover a new value for your content you hadn’t considered. Be open to adapting and evolving your goals as you learn what works.

Change the Channel

In the age of content everywhere, many publishers are struggling to find a strategy that targets their core audience and instead find themselves trying to be everything to everyone. With limited editorial resources that strategy rarely works. The result is too much content that doesn’t perform well in any particular channel and a watered-down brand that doesn’t resonate with any one, loyal group.

Before you start developing your content, assess where your desired audience likely lives and how they are most likely to find your content. Identifying a few key distribution channels will help you sculpt your content to maximize performance within a given channel.

Target Your Content

Now that you know what your content will be about and where your audience will find it, it’s time to make sure the content itself is packaged in a manner that aligns with those goals. That means identifying what formats and templates work best for your intended audience. While social media loves eye-catching images and clickable headlines, content designed to drive organic search traffic should be SEO-focused and formatted for search-friendly performance.

Aligning your content format to your end goals means again leveraging teams outside of content to gather data and advice on what works and what doesn’t. This will change over time, so a big part of targeting content requires a willingness to innovate and evolve over time.

Measuring Success

The most important step in creating a strategic and purposeful content strategy is the follow up. Find ways to measure the actual success of your content initiatives that are focused on your company goals – not simply based on standard one-size-fits-all approaches. Measuring overall traffic or page views, for example, may not be the best way of determining if what you’re doing is serving your needs.

Make sure your approach to analyzing the success of your efforts is effective by bridging the communication gap between your decision makers and your data analysts. Too often, our data experts don’t understand our broader business goals and end up assessing the data in ways that are logical but not necessarily aligned with predicting the businesses’ desired outcomes.

While each of these steps may appear to be common sense, too often they get lost in the content planning process. Teams are siloed and often don’t discuss strategy until after the content is already created. Discussing each team’s needs and concerns early will result in better performing content and more efficient processes. It may also result in better understanding across teams and shared learning that results in better performance by each.

About the author

Jeanette Mulvey loves telling small business stories. From hardware stores in Saskatchewan to fashion designers in Milan, she’s traveled the world learning what makes entrepreneurs tick and hearing their struggles. As VP of B2B Content at Purch, she is responsible for content and social media and for Business.com and BusinessNewsDaily, where she strives to ensure both sites are the go-to destination for small business advice and inspiration. Follow her on Twitter @JeanetteB2B

Perspectives

Unified communications: bridging the gap between B2B and B2C content strategy

June 22, 2018 Jeanette Mulvey, VP B2B Content—Purch

When it comes to content creation, B2B and B2C are a lot more alike than most publishers think.

The philosophical and practical distinctions between these two types of content developed over decades and publishers have come to view them as being so different that they can’t be managed or marketed jointly. Nothing could be further from the truth. The digital democratization of access to content means that B2B and B2C publishers are no longer targeting different audiences at different times. Instead, all content – regardless of topic – is in competition for the same audience.

The smartest strategy for both kinds of publishers is to reconcile the differences between the two and gain the benefits of learning from the best practices of each. Here are four ways to start thinking differently about the divide between B2B and B2C content so that you can build a content plan that leverages the pros and cons of each strategy.

People First

B2C publishers consider readers to be “consumers” – not only of their content, but of the goods and services publishers are marketing. B2B marketers and content creators think of their audiences as entities: businesses, teams, or departments.

In the age of B2Me marketing, it’s time to start thinking of them – all of them – as people. Everyone who comes in contact with your content is a person with ideas, desires and problems. Content that helps inspire those ideas, stoke those desires and solve those problems will be relevant to all readers – whether they are watching a video on the couch on a Saturday afternoon or in the office reading an article about accounting software.

Luckily, your content is created by people who have a lot more in common with readers than you might think. Regardless of content format or subject matter, the first step in any content plan should be to encourage your writers and editors to focus first on who is reading and why. Thinking about the external impact content will have versus focusing on the internal process of creating it is the first step to building successful content strategies for both B2C and B2B.

Forget Selling. Start Relating

Once you start focusing on your audience early in the process, it will change the way you think about creating and delivering content. B2B content, in particular, has long been focused on marketing or selling rather than informing, educating and partnering with readers. When content is focused exclusively on customer acquisition, it’s a one-way conversation that offers little to the reader, but asks a lot in return.

In this way, B2B content creators need to get better at emulating B2C content strategies. Creating content that is relatable and engaging rather than promotional and focused exclusively on selling, builds relationships with readers first. Once you’ve established a bond with your audience that is based on first offering them something they need, you’ll be in a better position to start connecting in a way that is multi-directional and requires something of them in return.

Teaming Up

B2C publishers, on the other hand, have a lot to learn from their B2B counterparts when it comes to creating content that is monetizable beyond traditional advertising and paywalls. B2B publishers have developed multi-stream revenue strategies that allow for content monetization across multiple platforms and at various stages in the buying process. B2C, on the other hand, rarely takes monetization opportunities into account early in the (non-native) content creation process. Too often, B2C sales teams are playing catch up trying to market and generate revenue from content after it’s complete, rather than partnering with content teams during the creation process.

B2B teams have taken the early lead on developing content creation processes that align editorial efforts and sales goals from the outset. The fear that too much input from advertisers will taint traditional editorial processes and impinge on journalistic freedom have resulted in an unwillingness to develop new ways of working together to identify your end-game and develop content designed to get you there.

Open Source Content

The next hurdle for both B2C and B2B publishers will be adapting to the post-expert age of content creation. No longer do readers care who is creating the content they’re consuming. An Amazon review often holds as much sway with readers as a carefully researched professional review. While expert-written, fact checked content is still essential, smart publishers on both sides of the business are finding ways to incorporate user generated content (UGC) directly into their strategy.

Commenting and social interaction are no longer enough to bridge the worlds of expert content and UGC. Instead, both B2C and B2B need to find ways to partner with amateur content creators and provide platforms for them to participate in the content creation process as part of the overall content strategy.

B2B has done that well with community content and crowd-sourced user reviews but struggles with integrating social media and building lasting relationships with outside contributors. B2C has done a great job leveraging social media and integrating it into content. However, building communities around key B2C media brands has been less successful.

In the age of proactive, publisher-driven content distribution we all need to learn from each other. Yes, today’s consumers seek out content they desire. But smart publishers are constantly on the lookout for ways to anticipate their needs and deliver the right content in the right channel. This shift in this content distribution dynamic will drive a continued evolution of digital content away from B2C and B2B distinctions and require both types of publishers to think more broadly by embracing as many of these strategies as possible.