B2B Marketing Strategy: How to Write Great Content

How to write great Content when you don’t know what to write

When you sit down to write your next B2B Marketing blog post and the blank page seems like the loneliest place in the world, what do you do?

The problem of what to write affects all content writers at some point. You know your business needs to push out informative and interesting content – but haven’t you said it all already? Hasn’t someone else?

In a word – no! You haven’t said it all. Or at least you haven’t covered everything that needs to be covered in your industry – that’s impossible. And this is where ‘curated content’ can help you.

The three types of content

Essentially you can break down your content options into three categories:

• Self-generated – this is any content produced directly by your business. It may be blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers and so on.
• ‘Aggregated’ – this is third party content that you link to directly with no editing (not to be confused with ‘curated content’ below). This often includes opinion, industry news, and other resources deemed helpful to your audience.
• ‘Curated’ – this is third party content that you wish to share, but also add your opinions and ideas, personalising the key points for your specific audience.

Curate or generate?

Curated content is not purely for when you don’t know what to write! It’s much more useful than that.

Even if you have plenty of great content already written or in your head waiting to hit the page, it makes a lot of sense to keep your readers or viewers informed, interested, and engaged by including the opinions, news, and resources of other players in your industry.

After all, the goal of producing content is to demonstrate authority in your field to your audience; being able to highlight this valuable content from your industry still serves that function.

In short, diverse, valuable, and original content is appreciated by everyone, no matter where it comes from. And when you personalise it by adding your own commentary it becomes even more powerful and can save your own content strategy from becoming stale and predictable.

A typical example of curation

Say you run a successful accounting business and your clients rely on you for keeping up to date with compliance and the latest regulations.

Your self-generated content may frequently provide how-to tips on specific aspects of accounting and finance. Occasionally there will be an important change announced by the regulators. Rather than just writing a blog post about this, it is a good idea to seek the opinions of other ‘thought leaders’ in the field of accounting …and you can always add your own comments to theirs.

You can still create your own title, introduction and conclusion specific to your audience, but in the body of the post you can link to and refer to the article or interview, and include relevant points from it.

Frequency, relevancy and originality

Being able to produce enough quality content to ‘touch’ your audience regularly enough is one of the toughest challenges for many businesses. Curated content helps you increase the volume of content, remain original, and stay on-message without putting countless hours into each post.

This, in turn, positions you as a valuable resource for your followers, helping you to develop the all-important relationships that can lead to more sales meetings.

There are no hard and fast rules for how much of your content should be self-generated, aggregated or curated; as a general rule, the more time you have available to put into content the more it will be self-generated. However, a small business owner may have little time but is prepared outsource a large volume of content writing.

An effective B2B Marketing strategy for most businesses is simply to provide a good enough mix to keep their audience engaged; and you will be the best judge of that by the responses that you get when you share!

Learn more about the complex world of B2B Marketing.

Cheers, Ashley   [C53]

Ashley is a B2B Marketing specialist leading a young team at Lead Creation