B2B content strategy tips to attract and engage your audience

Creating content and publishing it is only part of the job. For content to land with your target audience and deliver on your goals, it needs to be supported by a content strategy.

Here are a few things to think about - what would you add?

1. Your target audience

Understand your purpose and who your target audience is. If you aren't creating content with a specific audience in mind, it won't land. Simple as that.

Content needs to resonate, which means it needs to be relevant. Being relevant is much easier if you know and understand who you want to talk to before you create the content.

Trying to appeal to lots of different groups will inevitably lead to your content appealing to no one.

2. Value for your audience vs the sell

You know what you want your content to deliver, but content marketing is a subtle art. It's not like advertising, it's not a direct sell. (How many ads do you read?)

Plan your content around building a relationship, positive association and trust with your target audience.

Think about how your audience benefits from reading/watching/listening to your content without you necessarily getting anything in return.

Yes, have a call to action, but if you are always trying to sell or your content always segues into a sell, it's obvious and a turn-off.

3. Promotional strategy

Time and energy go into creating content, but you also need to plan how to get eyeballs on it.

Your thought leader, white paper, research, blog series, podcast episode, video - whatever it is - needs a promotion strategy.

Posting a link to your article on LinkedIn isn't 'job done'. It will only appear in the feed of a select few of your connections and followers. (See my blog post How to Magnify Your Visibility on LinkedIn)

Plan how and where you are going to promote your content and how many times you are going to promote it.

A proper promotional strategy will get more eyes on your content, extend its shelf life (if it's not time-sensitive) - and help keep your social channels stocked up.

4. Be realistic

Creating content, editing/designing, scheduling and repurposing all take time.

Getting relevant approvals can also be time-consuming, so it's important to be realistic about how long it will take from the initial idea to publishing and schedule appropriately.

Start with when you want to go live/publish and work backwards, adding in wriggle room for unexpected delays.

Keep approvals/'editors' to a minimum, avoiding editing via committee if possible. If you need clients to sign off on a piece of content, factor in how that will be managed.

(Journalist tip: Never give people the real deadline if you can avoid it.)

Content marketing takes time to deliver and only works with consistency.

It can be easier to achieve consistency by starting small and building frequency rather than aiming big, struggling and being sporadic - or failing.

A good approach is to do more with less and sweat content with a proper promotion strategy (see point 3).

5. Different content types

It's easy to stick with what you know, especially when there are many different demands on time, but the world moves on.

If you are producing the same type of content, you may be limiting your reach.

Not everyone consumes information the same way, so it's a good idea to mix it up a bit.

You don't have to start from scratch; instead, plan your content to be reformatted easily.

For example, a video can quickly turn into an article or series of shorter LinkedIn posts. (Or both.)

Key learnings pulled from white paper can make an engaging carousel/slider on LinkedIn.

A blog post responding to clients' pain points can be turned into a short explainer video.

Final thoughts

Like a good story, there is a beginning, middle and end to a good content strategy.

It begins before you create your content but doesn't end once you've published.

??? PS I'll be going live on LinkedIn with the brilliant Ayo Abbas on 17 November at 12.30 pm to discuss content strategy and how to stay ahead in a busy world. For all the details, click here.

Time-saving content creation tools

These are the tools I use most to make content creation and repurposing easier.

Otter.ai - automated transcript tool

Otter turns audio quickly into text; it could be a video, podcast or interview that's been recorded.

Canva - design tool

I've set up a branded template for LinkedIn carousels/document sliders, so I just have to drop in the text each time.

For my personal Instagram account, I also use Canva to create Reels. You can turn a series of pictures into a video, add text, manipulate when the text appears and where, and a whole bunch of other whizzy stuff.

Veed.io - Video editing

iMovie, as a video editing tool, makes me want to cry. Veed is far more user-friendly, so I use it for trimming, cutting, and adding slides, text and subtitles.

Descript - Creating quick video clips

Descript transcribes your video (or audio) to make it easier to select an appropriate clip. You just highlight the sentences you want, and it creates the clip. Easy.

Excellent for splicing and dicing longer videos into social media-friendly snippets or creating podcast sound bites.

?What content creation tools do you use? Share in the comments.

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