Content Factory Basics: 5 Rules for B2B Content Supremacy

July 30, 2012

The success of your content factory hinges on your content, of course!

What do a content factory and the National Book Awards have in common?content factory

Since the 1950s, the National Book Awards have been celebrating the literary achievements of America’s greatest writers. We’re talking about the likes of William Faulkner, John Updike, and Allen Ginsberg. Some National Book Award recipients have been acknowledged for their use of allegories and alliteration. Others are recognized for their beautiful prose, dramatic denouements, or mesmerizing motifs. The point, of course, is that there is no single formula for winning the National Book Award, just as there is no one definition of what constitutes the great B2B content your content factory should be producing.

Fortunately, B2B content marketers have much clearer guidelines to follow to ensure that their content factory churns out effective content. To be successful, they simply need to follow the following five rules for what B2B content should be:

1. Customized for your audience at every stage of its journey

Your content factory should be creating content that speaks to your target audience’s needs at that specific point in time. That content should reflect a deep understanding of where your prospects and customers are on their way down the path to purchase and includes the appropriate messaging to shepherd them through every step in that journey. For example, you need content that:

  • Raises awareness of who you are and the fact that you understand the specific problems your customers face
  • Promotes discovery of potential solutions to that problem
  • Fosters comparisons and allows your company to differentiate itself from your competitors

Inbound marketing software provider HubSpot provides a great example of this rule in practice with its free inbound marketing assessment. The tool evaluates your current marketing program, alerts you to potential areas for improvement, and points you to resources to help you improve. HubSpot’s site also contains supporting content to help with each step of this process along the way.

2. Able to convert your audience along the way

In addition to accompanying your audience on its journey, your content factory should produce content that includes the right hooks, triggers, and calls-to-action to elicit the desired responses. If your content is truly customized for your target audience’s journey, those hooks and triggers will speak to your audience’s needs, and thus will likely be highly effective.

Dropbox, a company that provides a free, cloud-based content sharing service, provides a great case in point. Its landing page prominently features an animated video that outlines a series of real-life problems that its customers face. The short video explains how using Dropbox can solve those problems and ends with a simple call-to-action, asking users to download the company’s free software. After watching the video, consumers will likely realize just how much they need Dropbox and will be all the more inclined to download the software.

3. Timely and relevant

The old saying “timing is everything” certainly applies to B2B content. Part of ensuring that your content factory produces great content is being in tune with what’s going on in your industry right now. After all, even if you create the best content in the world, if it’s about yesterday’s news, who is likely to care anymore?

I’m proud to tip my hat to my colleagues at OpenView Venture Partners, who do a great job of generating content every week for the firm’s blog. By regularly writing about the array of challenges and issues they see OpenView’s portfolio companies and other entrepreneurs facing at any given time, we have become a source of content that is both timely and relevant to their current needs.

4. Highly engaging

Content that you simply read will often be forgotten. Content that tells a story and that you can interact with, on the other hand, is more likely to be remembered. Make sure that your B2B content factory produces content that is engaging (i.e., uses visuals, sounds, and other devices to activate the senses), narrative, and interactive. Content that gives users an experience (whether it’s through the use of interactive multimedia or it simply offers the ability to leave comments) is content that you won’t soon forget.

Eloqua, a marketing automation pioneer, exemplifies this principle. The company’s website is filled with videos, infographics, interactive data visualizations, and other highly engaging content. As a result, exploring Eloqua’s content becomes an enjoyable experience, rather than a tedious chore.

5. Easy to find

What good is content that your audience can’t find? Your content factory needs to produce B2B content that optimized so that it’s easy to find on Google and other search engines. It also needs to be strategically placed on your website so that your site visitors don’t have to search around to find what they want.

Smashing Magazine, a website for web designers and developers, understands content searchability and organization in spades. Not only is the site’s navigation clean, simple, and intuitive, it allows you to quickly find the content you’re looking for by type and topic, as well as through the site’s search engine. Thanks to great SEO, type a relevant keyword into Google, and you’ll likely find a corresponding hit for the site on the first page.

While your content factory may never produce anything that gets recognized with a National Book Award, by following the rules outlined above you can at least ensure that your content becomes an effective marketing tool.

To go back to the beginning of this series on creating a content factory, click here.

 

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Content Marketing Institute’s blog.

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Kevin Cain</strong> is the Content Marketing Director for <a href="http://www.bluechipcommunication.com.au/">BlueChip Communication</a>, Australia's leading financial services communication firm. Before joining BlueChip, Kevin was the Director of Content Strategy for OpenView.