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:

Step 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.

Step 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.

Step 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.

Rethinking ABM as a strategic tool

Background to ABM

Account-based marketing (ABM) is nothing new. It has been around as an idea since at least the early 1990s and as a named concept since 2004.

The precursor to ABM first came to prominence in the eyes of the marketing community in ‘The One to One Future’ by Peppers and Rogers in 1993. At the time, this book was a radical rethink of some of the fundamental rules of marketing, envisaging a future where mass-marketing (focussed on building market share) would be bypassed by a focus on identifying a smaller group of the highest consumption propensity customers and selling more to them on a one-to-one basis (building share of wallet). To do this, companies would need to make use of the latest in one-to-one channels such as ‘fax’ and ‘touch tone phones’. Fax marketing may have gone the way of the dodo, but the principle of shifting to an individual customer-focused mindset was pretty revolutionary and stuck.

By 2004, ITSMA had formally coined the term Account Based Marketing. By this time, a lot of the leading B2B companies had already cottoned on to the huge potential of the idea and were using it to varying degrees of effectiveness, but it finally had a name. And B2B marketing agencies the world over rejoiced in the addition of a new initialism with which to bamboozle their clients.

Almost 20 years on from the birth of the term, ABM is almost everywhere. Depending on your source, between 70% (Hubspot’s ‘State of Marketing’ report) and 94% (Terminus’ ‘The State of Modern Marketing’ report) of B2B marketers say they use ABM. That is remarkably high – given a 2013 study by Bristol University found that 78% of British women regularly use deodorant, based on the higher estimates, we can conclude that marketers are significantly more likely to use ABM than deodorant. Make of that what you will.

What’s the problem?

ABM is self-reported as being exceptionally highly used. The big issue here is that there is very little agreement on what ‘ABM’ actually means.

Gartner says: “Account-based marketing (ABM) is a go-to-market strategy targeting certain accounts with a synchronized, continuous set of marketing and sales activities. ABM activities engage those accounts and individuals through all stages of the buying journey.”

So according to them a) ABM is a go-to-market strategy, b) ABM targets specific accounts, c) ABM integrates sales and marketing, d) ABM engages accounts and individuals, and e) ABM engages throughout all stages of the buying journey.

However, if you spend ten minutes speaking with B2B marketers, reading the myriad published articles, or delving into the LinkedIn debates, you will find a smorgasbord of different conflicting interpretations.

The following are précised versions of statements I’ve heard during conversations with B2B marketers at tech companies over the years:

ABM is a technology: ‘We bought ABM in last year and are focussing on getting the team making the most of their licenses this year.”

ABM is general lead generation: “Our ABM programme focuses on generating MQLs from the 5,000 accounts in our target segment.”

ABM is retention marketing: “Our ABM programme is based around getting renewal messages to our existing customers.”

ABM is all marketing: “We believe all good marketing is ABM.”

The understandings of what ABM means are so diverse that stats around usage are largely meaningless. But why does it matter?

It matters because companies are missing out on the value that ABM can bring. Many companies are either missing out by viewing ABM as having too narrow of a definition (if you only view it applicable to retention marketing, you are missing out on a wealth of opportunity around acquisition and upsell, for example) or as so broad as to become meaningless (if you view marketing to a very wide set of accounts with no meaningful personalisation as ABM, then ABM is adding nothing to your mass-marketing efforts).

What’s the solution?

One of the most important parts of the Gartner definition given above is that ABM is a go-to-market strategy. It’s not a campaign, it is a strategy. We go less far than this however and describe ABM as a strategic tool. We argue that it is not a strategy in its own right. A good strategy has a thorough diagnosis, a clear guiding policy and coherent actions. The risk of defining ABM as a strategy is that it risks positioning ABM as a marketing cure-all or ‘silver bullet’ solution which it is not.

Hence why we like to talk about ABM as a strategic tool. Think of ABM as a lens which you can apply to the diagnosis of marketing challenges and a principle that you can apply to the policies and actions you take to solve them.

Is it a market problem or a specific account problem? Should we solve this with a whole market/segment-focused solution or an account-specific solution? What actions can we take at an account-specific level to support the overarching strategy?

Consider a common marketing challenge: a tech company wants to break out of the mid-market and establish itself as an enterprise solution.

It is useful to look at this through the lens of ABM to help identify what’s at the heart of the challenge and what a solution could look like.

An essential step in becoming established as an enterprise solution provider is to win quality enterprise engagements that can provide case studies and proof points that their product is, indeed, an enterprise solution. A key part of the challenge is how to deliver a case-study-worthy implementation with an enterprise account when all their current clients are mid-market.

Traditionally the most obvious steps here, depending on the specifics, might include broadening their messaging and media targeting to address larger accounts, and/or identifying a shortlist of prospective enterprise accounts and building out individual strategies to win them (a traditional application of ABM).

However, if they treat ABM as a lens through which to think about what might be possible, by focusing on how marketing to specific accounts could help them, they might arrive at some different options.

For example, it might just be that they have an existing account that is on the borderline of Mid-market/enterprise. In this case, there could be an argument made for growing the use of their product with this account, supporting their growth as they go, until they are actively delivering an enterprise solution to an enterprise account (and having upsold and cross-sold to increase revenue as they go), thereby giving them their first case study and proof-point.

The opportunities are endless. In some cases it will reveal tactical opportunities to enhance your effectiveness, in others, it will fundamentally alter your marketing strategy, and in others, it will be of limited relevance.

ABM is not a silver bullet, and it will not solve every one of your marketing challenges. It is not a campaign or project that you can undertake and tick off a list. It is one of the tools in your arsenal that you can apply to the diagnosis of problems and the building of solutions.

This doesn’t diminish its role- if anything, it opens up exciting possibilities about its application and ensures that ABM is used in flexible service of effective marketing, rather than as a set play.

Next time you’re faced with a knotty marketing challenge, think about it through the lens of ABM- it just might reveal a new way to tackle it.

Driving growth in the indirect channel

Winning in the Wild West

When I first started working with a leading indirect channel client years ago, the owner described their market as akin to ‘the Wild West’. This was during a boom time and fortunes were being made and multiplied at record speed, with a lot of players flying largely by the seat of their pants. Often, high double-digit annual growth required little more than keeping tightly latched on to a few key clients whose own rapid growth would drag you up and up to more dizzying heights.

The channel has matured rapidly but is still a unique world to operate in for marketing leaders. The diversity and complexity of the ecosystem offers huge opportunities and also huge pitfalls. Even more so than in many areas of B2B, the breadth of effectiveness of marketing on display is notable.

There are some outstanding B2B marketing leaders in the space who thrive on their understanding of the nuances of the market and their partner ecosystem, have the acumen and authority to play true strategic roles in their organisations, and who devise smart marketing strategies that drive sustainable long-term growth. There are also some who find themselves buffeted along on the winds of changing leadership direction and find themselves frustrated and viewed as essentially a sales support function.

The winners and losers in the space are facing many of the same challenges and complexities. The big difference is how they meet them. In this article, we’ve looked at four key tips from our experience of working with marketing leaders in the indirect channel and some of the ways you can put them into practice.

1)     Play the long game

One of the biggest mistakes some channel marketers make is focusing too much on meeting short-term needs- usually on direct lead generation. Whilst generating leads is essential, focussing straight on the end goal and ignoring the fundamentals rarely leads to sustainable growth. Often this blinkered focus actually harms your ability to achieve the goals you’re so focussed on reaching.

It's important to have both a long-term and short-term focus in your marketing efforts. This means, yes, having a robust programme in place to provide consistent warm leads up to your sales team, but also having a long-term focus on the upper end of the funnel that will make your future lead generation efforts so much more effective (and efficient). This is not unique to the channel but is even more important here than in many other B2B markets. In a large part, this is due to the lack of differentiation that customers typically perceive between their channel suppliers.

There is no standard budget split that is correct for all between long- and short-term focus. It depends on your own unique position, the nature of the market and your growth ambitions. However, achieving a balance is vital and worth reviewing. It can be a tough sell into the organisation (especially in cases where Head of Marketing reports to Sales) and a well-thought-out business case is vital.

2)     Think broad

Channel marketing is dominated by email, display ads and events. On paper, they can offer an attractive equation- work out your conversion rate at each stage, plug in the data and deliver predictable numbers of attendees at physical and digital events that your Sales team can take on as warm leads to then convert into customers.

But in practice, whether or not it ever worked, it does not consistently work now. Narrow marketing with highly specific touchpoints along a linear journey does not work where a) your customer has a high degree of control over their own purchasing journey and b) they make decisions as part of a complex buyer group. Both of these are the case throughout the channel.

Instead, you need to ensure that you’re reaching your customers across numerous marketing channels whilst providing them with the ability to enter the buyer journey at a stage that works for them. Broadly speaking, the more quality touch points before a prospect reaches the sales stage, the more successful the conversation will likely be. And these touchpoints need to be considered on an account level rather than solely at a contact level.

3)     Be more daring

Most channel businesses offer a similar product set at a similar price to their direct competitors. It is possible to differentiate here with a uniquely packaged offering or through highly competitive pricing, but channel organisations that can (or want to) do this in a meaningful way are in the minority.

However, when it comes to how and where businesses in the channel promote to their prospective customers, there is currently very little differentiation in the market. But this is where the opportunity is. A misguided focus on staid professionalism over effectiveness has crushed creativity in channel marketing and is an area ripe for shaking up.

You don’t need to go crazy, but being distinctive and memorable in a sea of similarity helps to cement your channel business in potential buyers’ minds at all stages of the buying journey. The distinction can come from where you show up versus competitors, in what you say, or in how you say it.

4)     Be Consistent

A common experience amongst channel marketers is to find the business at one moment demanding leads, putting significant time, effort and budget into short sharp lead generation campaigns, for Sales to then reach capacity, and for the campaign to be turned off. And then for the situation to repeat itself a few weeks or months down the line.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that significant cost goes into the setting up of this type of activity which then needs repeating each time it is spun up in a new iteration. The second (and more important) one is that the organisation loses the opportunity to communicate a consistent message to the market over a longer period. The communication of a consistent message over the long term dramatically enhances the effectiveness of lead generation. It means that future campaigns are not starting with a totally cold prospect base but rather are communicating with an audience who already have a level of awareness and understanding of your offer.

Consistency not only saves significant time, effort and budget, but leads to significant incremental improvement over time.

Conclusion

No two channel organisations are the same. Funding may be in the millions in the form of MDF or a hard-fought-for few thousand. The world of a one-office MSP is different from a multinational cloud disti. The IT needs of 10 person plumbing company customer are different from the needs of a global shipping company customer. However there are challenges that the whole industry faces and by following the top tips we’ve explored above, there is always an opportunity to find and drive growth for your organisation.

If you recognise the challenges in this article and are wondering about how to put the recommendations into practice in your organisation, please feel free to reach out to me at jminchin@nyalamarketing.co.uk.