Solving the "Dry Well" Challenge of Content Marketing

Consistently producing content that connects with potential buyers remains one of the greatest challenges facing B2B marketers. The need to make content relevant for individual buyers at every stage of the buying process, to publish content in multiple formats across multiple channels, and to publish new content frequently have combined to strain the creativity and resources of B2B marketers.

In the early stages of a company's content marketing efforts when marketers are focused on "building out" their content library, it's relatively easy to identify good topics for content resources. But after the initial build-out phase is completed, it can become more difficult to identify content topics that are relevant and fresh.

Of course, some topics need to be addressed more than once. It's important, for example, to update your content when the capabilities of your product change, or when new research about a topic becomes available. But sooner or later, many B2B marketers will feel that their well of relevant and meaningful topics has run dry.

To address this challenge, marketers need to think more broadly about the kinds of topics that can be effective in their content marketing program. From a topical perspective, there are four basic types of content (shown in the following diagram).

Product Content - This is just what it sounds like - content that describes the features and functionality of a product or group of related products. In a 2015 study by LinkedIn, business buyers ranked product info, features, functions as their most preferred type of marketing/sales content.

Product Category Content - This is basically "educational" content that discusses issues or needs that a type of product or service can address. When a provider of account-based marketing software creates content that explains why ABM is a more effective approach to marketing, or describes what capabilities buyers should look for in an ABM solution, that's product category content. Good product category content usually doesn't promote a specific product, but it does "evangelize" the product category.

Most of the marketing content created by B2B companies (excluding pure brand advertising) falls into one of these two categories, and these are the types of content topics that marketers focus on first. This is a valid approach, but these two categories will only provide so many good topics for content resources.

There are, however, two additional types of content that can complement product and product category content, and thus provide a valuable source for good content topics.

Business Function Content - This type of content addresses issues relating to the job responsibilities of your potential buyers, but which aren't directly related to your company's product or service. For example, suppose that your company offers a sales enablement solution to financial services firms. Your buying group will almost certainly include chief marketing officers and chief sales officers. Once you've developed enough product and product category content, you can create content resources that address more general marketing and sales issues. This type of content could include topics such as:

• How to win business from millennial investors
• How financial advisors can use social selling to attract and win new clients

Industry-Related Content - This type of content discusses issues that are related to the industry in which the prospect operates. To continue with my financial services example, the sales enablement provider could create content around topics such as:

• The impact of "robo-advisors" on traditional financial services firms
• New (or pending) governmental regulations affecting financial services firms

You may be wondering why you should create content that isn't closely related to your company's product or service. One of the objectives of content marketing is to demonstrate that you understand the issues and challenges that your prospects and potential buyers are facing. Product category content helps you achieve this objective, but so can business function content and industry-related content.

Top illustration courtesy of Paani Program via Flickr CC.