First, a Quick Reminder on What Content Marketing Is
Admittedly, content marketing is still a bit of a buzzword. To eliminate the buzz and make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s revisit a quick definition from the good old Content Marketing Institute:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
To clarify this a little bit further: by content marketing, we basically mean regularly-produced web content that’s designed to help customers find your service and recognize its value. That includes blogs, of course. But social media, email marketing, and even paid ads are all channels that could also fall under the term’s umbrella.
With that noted, here’s what your B2B tech company should stop doing.
1. Stop content marketing to everyone.
The first step to better content marketing is to narrow your audience as much as possible.
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We’ve written about audience targeting before. The gift and the curse of the internet is that you can reach anyone with your content. Remember, though, you don’t need to reach everyone – you only need to reach the people who will buy your services.
For B2B tech companies, here’s what that means: define who your ideal customer is, and write directly toward them. For example, one client of ours is a managed IT service provider that only serves professional service firm offices with more than 20 workstations. For a long time, though, they were producing content that could have applied to anyone with an interest in IT support, which resulted in subpar SEO results on the high-competition general topics they were writing to, and irrelevant traffic when users did find them. (Healthcare IT leads are useless if you don’t provide healthcare IT.)
By shifting their content to an explicit focus on a certain type of client, they were able to speak more effectively to certain topics. The result? More (and better) traffic – and ultimately, more (and better) business.
Take the time to hone down your audience as far as possible. Tools like buyer personas and StoryBrand can help.
Is your ideal customer the tech administrator at a 50 workstation professional services office? Are they the VP of HR? Are they the facility manager at an industrial warehouse?
Whoever they are, find them (this takes research), and then write for them – not for everyone else. If you don’t narrow your content down, your B2B tech marketing efforts will fail.
2. Stop saying what you want to hear.
With the audience identified, it’s time to speak their language. That means creating content that interests them, instead of focusing on content that interests you.
I’ve written about this in more depth here, but it’s worth a brief recap. There are two basic tenets to a client-centric content marketing approach:
Position your customer (not your company) as the hero in the stories you tell. Create messaging that focuses on how the customer can win with your service – not on how your service is the best because of how many years you’ve been in business, or on how great you are at incorporating certain types of technology. Those things are valuable only insomuch as they serve your customer.
Write to topics that your customers are searching, and use their language. Don’t write blogs around things you think are interesting. Write blogs around what your ideal customers are searching for. And, on that note…
3. Stop using B2B tech jargon.
This comes back to using the language of your customers. You know firsthand that B2B tech is as jargon-packed a field as you’ll find. Don’t hope to impress customers with B2B tech marketing language they won’t understand. Instead, impress them with how much you understand them.
A quick way to determine if you’re using too much jargon: give your sales pitch to someone who’s not in the industry. Even, better, give it to a fifth-grader. If they can understand it, you’re doing well. If not, get simpler.
Yes, your clients are almost certainly tech savvy. But the reality is that jargon varies so much from organization to organization – and even from department to department inside of an organization – that it’s always better to speak in plain terms than to risk fanciful obscurity.
Create content marketing that’s clear.