Content marketing is highly effective in the B2B sphere, as the buying process is far more drawn out and lends itself to a longer, more comprehensive and research-driven decision making process.
Unfortunately, executing a successful B2B content marketing strategy takes a lot of work and resources—which might be more than you can afford to spare.
But this doesn’t mean you have to kiss your B2B content marketing dreams goodbye and settle for an unenthusiastic alternative (though I’m sure your human billboard is a top bloke). Through the miracle of outsourcing, you can enjoy all the benefits of successful B2B content marketing without having to build and manage a dedicated team from scratch.
While outsourcing offers numerous benefits, you can’t just kick back, relax, and let the outsourced elves run around behind the scenes doing all the heavy lifting for you. To get the most from your professional relationship and ensure your marketing strategy is a success, it pays to be prepared. With sufficient groundwork laid out, the company you outsource to can hit the ground running and get straight into doing what they do best—creating compelling content and generating high quality leads.
Here are four key things to have ready before you can consider outsourcing your B2B content marketing strategy:
- A business one pager
The better a content marketing agency knows your company, the more likely they’ll be able to create high quality content that’s indistinguishable from anything created internally. From the get go, you should be able to provide them with a business one pager including essential details, like a brand overview, positioning statement, product overviews and primary target market.
- A style and tone guide
The style and tone of your content—be it written, video, audio or infographic—should be an extension of your brand’s voice and cater specifically to your target demographic. Without putting in the time and effort to compile a comprehensive style and tone guide, you risk ending up with content that’s disjointed and off mark. For example, if you’re targeting the CIO of a high-end networking organisation, you’ll never cut through the noise with content that’s overly casual or riddled with metaphors.
- Persona document
A persona document is the guiding force behind any successful B2B content marketing campaign, as it defines your target audience: the people you’re trying to reach and engage with your content. By conducting the market research and analysis necessary to compile a persona document, you’ll be in a much better position to work with your chosen agency at every stage of the content marketing process.
- Clear goals and objectives
A lack of clear, unanimous goals is a leading cause of client–agency relationships breaking down. Not knowing exactly what you want from your chosen agency from the outset can create significant frustrations that undermine the entire B2B content marketing strategy. Plus, if you both have different measures of what constitutes success, then the value of any metrics and results will depend on who’s looking at them. Furthermore, creating clear goals will help the agency structure their approach and create a customised content strategy that caters to the specific needs of your business.
GCL Direct offers holistic marketing solutions that facilitate more accurate audience profiling and segmentation, which strengthens any marketing strategy by boosting engagement rates and, ultimately, conversion. If you’d like to learn more about our superior lead generation service, feel free to get in touch.
