What gets in the way of effective content campaigns?
In the Content Marketing Institute’s annual survey of B2B content marketers, respondents routinely identify a lack of resources as a key challenge. This year was no different, prompting the authors to call it the “problem that just doesn’t go away.”
I’ll spare you my rant about the disconnect between how most organizations talk about the value of content and the money they put toward it. Today I’m here to pose a different question:
What if the reason your content is not driving the outcomes you want is not that you don’t have enough resources—but that your content resources are focused on the wrong things?
In my experience, they are. Whether you’re in an enterprise with a dedicated content team or a scrappy emerging-growth company with a total marketing headcount of 1.33 people, content strategy and creation tends to be largely siloed from campaign strategy.
This leads to a lot of content that’s very good at meeting someone’s content goals, but not necessarily what you need to meet your campaign goals.
Lots of content, but not the right content.
When our clients are struggling to create effective, targeted content campaigns, it’s usually because of one or more of these content challenges:
- One-size-fits-all content. You may have a lot of awareness-level content, but nothing tuned to the specific audience or industry you’re targeting.
- Too much of a good thing. Your big library of blogs or case studies makes it challenging for target audiences to find the content meant for them.
- Audience/information mismatch. For example, a deep dive on product details targeted at executive decision makers.
- Format/information mismatch. For example, webinars that are too focused on your product and not focused enough on your audience’s challenges
- Critical content gaps. It may seem like you have content across the journey, but are missing information around key questions the audience has.
- Siloed assets. You may have all the right assets to support the buyer’s journey—but no clear pathways between them.
The more of these issues you face, the harder it is to figure out which content to use, adapt or develop to make your campaign deliver the results you want.
Connecting the dots between content strategy and campaign strategy.
Whether creating content or curating it, you should always be able to answer two questions:
- Who is it for?
- What should it lead them to do?
Knowing your marketing objectives—and the audience you need to reach to accomplish those objectives—allows you to evaluate and prioritize content ideas. It gives you solid ground on which to redirect the ones that don’t meet those goals. It also helps you assess your existing content assets to see which you can use as is or repurpose for your campaign.
In my experience, content strategy and creation usually happens separately from campaign strategy. And that’s the heart of the problem.
Consider this scenario: Your product team informs you they’re developing a guide to a valuable but underused feature of your solution. This asset will create awareness about the feature and how to use it. They’re hoping you will include it in your campaign. Should you?
Let’s think about it.
➡️ Does that feature solve a known problem for a key audience?
➡️ Is that the audience you’re targeting with your campaign?
➡️ Is the feature the reason to use your product, or a value-add?
➡️ Are there other questions that need to be answered for your audiences before they can even consider that feature? If so, do you already have content that does that work?
If your campaign goal is to drive retention by fostering loyalty among existing customers, this asset might be just the ticket. But if the organization’s priority is net-new logos and you’re tasked with raising solution awareness in a crowded field, you’d be better off asking Product Marketing to focus on a self-serve demo instead.
Developing a goal-focused content campaign.
If content planning often starts with the question, “What content can we create?”, campaign planning often starts with the question, “What content do we need?”
A goal-focused content strategy, on the other hand, starts with—well, your goals. Here’s what that looks like.
- What are the overall goals of this campaign?
Starting with goals helps you focus on what you need the content to do, rather than the broader field of what the content could be about. It goes without saying that your campaign goals should map to larger organizational goals. - What specific audience(s) do I need to reach to achieve those goals?
In B2B, you’re always selling to a buying team. Understanding which roles on the buying team you need to reach with your campaign is key to creating content that converts. Are you trying to reach decision makers? Focus on creating urgency for your solution (awareness) and proving that it won’t be a mistake. Between these two areas you’ll need lots of content for champions and influencers that shows without a doubt how you do it. - What does that audience care about? What problem do they need help solving? How much do they know about the problem? How can our solution help?
Buyers look for content—and products and services—to understand and solve problems. They’re looking for ways to do their jobs better. When you skip steps 1 and 2 and go straight to the fun of content ideation, you often end up with content that is either too broad to appeal to your target audience or too narrow to get the job done. - What are the audience’s preferred content formats at each stage of the journey?
There is a lot of great research about which content formats buyers tend to prefer at each stage of the journey. But buyers aren’t one size fits all. This information helps you make sure your content will appeal to your particular audience—especially if someone else on the team is super jazzed about the format du jour. - What information will the audience need to progress on their journey? What questions will our content need to answer?All buyers have questions that need to be answered before they can commit to a purchase. While those questions used to be answered in a sales conversation, today’s buyers expect to learn as much as they can through their own research, before talking to someone. If you’re not actively thinking about those questions and making sure they’re answered in your content, your buyers will go somewhere else.
- What content do we have that answers those questions? If it’s not in the format the audience prefers, how hard would it be to adapt it? Too often the decision to repackage content happens “because we can” rather than “because we should.” Taking a goal-focused approach helps you divert resources from the derivative content rabbit farm to the assets that can provide the most value in your campaign.
- What additional content will we need to create to support this audience’s journey? This is the point where a lot of campaign and content strategies start: What content do we need? By taking the steps above first, you can confidently fill any remaining gaps for your campaign.
At Iron Horse, we use a 6-part content strategy framework to help marketers create content-based campaigns that drive the outcomes they want. You can learn a lot more about this framework—and get a free Google Sheets workbook containing 6 content strategy templates we use to support it—in our B2B Marketer’s Content Strategy Toolkit.
The Iron Horse insight.
There are plenty of reasons for B2B marketers to become more strategic about how they use content in their campaigns. A lack of resources may be the problem that doesn’t go away, but bigger buying groups, ever-lowering tolerance for non-personalized experiences, and increasing pressure to find ways to use AI to scale production all point to a need for stronger alignment between content and campaign planning. Whether handing off to your favorite AI tool (please don’t, not yet), your resource-constrained internal team, or your agency partner, a well-documented content strategy grounded in your campaign goals and audience insights will help you use your resources more efficiently and create more effective campaigns.
