Find and repurpose your B2B content marketing

Companies are increasingly building internal teams to handle content marketing. This is creating new challenges for the sector – including skills gaps and problems with content creation and reuse.

Recent B2B content marketing research from marketing software provider Curata found that 75 per cent of companies were increasing their investment. Around 43 per cent of those polled said they were building their own content marketing teams.

There is an interesting takeout from Curata’s figures; although more people are being hired, there is a shift in the challenges that organisations face in putting them to best use.

New people, new strategy

Overall, B2B companies have moved away from that seemingly age-old strategy of targeting hits and visits. B2B is not like B2C. Targeting is now the aim and engaging with the customer’s purchasing journey – be it the funnel or whatever marketing terminology you want to use.

But the question arises about how to produce such content. For example, 41 per cent of companies said hiring people who could create content was their biggest requirement. This was followed by 21 per cent who could direct strategy.

At the same time, the need to find increasing volumes of content persists. For some companies, this is solved by making improvements to how they audit and curate it. In short, marketers are asking themselves how much content they already have and how they can repurpose existing material.

The idea of making budgets work harder makes sense. But this could change the job requirement for people coming in to handle B2B content marketing. The challenge is to find content from within the company and making something out of it.

And now…

So how best to reuse content?

• Look at company presentations or even better customer emails. These often contain a wealth of ideas that can easily be repurposed.
• Make employees in other departments aware of what you are looking for and bring them into the curation process. Set up a centralised hub to make it easy to submit an idea. Many will be eager to do this as long as it is straightforward.
• Think about calendar events. Whatever the sector, every industry is ruled by dates to some extent.
• Think like a journalist. Journalism is not just about the latest Edward Snowden scoop. Often it is simply about good ideas and how to present them in a way that engages the reader.
• Don’t be afraid to use old content. Re-run it if it’s still relevant or better still update it. Some of the best engagements happen on Twitter when someone has seen the tweet twice.
• Be modular. Look at Dell’s ‘Nurture’ campaign. It produced hundreds of smaller pieces of content that could then be bundled into larger pages tailored to a particular customer. One hundred pieces of content can means thousands of different combinations.
• Remember, good ideas are often simple and right in front of you. It’s not like looking for the TV remote under the sofa.

Find and repurpose your B2B content marketing is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.