Producing valuable content is one of the most powerful ways to achieve the recognition and success you and your business deserve.
Problem is, it’s difficult to do.
Get it right and you’ll establish yourself as your market’s go-to expert. Get it wrong, and all that time and effort will be for nothing.
Critical Components for Campaign Success
To be successful, your campaigns require three critical components, longevity, consistency, and value. In short, you have to show up regularly with valuable ideas and insights, and do so over the long-term.
That’s easier said than done. Generating great ideas on a consistent basis, and keeping it up month-in and out, is what scuppers the vast majority of content campaigns.
Here’s the good news.
When you’ve been doing what you do for some time, are passionate and skilled at it, you’ll already have all the content ideas you’ll ever need to be successful.
Leverage Your Experience and Expertise
During the two decades I’ve worked in B2B marketing, I’ve made one vital discovery that sits at the heart of every successful campaign I’ve run.
Consultancy-driven B2B service providers like you have a treasure trove of insight at your fingertips.
As you’ve traveled through your career, you’ve learned lessons and had lightbulb moments that have resulted in critical insights into your clients’ problems.
You’ve then applied these insights to your work to ensure you’re as efficient and effective as possible.
It’s these same insights that’ll engage and attract your market.
However, because they’ve been compiled over time and assimilated into your approach, they can be difficult to recall without prompts.
Which is why I’ve created the mindmap. It’s been specifically engineered to help you retrieve this valuable information from the deep recesses of your mind and use them to brainstorm brilliant ideas for your content campaigning.
Here’s a quick guide on how to use it.
Navigating the Mindmap
The first element is the audience profiling branch. This is vital for creating the strongest foundation for your content campaigns.
Like a laser beam, the more focused your content is on a particular person, the greater its penetrative power. So, it’s important to know who it is that you want to communicate with.
A good shortcut is to picture one of your best clients. The person, not the business. Then answer the following questions:
- Where do they work?
- What’s their role and responsibilities?
- What do they want to achieve professionally and personally?
- Why are these things important to them?
- What is getting in the way of their achieving their goals?
- Why are those things present?
These are important elements because they are the reasons that motivate your market to purchase your products and services.
Once you know what motivates people to buy, you can then develop content that responds to their needs and helps them achieve one or more of the following five outcomes.
- Clarifying the problem your market is experiencing
- Building momentum towards their goal
- Creating efficiencies in their business
- Delivering competitive advantage
- Driving better results
Each outcome is worth your market’s time and attention, and content that focuses on them will stand the greatest chance of grabbing their attention.
The next step is to identify the insights that’ll produce the above outcomes for your market.
In the mindmap, you’ll find six areas of investigation:
- Overcoming Obstacles: Issue identification, clarification, and resolution
- Myth-Busting: Eradicating outdated thinking, behaviors, and beliefs
- Optimization: Process efficiency
- Compelling Events: Confronting change
- Pitfall Avoidance: Navigating traps to ensure a smooth path to optimal outcomes
- Visioning: The optimal, mutually beneficial outcome you want to create
Each strand is designed to help you analyze your thinking and identify critical insights that’ll be of value to your market.
Overcoming Obstacles
What do you know about the true nature of your client’s issues that’ll help them bridge the gap between what they think is causing their problems and what you’ve discovered is the real cause?
Typically, what they think are the causes of their problems are surface symptoms only, and not the underlying cause.
Myth-Busting
What are the behaviors, beliefs, and assumptions that no longer serve your clients?
Typically, they’re based on given wisdom or paradigms of thought that are outdated or were never true in the first place.
Optimization
What ineffective processes are your clients operating in their business? They might be their business processes or processes aligned with your service.
Your goal is to provide tools, techniques, and tactics that help your audience increase the efficiency and effectiveness of deploying your service or their internal systems, processes, and people.
Compelling Events
What are the important issues affecting your market today that are outside of their control?
Think about how you can help them confront the internal and external changes that demand attention and action.
Pitfall Avoidance
What mistakes have you made or seen your clients make that you can help your market to avoid?
Helping your audience to make decisions today that’ll make sure they avoid potential problems later will demonstrate the power of your relevant experience.
Visioning
What’s your vision for your clients? Not the vision for your business but the ideal outcome you want to help your market achieve.
Communicating the values, principles, and customer vision that drive your approach to business will enable you to align yourself emotionally with your market, and create a strong connection between you and them.
The Bottom Line
When you’re able to leverage the insights you’ve earned in each of these areas, you’ll demonstrate your suitability for your market’s business, while displacing both your competition and incumbent suppliers.