In building out a content marketing strategy, our B2B clients rarely need help developing more content—they typically have more than they can use. They do ask us to help them make the content they have (from web content, to case studies, and customer stories) more relevant to their core audiences and C-Suite customers. An overabundance of internal experts, a noisy marketplace and a fast paced competitive landscape make it difficult to serve up the right content to the right audience at the correct time to drive engagement.
Over the course of our work with marketers, we’ve found that the best editors are often the clients themselves. Rather than guess at what is relevant, or how to make things relevant, take the time to solicit a handful of your customers to understand where they are struggling, what their top priorities are, and how your expertise can address those needs. This enables you to develop customer stories that matter.
Value of Co-Creation:
One way to access your executive clients is to request that they work with you in co-creating a customer story or use case that would help their peers understand a challenge or best practice in a context that is relevant to them. This can be as simple as interviewing clients or conducting qualitative or quantitative research with clients on business issues that matter to your company and to them. If you do the majority of the writing and development of the content, often executives are happy to be a part of the piece as long as their role is limited to reviewing and editing.
Co-creation brings three important outcomes to your content:
Credibility
Your clients will identify a value proposition and talk about it in a way that will be deemed more credible to their peers.
Relevance
Working with your clients allows you to identify the highest priority areas that they care about—making your content relevant and targeted to your most important audience.
Authenticity
Authentic stories told by peers bring the value to life for executives reading your content.
Content marketing continues to grow in importance as more and more of the buying in B2B environments moves to digital. Finding ways to develop the most relevant content to your buying communities is critical in this competitive landscape. Your customers are an untapped resource that may hold the keys to your success.