How’s your content calendar looking? Are there gaps? Are you publishing consistently? Not sure what relevant topics you need to include? Building a content calendar that your audience will love is no easy task for B2B tech companies. There are lots of considerations from SEO to industry trends to ensuring your products and services are promoted.
Need some inspiration? We’ve got you fam. Here’s a list of content calendar ideas for content marketers in B2B tech.
You Know Content Is King
As a savvy, B2B-tech marketer, you know the importance of great content and a blog that keeps churning out high-quality posts. According to HubSpot research, B2B companies that publish 11 blogs or more a month generate 3 times more traffic than those blogging less. However, content creation challenges are a problem for 49% of B2B marketers.
You need more content but may have hit a roadblock. It happens. Ideas don’t always flow as easily as we’d like. You can certainly try some brainstorming exercises with your team to capture more ideas. But we’re going to go ahead and share some content calendar ideas to get you started.
Keep Track of Industry Buzz
Technology is an ever-changing industry. There’s always a new industry trend that’s emerging. All these things can have serious implications for your customers. Having an in-depth knowledge of industry buzz shows your audience that you have a pulse on the industry, setting you up as a thought leader.
To quickly and easily consume industry news, here are some tactical things that you can set up quickly:
- Leverage news or RSS aggregators to subscribe to specific industry sites that focus on industry news/buzz
- Set up a daily Google alert for certain key terms
- Dedicate a member of your team to follow industry buzz
- Contract with a freelance writer who has their finger on the pulse of the industry
With all this information and/or a dedicated resource, you are sure to create timely and compelling content.
Quick example: Did you see our recent article on “The Tanking of Tumblr”?
Interview Internal Stakeholders
There is a wealth of information on your industry and audience right within your own organization. You can engage with sales and understand better the pain points of customers, their common questions, their preferences, and what the competition is doing. Use this intel to develop relevant content that speaks to these things.
You can also chat with your product team, understanding what new features or functionality will soon be available and why they are important. This can help you develop a content strategy for launching new products and features as well.
There are many more experts within your team as well. The value of what they have to say matters. You can even encourage them to submit their own ideas via an “idea repository” in your content calendar.
Consider Your Changing Audience: Millennials Are Now Major Decision-Makers
Approximately 33% of millennials are the decision-makers for enterprise technology purposes, as compared to 23% of baby boomers and 27% of Gen X. If it’s been a while since you addressed how you talk to your audience, then you should probably revisit this with a watchful eye on millennials as decision-makers.
So, you need to ensure that your content calendar aligns with how they want to consume information. They have different values and motivations than other generations. They also do a lot more research before they’re ready to engage with sales.
Thus, your content calendar needs to include specialized content for this buyer, tracking their unique journey from awareness of their challenge to finding the ideal solution.
Our advice here: create a customer journey map for millennial buyers. That exercise will uncover gaps in your current content offering and paint a clear picture of what you need to get on your content calendar going forward.
Develop Content that Solves Challenges
Research has shown that when a B2B tech buyer has a problem, they actively look for a solution. In fact, 62% of buyers seek out content to solve their challenge.
What can you take away from this stat? Buyers want content that answers questions and provides solutions. This means you can write content to do just this. You can even title your posts as the question, which often has major SEO benefits as well.
When thinking about creating problem-solving content, you may also be able to draw inspiration from your current customers as well as sales. They know the biggest questions and problems that arise that can quickly be resolved with your solution.
By developing problem-solving content, you’ll also be able to start a conversation with prospects more naturally. They ask a question, you have an educational post that resolves the question. This type of content is also perfect for social media.
Ensure You Have Content for All Your Buyer Personas
There are often multiple decision-makers involved in a tech purchase. They all have different objectives and motivations. You need to ensure that you produce content that is targeted at each of these.
You have the regular users of the solution that have one set of questions. Whereas, C-suite players need to ensure that the solution provides the functionality needed to help workers and is cost-effective.
You’ll want to identify who the potential decision-makers are and uncover their main pain points. Then map content to these issues. This also ensures that your content marketing messaging is consistent but also allows you to refine certain content pieces to speak directly to one buyer persona.
Breathe New Life into Old Content
Repurposing high-performing content is a great way to expand your content calendar. Look through your content analytics and determine which content pieces had the greatest ROI. Then determine how you can refresh them. Here are some ideas:
- Rewrite an article from a different audience angle or for a different buyer stage
- Rewrite an article for a specific industry vertical (ex: what you’re reading right now)
- Take a reverse or negative stance (ex: 3 Tips to Do X, changes to 3 Things Not to Do)
- Update an article with new stats that represent new research
- Change the format (ex: blog to infographic)
- Turn a long-form article into a 30-second explainer video
- Take a series of posts on the same topic and package them together in a new ebook.
These are just a few content calendar ideas for repurposing high performing content that could attract new audience members.
Conduct Your Own Original Research
Tech buyers are always eager for new data and insights. So why not develop your own survey around some of their biggest challenges or what they want in a solution like yours. You can then use this data to create multiple pieces of content, and it will certainly put you in a different league than your competition as a true thought leader.
Back in 2012, my fellow DivvyHQ co-founder, Brody Dorland, wrote on this very topic: “A New, Tactical Model for Building & Promoting Thought Leadership.”
Finally, You Need a Dynamic Content Calendar
If you are still using spreadsheets for your content calendar, it’s time to upgrade to a content calendar that lives within a true content marketing software platform. Why? Because spreadsheets are ineffective and take up way too much of your precious time that you could be using to actually create content.
Further, a content calendar brings better visibility, transparency and accessibility. Anyone with access can view exactly what’s in the queue. Having this tool could positively impact ideation as well, helping you identify gaps more easily.
Ready to ditch the spreadsheets? Try DivvyHQ’s content calendar. It’s free to get started.