As you may know, we are deep in the process of selecting a marketing automation software. We have it narrowed down to two firms we are doing a trial with and will have probably made our decision within the month.

As this process is coming to a close, I am getting excited at the possibilities and looking ahead to the future. One of my main responsibilities here are the nurturing programs; as such I am constantly looking at content that can effectively move a prospect through the sales pipeline. It occurred to me that what made content effective was the relevance of the message and the timing. Thus, as I was creating a framework for my content, I decided to mirror the B2B buying cycle. I created the diagram below to illustrate the framework.(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

In order to create effective content, you need to do 5 things:

• Talk to your sales team and find out what content is most effective and what content is not used. Throw away the content that is never used.
• Put the remaining content into each of the categories listed in the diagram. Again, get sales input into this process.
• Outline a content plan based upon your missing areas. What categories are you lacking in? What categories do the sales people feel are most important?
• Remember to include all types of content in your creation plan: whitepapers, blog posts, article links,web seminar recordings, podcasts etc.
• Begin creating always keeping in mind where the piece fits into the B2B buying cycle.

I would love to hear some more ideas on how you created an effective content strategy plan.

Technorati Tags: B2B, web seminars , whitepapers, B2B content

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under Marketing, b2b. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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