So I recently started helping my team adopt a B2B content marketing strategy, after being kind of removed from the marketing world for a few years...
For a small bootstrapped business, with no writers in-house, fledgeling bare minimum resources starting from scratch with freelancers, the amount of catching up we need to do is staggering. So, so much money has been pumped into churning out articles, videos, webinars, etc etc by venture backed startups. Every conceivable genuinely valuable shareable topic has been sliced and diced a thousand ways into mush. Nothing we could possibly produce comes close to what other teams have already drafted, years ago now.
In my career people often bring me in as the creative "ideas" guy, but this task of coming up with content when there's so much noise to compete with... it's broken me. Never in my life had I stared at a blank canvas and felt so lost. Coming up with absolutely nothing.. every idea just feels like cheap regurgitated garbage.
That's a long way of saying, I think this marketing channel, for B2B at least, is kind of tapped out. Or maybe I'm tapped out. Probably the latter?
I find that there is a lot of noise out there. You know the content with a lot of words but no message. Somebody has to create the "signal". You can create content with signal by working with people doing real work and stepping into the shoes of your customer. This is the job of so-called customer success people but they often don't have the opportunity to be in the shoes of the customer. I was a customer of B2B products (software and hardware) and I rarely found content that was meaningful. But there was a lot of problem solving in our internal daily meetings that could be used as content. But that material was not exposed to the sales/marketing people of the vendors. Some of that material was also something many companies would be unwilling to disclose. For example, companies are unwilling to admit that their product is not a good fit for so and so application. They continue their "messaging" as a product good for everything. The average sales and marketing person doesn't have enough context, knowledge or insight to understand that sales pitch doesn't work. I would find an occasional sales person who really understood the issues and would quickly develop a rapport with us and be successful in getting our business.
While you're correct that in many mainstream industries, every idea, every keyword, seems to have been exhausted, there are still opportunities for new formats and angles. If there are already exhaustive articles on your core keywords and topics, maybe you don't need to take the article route at all. Maybe you can create something interactive instead - something that leverages your current skills (design and development).
Also keep in mind that while you will have some audience goals ("readers should like and engage with my content"), your more important aim is to meet business goals (attracting traffic and capturing leads). The latter does not necessarily depend on the former. You can edge out competitors simply by ranking better than them or doing a better job of capturing leads - even if the content itself isn't as good.
Another thing I recommend new B2Bs is to focus on building "micro authority". If there are 10 things your product does, focus on being the most authoritative voice on only one of those 10 things first. Even the best-funded competitors can't dig as deep as you can on everything. Better funded competitors are also likelier to chase higher volume keywords that offer more potential rewards. But as a new startup, you can target truly long tail keywords and topics that bigger competitors won't bother with.
While these might not deliver the volume you want, they will help you develop authority, brand recognition, and a stronger SEO footprint.
Totally agree that there is an incredible amount of noise out there. And my impression is, that it is getting worse. Stopped counting how many people I unfollowed on LinkedIn in the last couple of weeks because of it.
And all this makes it really hard for non-VC backed businesses to compete. Maybe it content marketing becomes the same as SEO and search engine advertizing in that regard, maybe it is already.
That being said, in my very limited experience so far, all this noise is also a chance and an opportunity. Because all this noise is basically useless for customers, clients and users. Creating meaning full content, once you get it out there, is thus a very powerful thing. It is also kind of a funnel filter, if potential clients come to you based on hgih quality content, at least in my cases, dicussions are a lot more meaningful and concrete. All the contacts you get from "noise" still have to be sold on the product and service, the others are already half-way there, more or less.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I work in a highly saturated industry where every conceivable idea that relates to what we do has beaten to death in all sorts of ways that I'm utterly at a loss where to go from here. It is such a restricted niche that there's just no room for uniqueness anymore and it's draining me.
I've felt this way also, but the more you stew and understand about the industry the higher the chance of you seeing new angles. But yeah if i were competing with a hubspot level content marketer that's pretty hard.
My issue has always been, even if write good content how do you distribute it? Otherwise it's stuck on page 20 of Google
Have you read the book "Traction" (by Weinberg and Mares)? It might help you break out of the specific niche you're looking at and be able to come up with some white space to work on.
People crave genuine content. They're bored of the high production stuff designed for easy shares, SEO, pleasing everyone, and being as bland as possible.
Yea one of the ideas we're dabbling with is simply interviewing members of our team on various topics, and posting the interview transcript (our team is fairly camera shy)
> Nothing we could possibly produce comes close to what other teams have already drafted, years ago now.
This may be true for B2B content but it seems misplaced at a moment when the world is pivoting to adapt to a novel viral pandemic. Everything has changed. Everything is new.
Founder here! Several years back we focused solely on our data content marketing agency referenced in this post. We produce content, but isn't the sort of stuff that's going to end up on hacker news.
I'm about to launch a content-based business (technical tutorials) and priceonomics was definitely an early inspiration! Also loved "everything is bullshit"
For a small bootstrapped business, with no writers in-house, fledgeling bare minimum resources starting from scratch with freelancers, the amount of catching up we need to do is staggering. So, so much money has been pumped into churning out articles, videos, webinars, etc etc by venture backed startups. Every conceivable genuinely valuable shareable topic has been sliced and diced a thousand ways into mush. Nothing we could possibly produce comes close to what other teams have already drafted, years ago now.
In my career people often bring me in as the creative "ideas" guy, but this task of coming up with content when there's so much noise to compete with... it's broken me. Never in my life had I stared at a blank canvas and felt so lost. Coming up with absolutely nothing.. every idea just feels like cheap regurgitated garbage.
That's a long way of saying, I think this marketing channel, for B2B at least, is kind of tapped out. Or maybe I'm tapped out. Probably the latter?