The Content Triangle

Content is the fuel that drives successful B2B marketing.

Getting that content right can make the difference between high octane performance with your marketing programs and sputtering results.

I have found that getting that right comes down to three essential ingredients of your content. If you include these three things in the content you create, it will be very engaging for your customers.

Let’s walk through those three things, and then talk about bringing them together for impactful content.

Relevance

You want the content that you create to matter to your specific target.

You want it to be specific enough that it’s particularly relevant to the people you’re targeting. It should be about the pain that you can address. Hopefully, that pain is something that’s either keeping them up at night or is on their mind; it’s important to them.

When you write this relevant content, you also want to be careful not to be too broad. It’s hard to engage with a macro-level story.

There’s a time and place for macro information, but to really engage your customer, you want to provide specific, relevant content.

Experience

Beyond being relevant, your best content is going to be based on your experience.

These are the things that you have specific expertise on. These are based on your”craft.”

Some people say that mastery comes after 10,000 hours of experience at something. If you think about it, that’s what your business is doing. You’ve invested for years or decades in a particular area and topic. You are uniquely qualified to share, and you want your content to be related to that.

Don’t write about things you think they might care about, but for which you’re not able to provide any unique insights.

Value

Beyond your content being relevant and based on your experience, you want it to change things for your customer.

You want your content to go beyond just informing and be transforming for their business. Make it more than an FYI – something that helps them make a decision, enables them to take action, or solves a problem.

These are the valuable things that the right content can do for your client, built on your experience and in the areas that you can help them with.

This is your opportunity to give them something valuable for free, in the form of information.

In a way, it’s like a free trial of the expertise that you offer with your product and your solution.

Finally, this value means that it’s not about you.

You want your content to be oriented about them and their problem, and solving that problem. The information might include your solution, but the focus should be on solving their problem.

When you bring these three ingredients together in your content, you’re in the sweet spot where you truly engage your target audience. Focus your content where these three characteristics intersect.

Your customers will notice because of the relevance and value that you’re giving them.

Google will notice too, and award you with keyword ranking because you’re talking about a topic in a natural way that’s valuable to the people that are searching for certain things.