By Bob Sperber, Editor, Branded Content

B2B marketers work hard to get audiences to notice them, and a lot of effort goes into content to get email subject lines noticed, newsletters opened, and campaigns noticed. To complete that cycle of getting audience attention, the quality of your written content can determine whether it hits home with your audience — whether it gets saved and shared or deleted.

What makes good content? For starters, it takes planning and alignment with stakeholders beyond the marketing department. Marketing departments of all sizes, however, share similar challenges in communicating with and working with different types of stakeholders: 

• Management leaders: Marketers are eternally asked to “do more with less.” Without the budget and time to properly plan and prepare your content, you may experience lots of frustration with mediocre content, extra hours, and money ill-spent. 
• Technical subject matter experts (SMEs): A lack of availability or understanding by your technical subject matter experts can lead your content too deeply down a technical rabbit hole that fails to explain how your solution addresses big-picture needs.
• Sales Leaders: Poor coordination from sales and customer-facing service stakeholders can result in too many claims of customer benefits that lack details on customer problems, solutions, and success metrics your solutions provide in the real world.
• Writers and content creators: When writers aren’t provided clear messaging goals and content details from marketing clients who have trouble coordinating with other internal stakeholders, the quality of the content can suffer in its focus or ability to motivate readers.

Your mission as a marketer, should you decide to accept it, is get everyone on the same page — your page. You can do this by creating a good, clear content brief for your writer.

Bring it all together in your content brief

Many times, content plans spell out topics a marketer needs to promote, and while they’re market-driven in theory, do they really focus on the answers your customers and prospects are losing sleep over?  When developing an idea for an important asset, such as a white paper, your content brief is critical to literally getting you, your writers, and your stakeholders on the same page.

Before bringing a writer to the project, you should do some homework in advance to gather some information from your counterparts in other departments. Once you make it part of your process, it will become easier, and you’ll find it easier for everyone to work together to answer questions such as:

• What’s the topic of your piece? Be specific. For example, “Backup Software Solidifies Enterprise Backup and Recoverability of Microsoft Office 365 Data” will draw more clicks than “Innovations in Backup Software.” This helps your writer focus on the most important aspects of your solution.
  
• Who is your audience? Go beyond “engineering and manufacturing decision-makers in our industry.” Define their personas, roles, and levels in the organization, areas or processes they manage, and solutions they use.
• What’s your competitive position and communication goal? Are you the leader in your segment needing to prove your continuing innovation? A big fish in a small pond looking to broaden your market footprint? A small innovator needing to (re)introduce your capabilities? Differentiate your brand!
• What key challenges should the asset address? What are the key pain points or untapped opportunities customers report? Challenges should be more specific than: “more efficient process, save time and money, higher quality.” Get specifics, ask sales or technical leaders for the key aspects of those problems, and how you can solve them. This improves focus and reduces follow-ups and revisions. Provide supporting information.
• What related resources can you provide? Include links to specific webpages, sources and passages of technical materials, technology brochures, case studies, successful content pieces you’ve done in the past and how you want to build on them — not too much, not too little. You can even cite content from others you like, or don’t, and why.

With a little extra work up front to establish a process, your content will improve. Your stakeholders in sales and technical departments will be better prepared over time to address marketing needs. Your content will improve and perform better. In turn, management leaders who expect you to “do more with less” may notice and reward you in next year’s budget.

For more insight on content creation, read our white paper, "Rules of B2B Engagement — Power-Up your Content Marketing with Partnerships."