You will have heard the phrase “Content is King” uttered at numerous seminars aimed at enlightening marketing and communication professionals like yourself about the virtues of going online with your communication strategy. Forget it – it has all too quickly become old news. Instead, make way for what may seem like even more hype: “Content is God”. Oh, and while you’re chewing on that, try the very latest: “Conversation is King – content is just something to talk about” which hits it right on the nail in the words of online marketing veteran Cory Doctorow.

Whichever statement is your favorite, there’s more than a grain of truth in this focus on content/conversation at the core of communications. And the engine that makes it work or not is the “content strategy”.

What is a content strategy? And what kind of content do you need to provide as part of it? First, let’s discuss why content is so important to the new breed of B2B buyer. Beyond your product or service, the single most important thing you can offer your prospects or customers is content they find valuable. By ‘content’ I mean information and information-based experiences of all kinds – from simple, written articles, data and infographics to interactive video, podcasts, learning tools and engaging competitions.

Why do I believe that content strategy is the No.1 factor in the success of your B2B marketing and communication efforts? Put yourself in the shoes of today’s B2B buyer. Now imagine you need to buy a product you’ve never bought before – or you want to see if there’s a better product on the market than the one you have been using. How do you discover, learn about and evaluate the product choices presented by competing manufacturers? Most of the time, you’ll start with the Internet. Perhaps it’s Google, perhaps your favorite industry news site. What will catch your attention? An interesting article, video or perhaps an ad. Which of these will be most persuasive? Information presented in a clear, interesting, even entertaining way. And that information which you perceive to be least biased – preferably created by one of your industry peers or, for example, an analyst whose opinion is widely respected.

Content about and around your offerings is not a nice-to-have or an additional feature of being a customer of your company. Instead, you should think of it as being every bit as important as your best-selling product or service. And, just as you wouldn’t bring your products or services to market without a strategy, you need to have an equally well considered plan and production apparatus for the production and delivery of your content.

Essentially, a content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and control of useful, usable content. And every company should have a content strategy as a core part of its overall communication strategy. Kristina Halvorson of Minnesota-based Brain Traffic, the author of Content Strategy for the Web (New Riders, 2009) puts it very nicely, I think when she uses the following structure to help us think about content strategy: What, why, how, for whom, by whom, with what, when, where, how often, what next.

To that concise list I would add something along the lines of ‘how to measure’ then I think we’re pretty much done. But she also makes the excellent point that good content is useful, usable and enjoyable. Typically, for my B2B clients, it’s the last of these three adjectives that is particularly difficult to ensure. In part, that’s because turning what might otherwise be dry information into an interesting, even fun experience demands more time, better ideas and yes, more money to do. But it’s also the magic that really makes a difference to how B2B buyers interact with your company.

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