Back to Business: Building Your Fall Content Strategy Now

Fall is the highest-value quarter for B2B content

September will be here faster than you think. The time to plan for it is now.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Fall content strategy is the practice of planning, developing, and positioning content in advance of the September–November period—typically the highest-engagement quarter of the year for B2B content marketing—so that organizations can publish with intention and consistency when audience attention and buying activity peak. Building a fall content strategy in June or July, rather than August, is what separates organizations that dominate Q4 from those that scramble to keep up.

We’re at the end of June. Back-to-school displays are appearing in stores. Conference season is ramping back up. And if you’re in B2B content marketing, you know what that means: Q3 is the sprint to Q4, and the organizations that perform best in September, October, and November are almost never the ones who started planning in late August.

They’re the ones who used the relative quiet of summer—while others were coasting—to build the infrastructure for a strong fall.

Now is exactly the right time to do that work.

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Summer Content Strategy: Staying Visible When Audiences Check Out

School’s out for the summer, but don’t let your content strategy take a break.

The slowdown is real. What you do with it determines how you perform in the fall.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Summer content strategy is the practice of adapting a content marketing program to account for predictable seasonal shifts in audience attention, engagement, and buying behavior that occur between Memorial Day and Labor Day—while using the slower period strategically to build content assets that drive results in the high-engagement months that follow.

For most B2B marketers, summer presents a genuine planning challenge: audiences are distracted, decision-makers are harder to reach, and content that performs well the rest of the year often underperforms between June and August.

I’ve managed content programs through enough summer cycles to know that the worst response to the seasonal slowdown is to keep doing what you’re doing and expect different results.

The second worst response is to go quiet entirely and then scramble to rebuild momentum in September.

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From Blog to Brand: The Smart Content Repurposing Playbook

Strategically repurposing your content helps drive greater exposure and optimizes your budget.

Don’t let your carefully crafted content die a slow death.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Content repurposing takes the approach of “create once, use multiple times.” It’s designed to extend the life of your copy to both leverage exposure and gain efficiency. By adapting a single, well-crafted piece of content into multiple format and channels you maximize your return on every hour invested in creating that content.

Done well, it’s one of the highest-leverage moves in a content marketer’s toolkit. Done poorly, it’s just copy-paste.

The difference is strategy.

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Why Your B2B Content Team Needs to Be Good at Storytelling

Using GenAI for content marketing - tips and best practicesPopular wisdom has it that people like to read stories and that storytelling is a very important skill for content marketers to have—even if they work in the B2B realm. But what if your content team is hesitant about storytelling? How can you convince them of its importance?

This is a question I responded to recently on LinkedIn.

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SWOT, Done Right, Can Provide Important Insights

SWOT analysis, strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat words on blackboard.

I’m a big fan of conducting SWOT analyses, not only for strategic planning but really for any situation where you’re faced with an important business decision. A SWOT can help you gain clarity around the strengths and opportunities you can leverage and the weaknesses and threats you need to overcome. Pretty basic, but very powerful when done well.

Though common in large organizations, many small businesses and solopreneurs may not be familiar with the tool. Continue reading “SWOT, Done Right, Can Provide Important Insights”

If Your Goal is “Implied,” You Don’t Really Have a Goal

In interviewing for a job several years ago, I went through a round of interviews with various members of the organization. When meeting with the Chief Administrative Office (CAO), he handed me a brochure and said: “What do you think about this brochure?” My immediate thought was: “In what regard?,” but I resisted the urge to say that and, instead, said:

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Are You Overlooking Your Most Important Audience?

I’m often surprised that the most overlooked audience when it comes to communicating with key constituents is the internal or employee audience. Companies are generally pretty good about recognizing that they need to communicate with customers and prospects, but employees tend to be an afterthought. This may be because of the assumption that Continue reading “Are You Overlooking Your Most Important Audience?”

Unless Your Customers Are Like You, You Shouldn’t Treat Them Like They Are

Over the years I’ve noticed a dangerous tendency—among myself and others—to assume that we “know” our customers, or target customers. Because we think or believe something, we assume that—of course!—others think or believe as we do. They don’t.

This was driven home to me a while ago as my husband was watching the MLB All-Star Game.

“Great!” I said—”this must mean the baseball season is over!” No, he assured me — only halfway over; still about 80 games to go. “Good grief! Who in the world wants to watch that much baseball?!! How can the networks possibly afford to keep broadcasting these things?!?!?!”

And then it hit me. Continue reading “Unless Your Customers Are Like You, You Shouldn’t Treat Them Like They Are”

How Can You Find the Right Focus For Your Marketing Messages?

A prospective client contacted us recently wanting to produce a white paper to serve as a promotional tool. The white paper needed to include: a focus on the new national campaign theme, a focus on the new local campaign theme, a focus on the areas served, a focus on the organization’s new direction for the coming year, a focus on…OK, hopefully, you get the point.

If you focus on everything, you’re focused on nothing!

It’s tough to focus. Any organization has multiple objectives and messages that need to be conveyed and there can be a tendency to try to “do it all” in one message. The trouble with that, though, is Continue reading “How Can You Find the Right Focus For Your Marketing Messages?”

Creating a Plan to Improve Corporate Communications

Effective corporate communication has always been important. Now, though, in a hybrid and continuing uncertain corporate environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to determine how effective their corporate communications efforts are, and what adjustments or improvements need to be made to keep employees engaged, productive, and employed!
What worked pre-pandemic almost certainly doesn’t work anymore. It’s critical that corporate communications and HR staff work together to create a strategy and plan for moving forward.

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