5 Questions That Make or Break a Content Marketing Campaign
Esther Santiago
Technology companies are producing more content than ever. But research suggests a lot of it doesn’t work.
According to research by the Content Marketing Institute, 50% of tech marketers say their content is only “somewhat effective.”
I’ve spent more than a decade developing content marketing assets — case studies, white papers, research reports — for brands across technology, retail, healthcare, tourism, hospitality, and F&B. Here are the five questions that separate the campaigns that generate pipeline from the ones that go nowhere.
WHAT PROBLEM DOES YOUR CONTENT SOLVE?
There’s a difference between what your product does and what problem it solves, and plenty of companies get it wrong.
A hotel technology vendor that leads with “AI-powered dynamic pricing engine” is focusing only on a feature. But a vendor that leads with “you're leaving money on the table every night — here’s how to stop that” is speaking directly to the needs of the IT leader who will sign the contract.
To help clarify the problems your prospects face, review your go-to-market messaging. Then go further: Pull the pain points from recent sales calls and RFPs. What words are your prospects actually using? What’s keeping them up at night? What do they need to justify to their CFO before committing to sign with you? That language belongs in your content. Your feature list doesn’t, except as supporting evidence for the problem you’re solving.
WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?
“We need more leads” and “we need more content” are the two most common answers to this question. But they’re also the least useful.
Real goals sound like this: We need to shorten the sales cycle for mid-market restaurant groups. We need to re-engage retail technology buyers who went cold after a demo. We need to establish credibility in a category where we’re the challenger.
Those kinds of specific goals determine where your content sits in the funnel and should shape your format, length, tone, CTA, and distribution strategy. A blog post that builds category awareness for a prospect who’s never heard of you is a fundamentally different asset from a case study designed to push a sales-qualified lead over the line.
IS YOUR CONTENT ALIGNED WITH YOUR READER’S GOALS?
This is where brands that are anxious about pipeline make their most expensive mistakes. Sending a thought-leadership blog to a prospect who’s already had a demo and is ready for a case study is worse than a waste of time, potentially setting back the relationship. Sending a dense technical white paper to a buyer who’s still barely problem-aware is similarly tone deaf.
Map your content to your buyer’s journey. For a retail technology company, that might mean a sharp POV piece on inventory shrinkage for cold prospects, followed by a case study showing measurable shrinkage reduction for a major brand, followed by an ROI framework aimed at a CTO who needs to build an internal business case. Each piece of content must have a defined purpose.
DOES YOUR CONTENT HAVE A POINT OF VIEW?
Generic content like “The Future of Retail” and “5 Trends Shaping Healthcare” is basically invisible. Having a point of view means you take a position that a reasonable person might disagree with. It means you’re willing to say that something the industry takes for granted is wrong, or that something everyone ignores actually matters. (For example, I’d like to think you’ve read this far because I told you most content marketing doesn’t work.)
WHAT’S YOUR DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY?
I’ve learned the hard way: A decent piece of content with aggressive distribution will almost always outperform a brilliant piece that gets posted once to the company LinkedIn page and then forgotten.
Raise distribution strategy in the kickoff. It should help shape the content itself. A piece designed for a targeted email sequence needs a subject line that competes in a crowded inbox. A LinkedIn post has about two sentences to earn a scroll. Gated content needs to deliver enough value before the gate that a prospect feels that filling out the form is worth it.
And if the content team and the distribution team are different people in different time zones with different priorities, that’s a workflow problem worth solving before it affects the campaign.