B2B marketing trends in a post-COVID world: Nailing your content strategy

“An email from the CEO about coronavirus”.

Think back to March or April this year: how many emails did you receive with that exact subject heading? Too many, right?

And most of them were from organizations you hadn’t heard from in years; from companies you can’t even remember doing business with. The emails themselves were likely full of fairly generic, highly irrelevant (to you, at least) claims about how the organization in question was going to navigate the crisis.

Worse still were the emails from companies that didn’t even mention the crisis; emails, no doubt drafted weeks before the pandemic hit, that launched into a tone-deaf sales pitch that couldn’t help but fall flat in the midst of rapidly-changing global events.

Whether irrelevant or tone-deaf, the one thing this deluge of marketing content highlighted is this: the key to any good content strategy is to consider your goals and your clients’ needs while being completely mindful of the underlying environment.

Of course, it’s hard to judge these organizations too harshly — very few people saw this game-changing crisis coming and many of us were paralyzed by shock when it hit. But, as we emerge from the worst of the pandemic, we’ve now had time to take stock, to recalibrate, and to make predictions about what the post-COVID world will look like for businesses.

And one thing we do know is that, whatever industry you’re addressing, your previous content strategy isn’t likely to work. If you want to continue to connect with your customers in a meaningful way, you’re going to have to adapt — and continue to adapt as the situation unfolds and we begin to understand what the “new normal” is going to look like.

Employing empathy.

Your greatest tool as you begin to rethink your content strategy is, as ever, empathy. Over the past few months, we’ve seen that the brands that are making the most impact are the brands that are most in touch with their humanity — yes, even in the B2B sphere.

As the pandemic has forced us to reflect and reprioritize, we’re increasingly drawn to organizations willing to take bold steps in taking a stance for the collective good. Companies who have truly committed to health and safety, rather than merely paying lip service or acting out of a desire to stay current. Businesses that have concentrated on fostering connection.

So as you start to rethink your own content strategy, try to gauge this shift in your own audience. Consider the challenges they’re facing right now, and the challenges that may lie ahead as the financial, political, and health-related landscapes continue to shift post-COVID 19.

How can you use your content to address these challenges? How can you make it relevant to what they’re experiencing? How can you make it more human?

Above all, ask yourself how you can help.

Because that’s what we’re all going to need as we make our way out of this crisis — and as we navigate the knock-on changes the pandemic will undoubtedly bring about. We’ll need resilience, we’ll need innovation, we’ll need creativity and we’ll need to find new ways to help each other connect not only as businesses, but as people.