Expert Q&A: Shikha Saxena on planning for B2B content success

Planning is a huge part of B2B content marketers’ lives. So, when we began creating the planning section of our B2B content marketing handbook, we reached out to one of the best to help us gather some expert insight.

Shikha Saxena is Head of Marketing and Communications at Globant UK. During her career, she’s planned and executed countless high-impact content projects on time and under budget – some of them in partnership with Radix.

To find out how other B2B content marketers can follow in her footsteps and gather a few best practices for our checklist, we sat down for a quick chat.

Radix: Hi Shikha! First things first, how far ahead do you typically plan your content?

Shikha: One of the biggest challenges of creating great content in the B2B technology world is that things are constantly evolving. What’s relevant for your audience one week could feel stale and dated the next. So, it really doesn’t pay to make detailed plans looking too far into the future.

The pace of B2B marketing changed a lot during the pandemic. Now, with technologies like AI evolving at speed, there’s a significant shift in the market every few weeks. So, we don’t plan our content much further than one quarter in advance. If we looked any further ahead than that, we’d run a real risk of our ideas being irrelevant once they’re published.

But even with a relatively short period of time between planning and execution, you still can’t afford to step away from your content plan. At the very least, you need to revisit it every 4-6 weeks and make sure things still sit right, and adapt things as you go to optimise them.

Radix: So, what makes a great content concept for you? Is it just a matter of being timely and audience relevant?

Shikha: When we talk about making sure the content you plan and publish is relevant, we don’t just mean relevant to your audience’s interests. It also needs to be relevant to your business and aligned with your current objectives.

Content was a soft asset five years ago. But now, all of your decisions need to be justified in terms of ROI. Budgets are tight, and budget holders want continuous reassurance that what you create is having a tangible impact on the business and driving the right outcomes.

So, the key to planning concepts that work is tracking and understanding what delivers the right results. You might not get everything spot-on first time, but as long as you’re tracking the right performance metrics, you can identify what resonates with your audience, demonstrate how that translates into ROI, and continuously improve your content.

Radix: How can B2B marketers gain a better understanding of what their customers want from them, and translate that insight into their content plans?

Shikha: B2B marketers don’t operate on the frontlines. It’s all too easy to keep planning content based on assumptions about your audience, without having any real connection to them or confidence that you understand what they really need from you today.

Marketers need to make the most of the data available to them to stay close to customers. If you can see which pages they’re visiting and which content they’re engaging with, you can draw meaningful conclusions about what they’re currently interested in.

Keeping your content aligned with what your audience truly cares about is essential. It’s easy to get dazed by new trends and technologies, so you end up writing about them at length. But there’s no guarantee that your audience really cares about those trends until they show you they do.

Radix: Let’s say you’ve planned and launched a great piece of content. What comes next? Is it just on to the next planning phase?

Shikha: The constant cycle of B2B content planning and delivery often means that teams quickly move from one project to the next. By the time something’s published, chances are your head is already well into the next batch of projects. But if you move on too quickly, you could be missing some very valuable opportunities.

Once a good piece of content is launched and starts generating great results, it can’t be forgotten. Instead, you must amplify it and maximise its value.

That’s the perfect opportunity to revisit your content plan. Instead of jumping into the next thing, rework your plan around amplifying and promoting your high-performing content. Get as many eyes on it as possible, boost its impact, and use its results to secure buy-in for your next big content idea.

You’ve got to keep things mapped to your business objectives and sales goals. When a piece of content demonstrably contributes to them, amplify it to boost your results. Then work out why that piece worked and plan more of it.

Radix: Do you have any advice for marketers just getting started in B2B content planning?

Shikha: First, don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo. Things have been done a certain way for a long time in B2B, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way. Your fresh perspective has value.

However, you should always back your thinking with data. Data helps you understand what’s working and what you should plan more of, and prove the efficacy of your plans to budget holders. If you don’t have access to performance data, do some testing to establish what works.

So try new things, and if they don’t work, just take that as valuable data to inform your future plans.

It’s also important to build strong social capital within your company. The best content will often come from ideas held by SMEs. Connect with those people, build strong relationships, and ensure that when they have good ideas, you’re there to translate them into your content plan.

There’s a lot more where that came from

We hope you find Shikha’s insights as valuable as we did, and that they help you start building stronger B2B content plans today. But remember, solid content plans start with a clear and complete marketing strategy. You can learn more about that, and how to translate marketing strategies into content plans in our expert Q+A article with Irene Triendl.