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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.

The most valuable B2B content is closely aligned with the strategy of your business. Your marketing strategy helps bridge the gap between the two. But there’s a subtle art to translating a marketing strategy into a strong content plan.

To get some expert advice on how to do that, we recently sat down with Irene Triendl, one of the smartest marketing and content strategists we know. In Irene’s own words, she helps B2B companies figure out what to say, to whom, and in what order.

Here’s a quick look at our conversation.

Radix: Hi Irene, great to speak to you again! If marketers are creating content plans from scratch, where should they begin?

Irene: It might seem a bit obvious, but the first thing you’ll need if you want to deliver great B2B marketing content is a clearly defined marketing strategy.

You’d think that’s a given, but in a lot of technology businesses, there’s little trust placed in marketing teams. Technical decision-makers may want to sign everything off themselves, and, while they might have an idea of the kind of marketing strategy they should pursue, this is often only in their minds – not shared with the marketing team. Naturally, that’s a major hindrance to marketers’ effectiveness and ability to deliver great results.

With no strategy, everything you do will be ad hoc and in response to short-term needs. That pushes you into a loop of continuous firefighting, so major overarching goals like creating awareness or driving demand for specific solutions go unaccomplished.

Radix: So, if a marketing strategy is incomplete or non-existent, what should marketers make sure they clarify before they build a content plan?

Irene: Frustratingly, it’s often the most important elements of a marketing strategy that go overlooked or under-defined. It’s all too common to find that strategies don’t clearly define marketing goals, target audiences, or common objections and blockers, for example. Why people don’t buy is at least as important as why they do.

Value propositions are another area with a lot of room for improvement. Leaders often define them from a product perspective, but don’t explain why a customer should care. If your value propositions talk about you or your products more than what you do for customers, something has gone wrong.

If any of those things aren’t immediately obvious and available to you as a marketer, you’ll need to ask the right questions to establish them before you jump into building a content plan.

Radix: Once a marketer has finally got all of that defined, what comes next? How does their content plan start to take shape?

Irene: Your marketing strategy lays out what you want to achieve. So, the first thing you need to do is work out exactly how content can help you achieve that. For example, if your goal is for decision-makers in your target industry to recognise your name, your content might be a highly visual, targeted brand campaign; if the goal is to build authority, it might be a series of in-depth blog posts co-authored with subject-matter experts from your business.

Next, you’ll need to do some prioritising. If you’re starting from scratch, it’s worth focusing your efforts and budget on content that tells your core story in a clear and consistent way before you move onto more trend-based content, or content that speaks to just one of your audiences. Get your foundation in place and then build around that.

With a clear view of how content can help you achieve your marketing goals, and a prioritised list of the initial content you need to tell your core story, you’ve already got the makings of an effective and actionable content plan.

Radix: Content plans must vary a lot between teams and organisations. How can a marketer tell whether theirs is ‘correct’?

Irene: As you say, what’s right for one organisation won’t necessarily be right for another. But invariably, the best and most effective content plans are clearly mapped to marketing and business strategies, make it clear how they’ll deliver value, and are realistically deliverable with your budget and resources.

Radix: Obviously you’ve got a lot of experience creating content plans that meet those criteria. Do you have any top tips to share with our readers to help them do the same?

Irene: Sure, I think I’ve probably got a few to share.

Number one, if things feel overwhelming, break them down into manageable chunks. Starting from scratch is a daunting prospect, but you really can start very small. Just focus on telling your most important stories – things like who you’re for, the problems you solve, and how your approach is different – in ways that support your biggest goals and take things step by step.

Number two, make the most of the expertise in your business to make sure you’re going to the right people with the right messages in the right way. Build relationships with key SMEs early, and use content to build their profile in your industry. If you do that well, you can turn them into valuable advocates for your content and wider marketing plans.

And finally, it’s also important to connect your work to business results and think about how you’ll define and measure success. And don’t forget to celebrate your successes loudly to make sure people understand the value you’re delivering, so you can maintain buy-in for your content efforts.

 

Also in the series

We spoke to Stephanie Wisdom about how to keep your B2B content fresh, agile and focused on what really matters – your customers. Read the Expert Q and A with Stephanie.

 

2024 was transformational for Radix, and not always in ways that we wanted. We entered 2025 with new clients, new services, and new momentum, but also with a significantly smaller team.

Even as we tried to roll with the punches and learn all the lessons – agency friends, please don’t underestimate how many obstacles an acquisition can put between your favourite clients and their ability to give you work – we were pushing forward with a long overdue project:

Refreshing the Radix brand.

Living both these stories at the same time has often been a jarring experience.

Workshops. Font shops. Pulling out the stops.

Taken in isolation, everything about the rebrand was a joy.

We asked the amazing Laura Stripp to shepherd us towards a new visual identity. We imagined ourselves as hummingbirds, corkscrews, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s marvel of organic architecture, Falling Water. We shopped for the perfect typeface.

Lewis Davis then developed a completely new, much more elegantly appointed website, designed by Laura to bring her vision for our brand identity to life – and to the public.

The simple need for new copy also drove us to reconsider our core proposition. We found we could voice, more clearly than ever, what the brilliant B2B marketers in the technology companies and agencies we support really value about our copywriting and content strategy services.

It was thrilling to see Radix’s future rapidly coming to life.

The dissonance creeps in

But when I stepped out of our visual identity workshops and looked at the emails in my inbox, I found myself suddenly back in that other narrative: the story of a company making incredibly difficult decisions to weather unusually challenging times.

It’s hard to explain how those of us who led the rebrand felt, and the dissonance of striving to rearticulate our business’s identity, even as we lost some of the people who had, for a long time, helped to make Radix, Radix.

While we knew we were doing genuinely vital work, devoting our energy to a project that wouldn’t bear fruit for many months sometimes felt like a luxury. There was just so much that needed our attention in the here and now.

Branding as a matter of death and life

Today, almost halfway through 2025, my feelings have changed.

For me, and I believe, for the rest of our team, the challenges we had to overcome last year have made this rebrand much more meaningful.

So often, overhauling your visual identity and web presence is about giving a fresh lick of paint to a decades-old machine. For us, it became about giving the correct shape to something genuinely exciting and new.

Radix, reincarnated, is much closer to the Radix we imagined in our branding workshops.

We’re more agile and industrious. More perfectly designed to perform our explicit function. More seamlessly and sustainably attuned to our surroundings.

We’re a hummingbird, carrying a corkscrew, through a modern woodland home.

USPs? Oh, let us tell you about our USPs…

New Radix is even more endlessly tried-and-tested than the much-loved pair of hiking boots that were mentioned in our branding workshops.

Right now, all but one of our writers have over eight years’ B2B tech writing experience. The other has almost four, and frankly, can go toe-to-toe with the industry’s best. It’s a powerhouse writing team that still offers the capacity, flexibility, and industry expertise to help our clients achieve their content ambitions.

The freedom to shape our destiny

There’s one other thing I need to mention.

We’ve been able to choose the kind of business we are – one that prioritises sustainability, provides progressive benefits, and focuses on excellence – because we’re employee-owned. I believe the fact that we all have a say in our agency’s future allows us to respond to challenging times and bounce back even stronger, like few other companies can.

If you’re reading this and want to know more about what employee ownership means, reach out. I’m always happy to evangelize.

Radix is dead. Long live Radix.

Thanks for reading. If you want to see what a lovely job Laura and Lewis have done, have a look around. And if you want to create amazing B2B tech marketing content – just get in touch.