The Canright Content Method:
A Journalistic Approach to B2B Marketing Writing
When we take on a new project, our team follows five strategic steps to gain an understanding of your goals and what your business is about. The result is content that resonates with who you are and where you are taking your prospects and customers.
Step 1. Ideal State Action Plan (ISAP)
We use the ISAP to determine the ideal state you want to achieve. ISAP is a process of asking questions and categorizing answers as Ideal, Present, and Pathways. It leads to an overall understanding of your business, what you want to achieve, where you stand, and how to get to where you want to go. Questions include:
- What are your purpose, mission, vision, goals, and objectives?
- What do you do and how do you make money?
- Who are your customers/clients?
- Who is your competition?
- What are your internal processes and systems like?
- What do you like and don’t like about your present communications?
Step 2. Creative Brief
The purpose of the creative brief is to help find and define the essence of your brand and express it in terms that support B2B marketing writing. This helps us develop the “story” behind the brand, or why your company exists and how it benefits your clients. In the brief, we express what you want to accomplish through marketing and communications, including specific deliverables. Questions include:
- What do you want your prospects and clients to understand?
- How do you want them to react?
- Who is your primary and secondary target market?
- What type of messaging will most appeal to them?
Step 3. Content Marketing Plan
At this step, we look at what types of B2B marketing and technical content you need and are appropriate to meet your goals. If we’re working on a complete plan, we’ll shape it to best fit your goals and budget while delivering the highest possible impact. In many cases, we’re starting with a specific assignment. Even so, we look at the different ways we can use any given assignment across multiple channels:
- Articles and whitepapers
- Blog posts
- Email campaigns
- Product collateral
- Sales and educational presentations
- Social media
- Web pages
We also suggest topics. We look for compelling stories, with an eye toward making your services as personal as possible. Brands have personalities, and that’s what we want your content to reflect. We start to develop tone and voice as part of the plan.
Step 4. Copywriting
We take a journalistic approach to B2B marketing writing.
Our B2B marketing and technical content writing process starts with research. We want anything you have on a topic: PowerPoints, web pages, notes, whatever. We’ll also want a subject-matter expert to interview. We want to both understand the product and, especially, how it helps customers, what value it brings.
We are goal-oriented in our approach to writing copy and stories. We write with the purpose of the copy—the results you want to achieve—in mind.
Years ago, we learned that rewriting is the essence of writing. We deliver a draft, generally a week after the interview. You will review, and we will rewrite based on your comments. You can expect three drafts.
Step 5. Testing & Refinement
For marketing and sales communications, this step is especially critical. We run A/B tests of subject lines, email content, and landing pages. These tests, in turn, influence social media and web.
We run tests through a prospecting and email automation platform. We can also see blog performance through Google Analytics. We refine copy based on these tests. And then we test again.
RECENT WORK
FinTech: The New Core of Financial Services (Yodlee eBook)
RESOURCES
Canright Content Brief Template
INDUSTRY EXPERTISE
Digital Assets, Blockchain Technology, and Cryptocurrency
Manufacturing
B2B MARKETING WRITING CLIENTS
