Impactful marketing needs solid foundations

A reliable diagnostic is to remove your company name and logo from your homepage copy and ask: could this belong to a competitor? If the answer is yes, the messaging isn't working hard enough. The problem is rarely that the business lacks genuine differentiators – it's that those differentiators haven't been surfaced and articulated clearly.

The fix involves 3 things:

• Structured discovery process: To identify what genuinely sets the business apart from the buyer's perspective (not the internal team's)
• Clear value proposition: That connects what the business does to the specific outcomes the audience cares about
• Messaging and tone of voice guidelines: That give everyone a shared reference point. Without this, even strong messaging tends to drift within 6 months.

There’s clear value in taking a structured approach like this. For example, Gunning Marketing worked with Nordcloud, a European leader in cloud migration and managed services, to develop the messaging and content foundation alongside a new 65-page website and series of content-driven campaigns. In the first year, the marketing function exceeded its revenue generation target by 138% and contributed to a 100:1 return on marketing investment (against a 10:1 industry average). Read the case study here.

The value proposition development process starts with understanding the competitive landscape – not just what competitors say they do, but the gaps in how they position themselves and the unmet needs they're not addressing. That analysis identifies where there's genuine white space to resonate with the target audience(s).

Then, the value proposition is built around the benefits and outcomes relevant to the specific audience segments where the business has the greatest growth opportunities. Effectiveness comes through focus – trying to be everything to everyone is where generic messaging comes from.

Gunning Marketing worked with Crescent People – a business psychology and organisational development consultancy – on value proposition development at a growth stage where sharper positioning was essential. Director Meghan Bell described the result as: 'I could have tried for years and still not got here, but you've captured everything I had in my head and it's so clear and compelling. It really has been a gamechanger for my business.' Read the case study here.

The most effective B2B content strategies start by delving into the audience and their decision-making process before touching content formats or channels. Understanding the specific questions, concerns, and information needs at each stage of their journey – from first awareness of a problem through to vendor selection – determines what content will move the dial.

A common structural approach is hub-and-spoke: a substantial piece of content (a guide, report, or whitepaper) that addresses a significant audience question comprehensively, surrounded by supporting content that explores specific aspects in more depth, adapted for different channels and buyer journey stages. This approach maximises the return on content investment by creating multiple assets from related inputs rather than producing each piece from scratch.

A content strategy should also include an audit of what content already exists in the organisation. Often, a significant proportion of what most B2B companies need can be achieved through strategic reorientation and repurposing of existing assets – case studies, presentations, sales materials, technical documentation – rather than wholly net-new production. Identifying those quick wins before commissioning new content is both more efficient and often faster to results.

Gunning Marketing has built and executed content strategies for a wide range of businesses including Nordcloud, Tivoli, Husky Finance, and The Language Grid – in each case starting with a structured discovery process before determining the optimal content plan.

The guidelines themselves need to go beyond describing the voice personality and into specific choices: sentence length, use of jargon, how to handle technical detail, what to do with numbers, when first person is appropriate. The more specific the guidance, the less interpretation is required, and the more consistent the output.

Examples are often more powerful than rules. A before-and-after showing how the same information reads in a generic register versus the brand voice, or a set of annotated real examples with notes on what's working and why, gives writers a target to aim at that's more useful than a list of principles.

For teams using AI tools to support content production, the guidelines also need to be structured for how an agent retrieves and applies information, not just how a person reads a document. Gunning Marketing has built tone of voice and content foundations specifically for AI-assisted content workflows – including for Nordcloud, where a custom Copilot agent now produces on-brand drafts across the marketing team with only minor editing required. Web Developer Rafal Kubacki described the result as content that 'has made the process faster, more consistent and easier to scale.'

Prioritise hub assets that generate multiple outputs. A well-researched guide or report can produce a series of blog posts, a set of social media content, an email series, and supporting sales collateral from the same research and writing investment. Designing content with this in mind from the outset dramatically extends the return on each piece.

External content support doesn't have to mean outsourcing everything. A retained content partner who operates as an extension of the team – handling the high-skill, high-value production while the internal team focuses on stakeholder management, approval, and distribution – is often a more efficient model than trying to scale an internal team for peaks of demand that won't sustain a permanent headcount. Gunning Marketing has worked this way with Engage Hub for 8 years. Marketing Manager Marcela Mielnicka described the relationship as: ‘An exceptional ability to turn even the poorest or most limited briefings into outstanding content – always on time and often exceeding expectations. I cannot imagine fulfilling my role as effectively without the ongoing support.' Read the Engage Hub case study here.

Here’s how to position the business case within each of those arguments:

• Cost of the status quo: What is the business losing as a result of unclear or undifferentiated positioning? Longer sales cycles, lower win rates, over-reliance on founder relationships, inability to scale marketing beyond referrals – these are relatable costs that strategy investment addresses directly.
• Evidence from comparable businesses: Case studies and metrics from organisations in similar positions, before and after a strategy investment. Nordcloud's 100:1 return on marketing investment in the first year following a new strategy and website overhaul is the kind of figure that reframes the conversation from cost to investment.
• The compounding ROI: A well-built brand and content strategy has a shelf life. The value proposition, messaging framework, and tone of voice guidelines created today will reduce campaign lead times, improve quality, and accelerate onboarding of new team members and agency partners in 3 years' time.

65% of B2B marketers say content relevance/quality was the primary driver in increasing their effectiveness over the last 12 months, according to the CMI. The question for the business case isn't whether strategy investment pays – the data is consistent on this. The question is whether the current approach is producing that quality at the scale the business needs.