The Building Blocks of B2B Content Strategy: A Guide

Content, indeed, is king -  especially in the B2B industry. It’s a tested and proven tool to generate leads, establish your brand authority, develop customer trust, and increase brand awareness. When you have highly informative and educational content, your brand will be hard to forget.

The distribution of relevant and functional content in the form of emails, videos, social media posts, blogs, whitepapers, newspapers, and the like, to your current or prospective customers, is called content marketing. 

Gone are the days when marketers used cold-calling, door-to-door salesman, and uninspiring and uncreative ads to “push” information in your customers’ faces. With the new wave of marketing and sales strategies that take place on digital platforms, businesses, and consumers now can find all the data they need to make purchasing decisions on the Internet.

The goal of content marketing is to create website content about your products and services that your audience will find, trust, gain knowledge on your expertise, and help them decide to make a transaction with your salespeople. 

The creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content (according to Kristina Halvorson, founder/CEO of Brain Traffic), is called content strategy. It pertains to the plan where you use written, audio, and/or visual content to fulfill your business goals. 

Content creation usually revolves around something that interests the creator. It’s not the same, however, in the B2B context. Regardless of the format, B2B content has nothing to do with interests. The ultimate goal should be to provide content that draws in a company's ideal customers by identifying their pain points and addressing them using your solutions.

Check out this Guide to Customer Pain Points

An effective content strategy will draw in your target market at every level of the sales funnel and keep them interested even after they make a purchase.

Related Reading: Lead Generation Sales Funnel: A Guide for Startup Companies

In this guide, we present you everything you need to know about content strategy and how to make an effective one.

Content Strategy: FAQs and facts

Q: Do I really need to develop a content marketing strategy? 

A: It’s a resounding YES!

According to research by Content Marketing Institute, you don’t just need a strategy, you also have to document it. A company with documented content marketing strategy:

• Is far more likely to believe that its content marketing efforts are successful.
• Believes that they’re more efficient in their usage of social media channels and other content marketing strategies.
• Can justify spending a larger portion of their marketing budget on content marketing.
• Considers all aspects of content marketing to be substantially less challenging.

Q: What are the elements of a powerful content marketing strategy? 

A:  A content marketing strategy should possess the following core elements in order to succeed:

Audience Personas

You can’t tell your brand’s story if you don’t know who you’re telling your story to, so the first step you should take is to identify the target audience you’re trying to reach. You can do this by:

• Researching market trends
• Keeping an eye on who your competitors' targets are
• Surveying your current clients
• Identifying who you are and aren’t targeting

Positioning Your Brand and Story

A well-defined brand and product positioning can help you provide your audience a consistent experience and create the right image across all your content marketing channels.

• These questions can help you formulate your market positioning:
• Who are my current and future clients, and what are their objectives?
• What is my brand’s distinct value?
• Who are my main competitors, and how do they promote their products?
• What issues does my product help solve?
• What makes it a better option than my competitors?

You can create your brand story using the data you gathered using these questions. Your brand story is a summary of your company’s mission, values, purpose, and history. It may help you choose the best direction for your content marketing strategy, as well as identify the right topics and messaging for your content. 

Owned Media Value Proposition and Mission Statement

To position your brand as a reliable content publisher, you need to have a defined owned media value proposition. Owned media pertains to the digital marketing channels a company governs, such as social media and branded websites. Improving owned media efforts optimizes the performance of paid and earned media for your online business. 

These are some examples of owned media:

• Social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. All other social media activities like shares, retweets, and comments fall under the earned media category.
• Email marketing campaigns such as brand story emails, video emails, company newsletters, digital magazines, and event invitations.

• Blogs and other channels that you own and edit yourself.  Among the factors you can consider when defining your value proposition are the unique values you can provide for your audience, what differentiates you from your competitors, and why should readers follow your channels.

One more important thing to include in your strategy is your content marketing mission statement, which should indicate why you’re creating content and who can benefit from it.

Your mission statement should mention the target audience, their goals, and how your content can help them reach those.

Business Case and Content Marketing Goals

A business without a goal is like driving a car without a fixed destination-it’s directionless and a waste of time and resources. Identifying your business goals and strategizing how your content can help you achieve those goals helps you create the right content your company needs. It also helps you estimate your resources and determine the results you want to generate,

Moreover, a well-documented business case can help you know the benefits, expenses, and risks of establishing a content marketing strategy and convince decision-makers of its worth.

Action Plan

 Behind every successful marketing venture is a well-laid content plan. You can start by listing your projects and campaigns and strategizing how they can help you achieve your content marketing goals.

Q: Does all of my content need to be original?

A: Yes AND No.

While your content needs to be consistent, you can make the process easier by repurposing content. It means creating content in one format and modifying it for another. For example, you can write a series of evergreen blogs about a relevant industry-centered topic. You can edit this series to create a downloadable eBook or chunk important content into digestible pieces and convert them into infographics, video reels, webinars, and podcasts.

Repurposing your content saves effort and time, and enables you to reach a wider audience, given that data can be consumed in various ways. 

Q: Do keywords matter?

A: Search engine algorithms are designed to pick up high-quality information and content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) pertains to how sites like Bing and Google locate your content, how it helps prospects become aware of your brand, and how your website and info work compared to other sites. 

Consumers today rely on keyword research to help them decide which products to buy. To know more about their product preferences, they usually type in queries in search engines. Keyword research involves finding and evaluating search terms that people type into search engines for specific purposes, often for general marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

Here’s what you should consider In deciding what keywords to use:

Authority - Google provides more weight to sources it considers authoritative, so in order to become an authoritative source, you need to nourish your site with informative, helpful, and engaging content to earn backlinks and social signals.

Volume - You may rank on the first page for a particular keyword, but it will not result in website traffic if no one searches for it. It’s like setting up a shop in an abandoned town- your goods may be excellent but it’s useless since no one visits and buys from it.

Relevance - Google ranks content according to relevance. In this sense, your content will rank for a keyword if meets the needs of your searchers. To rank high in the results, your content must be the best resource for the query.

Q: Should I use social media in sharing my content?

A: YES!

Sharing your content is a must if you want to increase your online reach and visibility. Every time you press that share button, you increase the chances of people seeing it and engaging with it. Regularly sharing high-quality content raises your website’s authority and trust ratings with search engines.

How do you develop a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

Creating an efficient B2B content marketing strategy is challenging. You might have the best content and the optimal channels to convey your messages, but it’d be useless if they’re directed to the wrong audiences. To succeed in the content B2B lead generation process there’s one question you need to answer: “Who are your customers?”

In this section, we'll show you how to develop a solid content marketing strategy and reap the many rewards of B2B content marketing.

1. Develop a strong B2B content marketing strategy by doing research

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail- this saying holds true, especially in the marketing industry. One can never underestimate the power of research and planning in determining your business’s success, especially when it comes to content strategy.

Here are some guide questions you can use for your research:

• What content types do your target audience usually consume?
• What are your target audience’s wants and needs?
• What B2B content marketing aspects do your competitors lack?
• What do your competitors post?

If you feel new and inexperienced in B2B content marketing, it’s a best practice to tap into the efforts of trusted B2B lead generation service providers. Their expertise can help you tailor the right content that’ll draw leads to your site.

2. Create high-quality content

Struggling to create engaging content that delivers results? We specialize in connecting you with the right audience for measurable sales growth. Contact us now.

Unclear, uninteresting, and bland content won’t attract any leads. The quality of content is of utmost importance in the B2B sector since you’re dealing with businesses that have extensive industry know-how. 

These businesses only consume content they find valuable. So regardless of the number of businesses you successfully attract, most will still shy away from you if you have low-quality content. 

To avoid wasting leads to mediocre content, B2B marketers like you should always create up-to-date, relevant, unique, and beneficial content. A variation of content types can help capture and hold your audience’s attention. This may come in the form of blogs, eBooks, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and more.

3. Don’t just write to promote your products or services

One huge mistake most content marketers make is writing solely to sell. Bear in mind that content marketing isn’t just all about sales and profit, it’s about generating content that can inform and educate your potential customers and their businesses. This way, you can better establish rapport and build a trusting relationship between your brand and your prospects.

4. Keep a content calendar

A content calendar provides you with a way to organize and schedule your social media and website postings. It includes what content you will share, and when and where you’ll share it. 

It helps you avoid looming over the question “What should we post next?” Pre-planned posts help save time and effort. While impromptu postings serve other businesses well, it’s not an excuse for poor content. Creating a content calendar helps teams think about what content to create and allot more time for researching, organizing, and keeping track of what efforts work well or not.

5. Pay for promotions

Paid content promotion involves paying for media placement or space. It allows your marketing campaigns to reach a wider audience and assess whether your content works and resonates with your target audience. 

By targeting the right audience, maximizing audience reach, and increasing brand visibility, paid promotions make your content strategy measurable and easier to track and maintain.

Final thoughts

Establishing a successful content marketing strategy takes a lot of planning, time, and innovativeness-right from building your content marketing plan’s foundation to combining your efforts with tools and techniques to maximize your strategy’s potential. 

The future of content marketing is faced with boundless possibilities, given the continuous growth of digital media. Setting up a dynamic content marketing strategy won’t be much of a hassle if you follow and understand the concepts explored in this blog. 

Implementing a content strategy is just the start. Our team can support your marketing efforts to ensure sustained lead generation and sales success. Request Pricing.