Do you want to learn how to create a content marketing strategy for B2B business? We’re bringing you the 7 steps to create a successful Content Marketing Strategy.
Whether you’re just getting started with content marketing or have been using the same strategy for a while, it’s always a good idea to revisit your content marketing strategy plan to make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers, regardless of when or how they intend to buy.
How do you create a content marketing strategy for B2B?
Short answer: in seven steps, in this order: set a goal you can check, decide who you are talking to, plan what you will publish, make it, make it findable, distribute it deliberately, then look at what happened and adjust. Most teams start at step four, making content, and wonder later why none of it moved anything.
The seven steps at a glance
| Step | What it produces |
|---|---|
| 1. Define goals | A number you will be judged on |
| 2. Target audience | The person you are writing for, named |
| 3. Content plan | Topics, formats and a cadence you can hold |
| 4. Create content | The work itself |
| 5. Optimise for SEO | Pages that can be found without you paying |
| 6. Distribution | Readers, instead of a published archive |
| 7. Analyse and adapt | The next quarter’s plan, based on evidence |
Each step is broken down below.
In this article, we’ll look at what content marketing strategy for B2B is, why your company needs one, and how to create a successful one.
We’ll also discuss seven steps that will get you on the right path towards success!
Let’s dive in.
What is Content Marketing Strategy for B2B?
A content strategy is one that takes your company’s goals and uses content as the main means of achieving those goals.
For example, one of your business goals might be to increase brand awareness (and thus revenue) — to accomplish this, you might utilize an SEO-focused content marketing strategy to boost your website’s visibility in the SERPs and drive visitors to your products or services.
New business owners might assume a content marketing strategy for B2B is not necessary, but that’s far from the truth. Producing high-quality content to meet your customer’s needs can help you build trust with new audiences and succeed in the long run.
A successful content marketing strategy is, in essence, the cornerstone of your attract and delight stages in the buyer’s journey. You can also use a content marketing strategy for sales enablement and overall customer satisfaction in addition to recruiting new prospects to your business.
Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy for B2B
Business needs a content marketing strategy to attract the right people, educate them on the benefits of using their product, convert them into customers, and keep them as customers.
Also, a content marketing strategy will help you move potential customers down the sales funnel and keep them.
However, keep in mind, making content for the sake of making content can be a costly and time-consuming mistake.
Knowing your strategy before you start creating content will help your company develop more relevant content, which leads to higher ROI for your content marketing efforts.
Think about this.
If you can write just one blog post that will get consistent organic traffic, an embedded link to an e-book, or a free tool, it will keep generating leads for you long after you hit Publish. Doesn’t this sound good?
Your evergreen content will provide a consistent source of traffic and leads, allowing you to experiment with different revenue-generating strategies such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content.
Furthermore, your content will not only help in attracting leads, but it will also help in educating your target prospects and raising brand awareness.
7 Steps to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy for B2B
Here are 7 steps to create a successful content marketing strategy:
1. Define Goals
Before you start planning, it is important to define goals.
How will you know if your content marketing is successful without a clear goal in mind?
A Content Marketing Strategy’s goals can be business-related, such as increasing revenue, marginal returns, or profits.
Specific goals can include increasing the conversion rate or increasing the time spent on the page.
The Content Marketing Strategy for B2B can also be based on general marketing and online marketing goals such as brand awareness and online visibility.
An important goal is also to develop unique selling points through content. That’s because, to stand out from the competition, it is essential that your content represents what makes you different.
You should be able to show off how your company and products are unique and have advantages over competitors’ offerings in everything you create for potential customers.
Your goal should be “S.M.A.R.T”, which means:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Action-oriented
- Realistic
- Time-sensitive
Only “smart” goals can lead to long-term success.
2. Target audience
The internet is a global communication medium that reaches several billion people. It’s obvious that appealing to all users isn’t possible.
Only by understanding who the content is meant for can you produce effective and successful content. That’s why it’s essential to understand and identify your target audience.
This way you will be able to produce relevant content that ranks well, allowing your brand to be seen in search engines.
The more thoroughly you analyze and segment your target audience, and use their needs and segment specs as the foundation for your Content Marketing Strategy, the more successful your content marketing will be.
Do you, for example, know which devices your readers use? Have you looked at the most popular search terms or social media topics?
These and other elements of target group segments provide a solid foundation for developing relevant content for your audience.
You don’t have to stick to a single target group: Target groups can complement one another depending on your goal.
You can appeal to the main target audience as well as multiple sub-target groups with your content. Personas should represent your defined target groups in order for you to better adjust the content. Writing for a single, defined person is much easier than writing for a broad, impersonal group.
Here are some tools that can help you recognize and define the target group.
Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, for example, can provide you with a wealth of data. Customer surveys generate useful information that can be generated via email, in person, or over the phone with a little more effort but a lot of precision.
3. Develop a Content Plan
Now that you’ve set clear goals and identified your target audience It’s time to put your research into action.
To begin, think about the latest trends and what kind of content your target audience responds to.
Is your audience more interested in long-form content? Do they frequently share videos with each other? Do they participate in social activities?
These are just a few questions to consider while analyzing audience trends.
Another thing you should do when developing a content plan is creating an editorial calendar.
Keeping track of how and when content is published is easy with an editorial calendar.
You can schedule a series of posts ahead of time using content scheduling apps, and they’ll go up on specified times and days.
Careful monitoring will demonstrate how well your content marketing strategy is achieving your goals.
When it comes to planning your editorial calendar, timing is everything.
Important events, such as conferences, holidays, and sales, should be included because they provide opportunities for content creation. Even if it isn’t part of your overall content marketing strategy, it still offers a larger and more diverse range of content.
Once you have your data, you can create your content any way you like. You aren’t limited to one type of content though, you can generate a wide range of content depending on your goals.
4. Create content
Every day, tens of thousands of blog posts, images, and videos are published. It can be difficult to develop a unique voice and authentic content.
However, keep this in mind: The content goal is to attract and keep your audience’s attention. Even if you want to choose topics that have never been covered before, finding a new perspective on old ones is enough. Perhaps you could adapt it to fit your company’s needs and display it.
Remember: You should always aim for value and consistency.
At first, you’ll have so many great ideas that you’ll want to share them all.
However, rather than flooding the web with countless blog and social media posts, it is better to establish a pace and focus on providing value to followers.
Take a blog for example.
You might start by publishing bi-weekly blog posts, which is OK because you’ll have 24 pieces of content by the end of the year. Remember, these pieces will last a long time, so there’s no need to rush.
Adding mediocre posts to your content marketing strategy for B2B won’t get you very far, and you’ll ultimately run out of ideas.
Reframing and recycling existing material can help you prevent this.
Articles can always be turned into guides and ebooks, and videos can be turned into courses and series. As a result, you’ll be able to better divide your content and provide more value with less effort.
The topic of content creation deserves its own blog post, but for the purposes of your strategy, you should make sure that every piece of content is properly developed by someone who specializes in the content type you’re using.
Press releases, for example, should be written by copywriters, and infographics should be created by designers.
Regardless of who generates your content, you should spend enough time writing headlines, since they will have a significant impact on the campaign’s success.
Your content should also be created in accordance with your marketing strategy.
So, if you’re trying to establish yourself as an industry authority, the types of content you create should all be directed towards that goal.
5. Optimize Content for SEO
Most people find what they are looking for on the first page of results when doing a google search. As a result, it should be self-evident that you should optimize your content for SEO. Your target audience will almost certainly never find your content if you don’t do so.
Sites that use a decent SEO strategy, on the other hand, will see an increase in content reach and visibility in search engines. SEO increases the visibility of your material to those seeking solutions to their questions.
Keywords also influence your content search ranking, so think about the words and phrases a customer would use. Consider your audience’s knowledge of the topic, their interests, and the popularity of the keywords. When identifying the most relevant keywords, reading the content of competitors might also be helpful.
High search volume keywords are often used by hundreds or thousands of websites, so avoid over saturating your content with the same words.
When choosing keywords, strike a balance between high and low search volumes. It’s also a good idea to employ related keywords so you don’t end up repeating yourself in your writing.
If you’re having trouble coming up with the right keywords, a keyword research tool can help.
You can, though, do your research using Google. Google’s auto-suggest tool will start showing popular searches as soon as you start typing. This can assist you in narrowing down your options.
When it comes to publishing your content on target websites, even if you’ve published a good content piece, you may need to do some housekeeping to guarantee that you get all of the SEO credit.
Many people may publish your work without including any links back to your website.
This may be accomplished by setting up Google Alerts to notify you whenever your blog title or company name is mentioned. You can also track social media mentions using social listening tools.
After you’ve created a list of websites that have published your content, examine each one to see if they’ve included a link to your site. If you created the content, you are undoubtedly deserving the credit.
If you come across a website that wasn’t linked back to you, simply send them an email or a message requesting that they do so. Most people will be happy to do so if they have previously used your work.
6. Distribution
One of the most common issues with content marketing is that once a piece of content is created, it might remain in peaceful isolation on the website where it is posted.
Because distribution is so important, make sure you build up a clear path for individuals who want to engage with your content.
To do this, analyze your current routes to market and identify any weak spots.
Can you make use of social media, the press, or current visitors? Can you get the help of industry experts to distribute your content through their own networks? Could you contact the data’s authors and ask them to promote it?
The work isn’t done when you click “Publish”.
You must devote the same amount of time and effort to distribute the content as you did to create it.
Consider who you want to read your content and where these people are most likely to be.
You should also think about the image you want to portray.
For example, if you want to increase your authority as a tech thought leader, you should target major tech publications rather than smaller, less authoritative websites.
7. Analyze and adapt
The key to sticking with a content marketing strategy for B2B is to keep it up to date and adapt it on a regular basis.
Select and track KPIs for different content types.
Always check to see if the content is accomplishing its goals. If it isn’t, you may need to make some changes to your strategy.
As previously stated, having certain basic ideas over a longer length of time is recommended, but don’t go too far. Because trends vary and your company adapts, making set ideas for three months is enough.
If you plan a year ahead of time and those topics become irrelevant, it will not only harm your brand and engagement, but it will also decrease your motivation to create more. So, give yourself some flexibility and don’t treat your content marketing strategy as a set-in-stone plan.
Summary
There are many factors to consider if you want to take your content marketing strategy for B2B to the next level.
Always keep your overall marketing and company goals in mind, and make sure that everything you do, from concept to distribution, is in line with them.
Set up internal processes to make the process go more smoothly and to ensure that everyone on your team can contribute to the success of your future content.
FAQ: B2B content marketing strategy
How long does it take to see results?
Search results take six to nine months to compound. Distribution results start the week you publish. That is why step six is not optional: it is what keeps the programme alive while the search side is still building.
What is the difference between a content plan and a content strategy?
The plan is the calendar. The strategy is the reasoning behind it: who you serve, what you want to be known for, and what you are deliberately not covering. A calendar without that reasoning is a schedule for producing noise.
Can a small team do this without a content agency?
Yes, if one person owns it and the subject expertise is in house. What small teams usually outsource well is production and editing. What they should never outsource is the point of view, because that is the only part competitors cannot copy.
How do we tie content to revenue?
Ask new pipeline how they found you and record the answer, alongside the analytics. Self-reported attribution is imperfect but it catches the influence that last-click reporting throws away, and in B2B that influence is most of the story.
Related reading: Content marketing strategy for B2B SaaS, How to create a B2B content distribution plan, How to report on content marketing efforts.
This article is from the Funky Marketing blog archive. The work continues at Funky Enterprises: positioning, demand generation and commercial systems for B2B companies.
If you want to look at your own commercial system, book a 30-minute needs assessment. New conversations with people who build revenue are on the Funky Enterprises Show.
