In 1859, the poet Emily Dickinson wrote that “success is counted sweetest by those who never succeeded”, and over 160 years later these words still ring true. In the world of B2B content marketing, the “nectar” Dickinson speaks of could easily be construed as the impressions, clicks and ROI we marketers all so crave.
If you haven’t tasted the sweet returns a successful B2B content marketing strategy can bring, don’t stop reading. In this comprehensive guide, we offer up the secrets to success so your B2B leads will be drawn to you like bees to nectar – starting with the foundational knowledge you need to build a solid campaign.
Guide anatomy:
- What is a content marketing strategy (and why you need it)
- Benefits of building a B2B content strategy
- Key ingredients of a solid content marketing strategy
- Where to start with your campaigns
- 8 Best practices for B2B content marketing
- Conclusion
What is a content marketing strategy (and why do you need it for B2B)?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty parts, we need to rewind a bit. What is a content marketing strategy? And do you need one for B2B? These are both good questions, but let’s tackle them one by one.
What do we mean by content marketing strategy?
When we talk about content marketing in digital marketing, we’re talking about the strategic approach to producing and distributing consistently high-quality, relevant and authoritative content to draw in and retain a highly specific audience, or segment of that audience.
A content marketing strategy encompasses the tactics, methods and guidelines that help achieve your business goals – and ultimately, through CTAs, drive profitable customer engagement.
Do you need a B2B content strategy for success?
Well, the stats speak for themselves. A recent study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute found that 73% of B2B marketers leverage content marketing as a part of their overall marketing strategy.
Not only do the most successful businesses implement content marketing as a major part of their B2B digital marketing efforts, but the top performers provided a consistent experience across their customers’ journey and spent most of the time building loyalty with their existing customers.
Translation: it’s time to jump on the B2B content marketing train to bolster your client loyalty and snatch up warm leads.
4 benefits of building a B2B content marketing strategy
We’ve briefly hinted at the benefits of crafting a well-thought-out content strategy for B2B, but it can’t hurt to reiterate: the most successful B2B marketers focus on both building relationships with new prospects and existing clients, which in turn leads to strong retention and continual growth. Here are just a few other benefits to mull over.
1. Elevate your ROI
Content marketing is important to B2B businesses as it is an effective way to enhance and deliver a high return on investment (ROI). This is in part because content marketing is a relatively low-cost approach.
Some of the most popular types of B2B content produced by content marketing teams are blog posts, short and long-form videos, case studies, webinars and podcasts – all of which are possible to create using free or inexpensive tools.
2. Give your business SEO a boost
Content marketing and SEO are inseparable – you can’t really have one without the other. B2B content strategies will incorporate inbound marketing techniques that pull leads into your orbit organically. As you gain audience attention by providing genuine value, there will be more incentive for users to stick around, and as they do your impressions and clicks will increase steadily along with your page rankings.
3. Create evergreen content
One of the many merits of B2B content marketing is that you can gear towards creating and disseminating evergreen content. That is, content without an expiration date on its value. Evergreen content, whether a handy infographic or a deep-dive style blog, will continually funnel users towards your website and services.
Unlike say a product announcement or news piece, this type of content remains beneficial to your audiences over time and can be continually improved to add further value or adapt to industry trends. If you select a topic that remains of perennial interest to searchers, you can offer well-informed and original content to position yourself as an authoritative thought leader.
It won’t be long before you start generating social media shares and organic backlinks as audiences jump to share the insights they’ve learnt.
4. Establish your brand as an industry leader
A powerful B2B content marketing strategy will position your brand as both a trustworthy source of information and an innovative voice that cuts through the noise. To do this you need to craft the right content at the right time to sway your audience as quickly as possible, and this might involve anticipating a growing trend or finding a specific angle to your subject that others have neglected.
The key ingredients of a solid B2B content strategy
What are the top-performing content marketers doing that other companies are missing out on? Well, for a start, they all incorporate the following elements into their campaigns.
- High levels of engagement – quality content will drive feedback loops in terms of engagement measurement, comments, surveys and community discussion.
- Competitor research – outperforming your competitors by conducting a keyword gap analysis.
- Advanced audience insights – aligning content with refined audience insights and analytics.
- Thought leadership – you will stand out in the B2B field as a specialist in your niche.
- Innovation – a strong campaign will produce unique and intriguing content.
- Benchmarking – tracking objectives and monthly, quarterly or weekly KPI check-ins.
What truly makes a content marketing strategy impactful is the capability to understand and target audiences directly and in their own language, producing leads in a cost-effective way for your business. Simultaneously, you want the greatest reach and the sharpest audience targeting along with the smallest expenditure, or at least, the healthiest expenditure for your budget.
Where to start with your B2B content marketing journey
For those yet to embark on the B2B content marketing journey, it can be difficult to know where to start and the best ways to begin the planning process.
Each content marketing strategy will be unique to the business, audiences and situation at hand. In fact, it may vary drastically between companies and indeed audience segments – for example, email campaigns for existing clients and potential customers will demonstrate different tones and focus on different stages of the buyer’s journey.
However, if you heed our key ingredients and best practices you’re bound to start off on the right foot. Typically, when building a content marketing strategy from the ground up, you will follow these steps:
Step 1 – Research your audience
Detailed, accurate and tailored audience research is the cornerstone of any successful campaign. In fact, SEMrush’s 2023 content marketing report found that it was the number one factor for success, so if there’s any step that you should do carefully, it’s this one!
Create buyer personas – research-based profiles of your ideal customers – for each segment of your audience. In B2B, these are often called ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and allow businesses to better understand their motivations, pain points, wants, desires and overall perspectives. With these at hand and crystallised in your mind, you can then implement SEO and other digital marketing techniques to get the ball rolling with lead generation.
Step 2 – Select the right marketing channels and formats
The next step is to find the main content formats and channels that will align with your buyer personas. What channels do they use and what sort of content are they most receptive to?
As we’ve mentioned previously on this blog, the primary channels used by marketers in the B2B sphere are SEO, PPC and content marketing via blogs, email newsletters, podcasts and social media, so use these as a springboard. Check out that post on B2B marketing channels for more of a deep dive.
Step 3 – Find your topic niche with content pillars
With your audience understanding refined and channels selected, it’s time to think about content creation. You’ll want a depository of repeatable long-form and short-form content formats across a variety of topics and subtopics that fit into an overarching content funnel. This means content that covers each step of the buyer’s journey – brand awareness, consideration and decision-making – and guides them along this route.
If you feel stuck for inspiration there are many ways to generate content and get your mojo back:
- Ask your audience what they want and need directly.
- See what other industry leaders are talking about.
- Conduct keyword research to see what your audience is searching for.
- Conduct a content audit to see in which areas you perform the best.
- Create a set of content pillars to keep things consistent and stave off creative burnout.
Step 4 – Work on your content workflows
While producing the content is important, so is your process for doing so. Ideally, it should be timely, repeatable and seamless for all involved.
Typically, the workflow should start from a content calendar, then move onto the briefing stages, before content is created and published. The most effective teams will make this a collaborative process to encourage a profusion of ideas and high-level quality control.
Step 5 – Get creating
This step is self-explanatory: with all the research and preparation out of the way, you can get cracking at the content writing. There are many techniques for content writing, so make sure to find the method that works best for you.
Step 6 – Measure your success
Previously, we said that benchmarking is one of the ingredients to success – and here’s why. Marketing without metrics is like working in the dark; without those important insights, you will have no way of knowing which elements of your campaign are producing results or holding you back.
You’ll want to crunch the numbers with the following metrics:
Current metrics:
- Total impressions on your recent content
- Total clicks on your recent content
- Click-through-rates of your recent content
- Social media shares
Benchmarks and trends:
- Compare current read time with the previous 3-6 months
- Compare current bounce rate with the previous 3-6 months
- Compare current active mail list subscribers with the previous 3-6 months
Highest-performing posts
- Pinpoint the top 20 posts with the most views
- Pinpoint the top 20 posts with the highest read time
- Pinpoint the top 20 posts with the most conversions
Step 7 – Learn, rinse and repeat!
With the knowledge you’ve gleaned from the rest of the process, you can repeat these steps for each of your audience segments and get better every time.
8 best practices from WebHummel’s B2B hive
Before we conclude this guide to B2B content marketing strategy, here are some final words of wisdom that will make the process that little bit easier.
1. Create multi-layered content
We’ve discussed the importance of picking the right content formats, but these don’t have to be completely separate. After all, a block of text alone isn’t going to convince users to stay longer on your site. Using a combination of text, images and an embedded video on a blog post, for example, will drive longer read times and reduce bounce rates.
2. Refine your digital marketing plan
In B2B, getting the logistics of your campaign right is crucial. This means following a tight and well-documented digital marketing plan, so everyone on the team can stay on the same page. Cast your mind back to the key ingredients we talked about earlier – you will want to include each of these concisely, so your objectives remain in sight at all times.
3. Automation station
It’s time to pull into the automation station – if you haven’t already taken measures to optimise your content creation process, listen up. You can shave plenty of time off the overall process by using tools to automate elements of your overall procedure.
For example, you might want to use a CMS for your content calendar, a social media scheduler or workflow tools such as Asana for your review process. Of course, they will add to the initial cost, but that is a lot of time recouped for you to create more quality content!
4. Transform content efficacy with storytelling
Storytelling in B2B makes a brand authentic to its audience. Typically it shows up in content or brand marketing when a business is relating its brand origin story or sharing customer experiences, but it goes much further than that.
Storytelling is a wonderful (albeit overlooked) tactic to align brands and their buyer personas. A powerful narrative will connect and relate audiences to wider concerns, themes and points of view. Often users will find that they care deeply about things they didn’t even know they cared about.
5. Collaboration begets results
There’s no need to go it alone, and when it comes to content marketing it couldn’t be more true. Make sure you have someone to bounce ideas back off and share the content load, whether that’s within your team or an external contractor.
6. Opt for a mixture of traditional, analogue and digital channels
Another pitfall that B2B marketers can sometimes make is overlooking the more traditional channels. In the digital marketing space, we often see specialists evangelising the power of the internet and organic reach – while, yes, digital marketing is powerful AF – analogue marketing has its place too. Whether that’s giving a talk at a networking event or running an in-person seminar, these physical connections can be particularly authentic, and very advantageous later down the line.
7. Exploit the biggest B2B social platforms (LinkedIn)
If you haven’t optimised your business LinkedIn page for search or made use of its expansive networks of local business groups, this is your cue to get started. As one of the most popular social media platforms among B2B companies, it’s both a wonderful place to attract new customers and learn from the best in the game.
8. Don’t bite off more than you can chew
If you’ve got this far and you feel that building a high-quality content marketing campaign will take more time than you or your team can spare, don’t sweat it. The solution may lie in outsourcing the load to the experts.
At WebHummel, we’ve cultivated powerful ‘bee-to-bee’ strategies with proven results and a backbone of years of industry expertise. If that sounds like we’re pouring honey into your ears, please get in touch to learn more about our services.
Conclusion: time to pollinate those B2B leads!
Now you have the knowledge to go forth and perfect your own B2B content marketing strategy, it’s time to pollinate those B2B leads with our best practices for quality content.
You won’t be able to hit all of these points in one go, nor should you. Building your content strategy is like building a skyscraper: it will take time, expertise and meticulous planning before you tower above the rest. Consider which tactics your team can realistically implement and invest in the tools to achieve your objectives.
For more B2B advice and content marketing expertise, check out the rest of beefound.agency’s knowledge hive.
