With an ROI of 300% on every dollar spent, content is one of the most favored marketing strategies for B2B. Why? Because it drives higher audience engagement, boosts brand awareness, and costs 62% less than traditional marketing.
However, it is not as simple as including a few keywords or publishing content several times a week. Instead, you need to plan a goal-oriented b2b content marketing strategy that aligns with your overall marketing objectives and brings the desired results.
Let’s jump right in!
Why Do You Need a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?
What makes B2B content marketing truly unique is its ability to target your key accounts accurately and generate higher leads. When it comes to B2B marketing, any purchase isn’t based on impulse.
It is a thoroughly calculated decision that involves numerous stakeholders who mostly rely on content to gain information and gather solutions to their pain points. Your content not only needs to be valuable and actionable, but it needs to speak to the ultimate decision-makers.
And this is where your well-planned strategy comes in to give your content a purpose. With a robust plan in place, you can ensure that the following elements of your B2B content marketing strategy are working well together.
- Involvement of sales, product, and customer success team along with marketing to better understand the target audience and what will work for them
- Alignment between the content and pain points of the target audience
- Regular tracking of marketing goals and key KPIs
- Constant feedback from the sales team and target audience to measure content engagement and relevance
Given how 48% of marketing leaders consider content marketing as an essential means for quality pipeline generation, it’s time you also focus on a winning B2B content marketing strategy.
B2B Content Marketing Best Practices- Creating a Successful Strategy
1. Set Measurable Goals
Every effective marketing strategy begins with well-defined SMART goals. Simply put, they have to be specific goals to be achieved in a period of time. They must be quantifiable to help you measure your success easily.
For instance, perhaps your goal is to gain 5000 new website visitors at the end of 3 months. Or maybe you want to generate 100 new leads with your content marketing efforts in the coming six months. Most of all, communicate these goals with other teams to ensure everyone is on the same page and works towards achieving the objectives.
2. Identify Your Ideal Customer
Before creating content, understand who you’re creating for. Identify your ideal customer profile and build buyer personas to target your content. Here, it is critical to connect with your sales and customer success teams – they are the ones with the best insights into what these prospects really want.
Besides, building buyer personas for your B2B content marketing strategy is a crucial step as-
- It helps you create tailored content that accurately targets your prospects’ needs and motivations
- It provides a solid basis for your sales and marketing strategies
- The precise knowledge of who your targeted buyers are, helps get everyone on the same page – your marketing and sales efforts become more streamlined
3. Map the Buyer’s Journey
B2B buyers go through most of their purchase journey through online research without the help of a salesperson. Obviously, content is the hero here. But knowing what your prospects are searching for and on which channel is key to an effective B2B content marketing strategy. This is where marketing needs to map the buyer’s journey.
The reasons for mapping your buyer’s journey are twofold. One, it helps align your content with the challenges at each stage of the journey- awareness, consideration, and decision. Two, it can drive your sales process as you will know where each prospect is in the journey.
So how is it helpful? Aligning your sales process with the buyer’s journey means you can create more relevant and specifically targeted content that generates higher demand.
Bonus Read: 5 Critical Actions to Simplify Demand Generation
4. Plan Your Content
Up next, you need to diversify your content marketing strategy by picking various content types and suitable content channels to target your audience where they are.
A successful content plan includes-
- Targeting the right keywords to ensure it reaches the right people at the right time
- Implementing a robust SEO strategy to make your content easy to find and drives higher traffic to the website
- Experimenting with a range of content formats, including blogs, videos, eBooks, infographics, podcasts, and more
- Creating multi-layered content. Combining text with visuals is an excellent way to engage the audience, as visual content is known to bring 75% higher ROI to marketers
- Adopting a multi-channel distribution approach. This means being present wherever your prospects are, be it via email, website, or social media
5. Analyze the Competition
In order to stand out from the competition in your niche, you need to know about them first. Because they are most probably targeting the same audience as you are. Undertake competitor intelligence to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Look at the keywords they are targeting and what efforts make them successful. And what is your USP that sets your company apart? Analyze their content strategy to optimize yours and drive home better results.
6. Measure the Results
Measuring the results is a critical yet one of the most challenging aspects of a B2B content marketing strategy. In fact, only 55% of B2B companies measure the ROI of their content efforts. However, tracking key metrics is the only way to know if your strategy has been successful.
Go back to your goals and track the Key Performance Indicators you were targeting. Once you know what’s working, you can double your efforts and reach your goals effectively.
Final Words
Creating an effective B2B content marketing strategy isn’t a one-time job. It is an ever-evolving process, one that needs all teams in the organization to be on the same page. And a part of this is to document your content strategy. This way, everyone has a clear picture of the goals to achieve and how you plan to engage with the audience.
