In today’s competitive B2B landscape, having a documented B2B Content Marketing Strategy is more critical than ever. Studies show that 62% of the most successful B2B content marketers have a documented strategy, compared to only 16% of the least successful. A comprehensive, audience-centric content strategy aligns your content efforts with business goals, keeps your team focused, and enables you to measure success.
Developing an effective B2B content strategy requires several key elements:
- Setting clear, measurable goals tied to business objectives
- Deeply understanding your target audience’s needs and preferences
- Auditing existing content to identify gaps and opportunities
- Creating a content calendar to plan and execute purposefully
- Distributing content on the right channels to reach your audience
- Analyzing performance data to optimize your content over time
Consider these compelling B2B content marketing statistics:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates 3 times as many leads
- 70% of B2B buyers say they consumed blog content before purchasing in the last 12 months
- 95% of B2B buyers view content as a trustworthy marker when evaluating a business
As we head into 2024, B2B marketers are doubling down on content. The Content Marketing Institute found that 66% of B2B marketers expect their 2024 content budgets to increase over 2023. Marketers need a solid content strategy to make the most of that investment. Let’s walk through the essential components.
Measurable Content Marketing Goals
One of the most common mistakes B2B marketers make is creating content without a concrete goal. To avoid falling into the trap of producing content for content’s sake, start your strategy by defining measurable objectives that ladder up to key business priorities like generating leads, enabling sales, or increasing revenue.
Align Goals with Business Objectives
Every content strategy must start with well-defined goals. Your content goals should directly support overarching business objectives like increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or enabling sales.
Use the SMART Goal Framework
The best way to set practical content marketing goals is to use the SMART framework. SMART goals are:
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve
- Measurable: Assign metrics to track progress
- Attainable: Ensure the goal is realistic given your resources
- Relevant: Align the goal with business priorities
- Time-bound: Specify when the goal should be achieved
Examples of SMART Content Goals
- Increase organic website traffic from our blog content by 25% by the end of Q4 2024
- Generate 50 marketing-qualified monthly leads from gated content assets like ebooks and webinars.
- Improve our average email newsletter click-through rate to 5% by the end of 2024
Putting your goals in a structured format using a template like this SMART Content Marketing Goals Worksheet can help:
[SMART Content Marketing Goals Worksheet Template]
- Goal:
- Specific:
- Measurable:
- Attainable:
- Relevant:
- Time-Bound:
Defining concrete goals upfront gives clarity and purpose to your content efforts. Everything you create should ladder up to one of these SMART goals.
Research Your Target Audience
Many B2B brands make the mistake of assuming they already know their audience inside and out. However, customers’ needs and behaviours constantly evolve, especially in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
That’s why regularly researching your target audience should be a cornerstone of your content strategy. You can ensure your content consistently hits the mark by gathering fresh insights through customer interviews, website analytics, and industry reports.
Develop Detailed Buyer Personas
To create resonated content, you need an in-depth understanding of your target audience. What challenges are they facing? What information do they need? Where do they spend time online?
Researching your audience allows you to develop detailed buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. Effective personas go beyond basic demographic data to capture psychographic attributes like pain points, goals, and content preferences.
Gather Audience Insights
Some ways to gather audience insights for your personas:
- Interview current customers and prospects
- Survey your email list or social media followers
- Analyze website behaviour in Google Analytics
- Conduct social listening to understand how your audience talks about your topics
- Talk to your sales team about common questions and objections they hear
Use Persona Templates
Organize your research into a persona template like this one from HubSpot:
[HubSpot Buyer Persona Template]
- Persona Name:
- Job Title:
- Demographics:
- Goals:
- Challenges:
- How We Help:
- Content Preferences:
- Objections:
- Real Quotes:
Develop at least 1-2 detailed personas for your key audience segments. Then, use these personas to inform everything from the topics you cover to the formats and channels you focus on.
Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey
To maximize the impact of your content investment, it’s essential to take an audience-centric approach. This means going beyond just producing loads of content to being hyper-focused on creating pieces that directly address your buyers’ questions, concerns, and information needs at each stage of their journey.
Understand the B2B Buyer’s Journey Stages
A critical aspect of effective B2B content marketing is ensuring you have content that meets your audience’s needs at each stage of their buying process. The typical B2B buyer’s journey has three main stages:
- Awareness: The buyer realizes they have a problem that needs to be solved. They are doing educational research to understand and give a name to their problem more clearly. Content should focus on the buyer’s pain points, not your product.
- Consideration: The buyer has clearly defined their problem and is committed to researching and understanding all available approaches/methods to solving it. Content should educate them about the various solutions and help them evaluate the pros and cons of each.
- Decision: The buyer has decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. Their solution strategy compiles a list of available vendors and products. Content should convince them that your product is the best choice.
Create Content for Each Stage
You need content assets that address each stage to create a comprehensive content strategy. Here are some common content types for each stage:
Top of Funnel (Awareness)
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Infographics
- Educational videos
Middle of Funnel (Consideration)
- Ebooks
- Webinars
- Case studies
- Product comparisons
Bottom of Funnel (Decision)
- Demos
- Free trials
- Customer testimonials
- ROI calculators
By mapping your content to specific buyer journey stages, you can more effectively nurture prospects and guide them toward a purchase decision.
Conduct a Content Audit & Ideation
Content audits are the secret weapon for developing a focused, impactful content strategy. By taking inventory of your existing assets and assessing their performance, you can pinpoint which types of content resonate most with your audience and which areas need a fresh approach.
Audit Existing Content
Before creating new content, take stock of your existing assets. A content audit will reveal what’s working well, where you have gaps, and which pieces need to be refreshed or retired.
Some critical for an effective content audit:
- Inventory all existing content in a spreadsheet, including critical metrics like pageviews, average time on page, bounce rate, social shares, and backlinks.
- Identify your top-performing pieces to understand what resonates with your audience. Look for common themes and formats to replicate.
- Assess which content is underperforming or outdated. Refresh this content with new information and optimize it for search engines.
- To spot gaps, map content to critical stages of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision).
- Brainstorm new content ideas to fill topic gaps, building off of what’s worked well in the past. Aim for content that provides unique insights your audience can’t find elsewhere.
Use Content Gap Analysis Tools
Tools like Ahrefs’ Content Gap feature can help identify topics your competitors are ranking for that you’re missing. For example, when Ahrefs ran their blog through the content gap tool, they found dozens of relevant keywords their competitors covered that they still needed to, sparking new content ideas.
Document Your Audit & Ideas
Capture your audit findings and content ideas in a template like this one:
- Content Title/Topic:
- Content-Type:
- Buyer Journey Stage:
- Target Keyword(s):
- Audit Notes:
- Action (Keep, Refresh, Remove, Create New):
Conducting a comprehensive audit ensures your content strategy is data-driven and focused on your audience’s needs. It also helps you prioritize which content to create or update first for maximum impact.
Create a Content Calendar
While content ideation and creation spark creativity, a content calendar introduces the structure and accountability needed to execute that creativity into a results-driven content marketing machine. It transforms your vision into an actionable, measurable plan.
Plan Content in Advance
With your goals set, audience defined, and content ideas generated, it’s time to build an editorial calendar. A content calendar helps you:
- Plan out content creation and publishing in advance
- Visualize your content mix across formats and channels
- Align content to critical dates and campaigns
- Keep your team organized and accountable
Consider Content Mix & SEO
When building your calendar, consider:
- Publishing frequency: How often will you post new content? Be realistic about your team’s bandwidth.
- Content mix: Include a variety of formats like blog posts, videos, infographics, case studies, and podcasts to appeal to different learning preferences.
- SEO optimization: Incorporate target keywords and optimize titles, meta descriptions, and header tags to improve search rankings. Build SEO best practices into your content creation process.
- Distribution channels: Specify where each piece of content will be promoted (website, email, social media, paid ads, etc.)
- Repurposing opportunities: Identify ways to repurpose content into multiple assets. For example, pull quotes from a webinar into social media posts.
Use Editorial Calendar Templates
Many tools are available to help build and manage an editorial calendar, from simple spreadsheets to robust content marketing platforms. The key is finding a system that works for your team’s workflow.
Here’s an example of a content calendar template in Google Sheets you can customize:
- Publish Date:
- Author:
- Topic/Headline:
- Target Keyword(s):
- Content Format:
- Funnel Stage:
- Distribution Channels:
- Notes:
Social media scheduling tool Buffer uses a content calendar to plan out social posts across channels a month in advance. This enables them to maintain a consistent publishing cadence, balance content types, and align posts with critical dates and events.
Distribute and Promote Content
The content creation process doesn’t end when you hit publish. That’s just the first step. To truly tap into the full potential of your content marketing efforts, you need to focus on strategic content distribution and promotion tactics that get your assets in front of the right audiences.
Use Multichannel Distribution
Creating quality content is only half the battle. You also need a plan to get that content in front of your target audience. A multichannel distribution and promotion strategy will maximize the reach and impact of your content.
Some effective organic content distribution tactics:
- Share on your owned channels: Post content on your website/blog, email newsletter, and social media profiles. Optimize posts for each channel, adapting copy, visuals, and CTAs.
- Email content to relevant segments: Notify your email list when you publish new content that matches their interests. Segment your list by persona, industry, or funnel stage for more targeted outreach.
- Promote in relevant online communities: Share content in LinkedIn Groups, Slack communities, and industry forums where your audience is active. Add value to the conversation; don’t just drop links.
- Encourage employee advocacy: Make sharing company content on their social profiles easy for your team. Employee-shared content gets 8x more engagement than content shared on brand channels.
Invest in Paid Promotion
In addition to organic promotion, consider paid tactics for high-priority content assets:
- Boost top-performing organic social posts to a lookalike audience
- Run paid search ads on Google for competitive commercial keywords
- Promote gated content offers on LinkedIn with lead-generation ads
- Sponsor newsletter ads or podcast spots to reach new audiences
Learn from Top B2B Brands
Customer messaging platform Intercom takes a multichannel approach to promoting major content campaigns. When they launched their 2022 Customer Support Trends Report, they announced it via email, social media, paid ads, and their website. This enabled them to drive downloads from various sources.
Analyze and Optimize Content Performance
Creating high-quality, engaging content is only half the battle in real life; you must measure its performance and consistently optimize it based on accurate data. By taking an analytical approach to understanding what content resonates best with your audience, you can refine your strategy to maximize results.
Track Key Content Metrics
Finally, you must measure performance and optimize based on data to improve your content strategy continually. Some key content marketing metrics to track:
- Traffic: Unique pageviews, average time on page, bounce rate, traffic source
- Engagement: Social media likes/shares, comments, email click-through rates
- Lead Generation: Content downloads, email signups, contact form submissions
- SEO: Keyword rankings, organic traffic, backlinks
- Revenue: Assisted conversions, sales pipeline influenced, closed-won deals
Use Google Analytics, social media analytics, and your CRM to track these KPIs. Create a content marketing dashboard with a high-level view of performance against your SMART goals.
A/B Test and Optimize
To optimize content, A/B test elements like headlines, visuals, and CTAs. Use heat mapping tools to see how users interact with your content and identify opportunities to improve the experience.
Also, pay attention to top-performing topics and formats. Double down on what’s working well. For example, Groove, a help desk software company, used data to optimize its blog strategy. They found in-depth, actionable posts that generated the most organic traffic and leads. So, they shifted their editorial calendar to focus on more long-form content.
Use Content Dashboards
Here’s a template for a content marketing dashboard in Google Data Studio you can use to track performance:
[Content Marketing Dashboard Template]
- Metric 1: New vs Return User
- Metric 2: Avg Views per session
- Metric 3: etc
- Metric 4: etc
Final Thoughts & Recap
The data shows that content marketing will be a crucial differentiator for B2B brands in 2024. But to stand out in a crowded market, you need a documented strategy.
By setting SMART goals, understanding your audience, mapping content to the buyer’s journey, auditing your content, planning purposefully, distributing widely, and optimizing continuously, you can maximize the impact of your content efforts.
Reiterate Key 2024 Content Trends
Some of the most essential content trends to prioritize in your 2024 strategy:
- Audience-centricity: Align content to your buyer’s unique needs at each stage of their journey
- Multichannel distribution: Promote content across a variety of channels to maximize reach
- Data-driven optimization: Use analytics to refine your content strategy based on performance insights continually
- Repurposing: Get more mileage out of your best content by repurposing it into multiple formats
Remember, a successful B2B content strategy is never “set it and forget it.” It requires ongoing planning, execution, measurement, and optimization to achieve your goals. But when done well, content marketing can be one of your most effective tools for building brand awareness, trust, and revenue.