Every marketer understands that content drives the digital marketing machine. But content production without a B2B content strategy is a good way to flush your precious resources into the void without seeing any return on investment.
The term “strategy” may seem too elusive to be helpful. But all a strategy is is an intentional plan of action. And it doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, it’s best if it’s not.
The best B2B content strategies are simple, clear, and direct. Here’s how to build one for your business.
Why Your B2B Content Strategy is Important
A strong B2B content strategy is important because it directly influences decision-makers at each step of the sales funnel.
B2B buying cycles are longer and more complex than B2C, typically involving multiple stakeholders and requiring in-depth research and justification before making decisions.
Your content must be ultra clear, precise, and targeted to effectively reach key stakeholders and answer their concerns quickly and effectively.
The results of a good B2B content strategy are well documented. A study by the Content Marketing Institute shows that 65% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented content strategy.
Furthermore, research by Semrush shows that 80% of companies that see extreme success in content marketing have a documented content strategy.
A B2B marketing strategy offers more clarity, precision, and overall success. There is no good reason not to have one. So, let’s explore the best practices for building yours.
Best Practices for Building B2B Content Strategies
Here are the best practices for building your B2B content strategy.
Content Planning
You’ll begin with content planning. This includes three non-negotiable components: audience research, competitor research, and clear goals.
Audience Research
Audience research is the cornerstone of all your content marketing efforts. If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, how do you expect them to find you?
Your strategy needs to begin with conducting thorough audience research.
Start with:
Google Analytics: Gather pivotal data about your potential customers on Google Analytics. Explore navigation paths, bounce rates, relevant keywords, and more.
Customer surveys: No resource is more valuable than feedback directly from your B2B buyers. Compile customer survey feedback concerns, insights, and wishes.
Chatbots: Chatbots gather data while they perform customer service. Learn where your target audience's pain points are and focus on how to solve them.
Foleon Analytics: Gather demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral data about your target audience with Foleon’s page-by-page engagement metrics.
Once you have gathered this research, start building your ideal customer buyer persona.
This is a profile of a fictitious potential customer who fits the demographics and behaviors of your real target audience.
Buyer personas allow you to address different audience segments by symbolizing the real people you are trying to reach.
For example, if your audience is global, you’ll need buyer personas for each geographic area you market to. You must understand the language, culture, currency, and more.
The concerns of a buyer in Berlin will be different from those in Mumbai, which will be different from those in London, and so on.
Understanding these unique pain points through a buyer persona will help you create targeted, helpful content for all your customer segments.
If you have multiple locations for your business, you’ll also need the ability to hire and manage payroll for your employees. Platforms like Remote offer a streamlined solution for onboarding and help you learn how to pay international contractors.
Don’t underestimate the value of a workforce who understands your target market.
Clear Goals
“Success” doesn’t mean very much if you don’t know where you’re starting from or going to. You can’t hit a target that doesn’t exist.
That’s why your B2B content strategy must have clear goals to define success.
Your goal can’t be something like “increase sales.”
Yes, that’s every marketer’s goal. But it isn’t specific. It isn’t measurable. And ultimately, it doesn’t tell you anything about growth.
An excellent way to set goals for your B2B content strategy is to use the SMART framework.
SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
For instance, take your ultimate goal of increasing sales.
To plug that into the SMART framework, your new goal becomes:
Increase sales by 15% by the end of Q3 by implementing a new CTA strategy on all blog posts.
Now you have a goal you can work with. It is:
Use this framework to clarify your B2B content strategy and how you will measure success. Then, clearly communicate your expectations to your team so there is no confusion.
Competitor Research
SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs give you an inside view of what your competitors are doing.
Plug a competitor's blog post or webpage into Ahrefs or SemRush and reverse engineer their strategy.
What keywords are they ranking for? Where are the keyword gaps you can fill? How do they structure their articles? What frequently asked questions are they answering? Are they giving actionable examples? How many?
Write down everything you see your competitors doing in their content and do it better.
Do they give 15 examples of a marketing technique? Give 50, including templates.
Do they give written step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish a goal? Make a video, a free mini-course, or long-form guides.
Content Development and Creation
Create Content for Each Funnel Stage
Lots of marketers hear “content” and think “blog.”
Good blog content is an important part of a sales funnel, but it’s only the first step.
As a refresher, the content marketing funnel contains three parts:
Top of Funnel Content: This is your blog. Top-of-funnel content is in the awareness stage when people are just becoming aware of your brand and who you are. Social media posts, product brochures, and ads also fall into this category.
Mid-Funnel Content: This is product-oriented content for when potential customers are in the consideration stage with your product. This includes educational videos, infographics, industry reports, white papers, case studies, etc.
Cloudbeds are killing it in the mid-funnel educational department. Their B2B content strategy includes podcasts, videos, webinars, e-books, and guides on their CRM software for hotels.
Bottom-Funnel Content: This is when potential buyers make the decision to buy. You’ll need customer success stories, testimonials, customer reviews, and other social proof to help people make the final purchasing decision in the decision stage.
You must have content at every stage of the funnel in your B2B content strategy,
It sounds overwhelming, but Foleon makes it easy. Use personalized templates and drag-and-drop professional designs into media-rich, interactive content in the format your target audience prefers.
You don’t need a designer or fancy bells and whistles—just you and the knowledge of your target audience.
Content Management
Multi or Omnichannel Distribution
Creating a strategy and producing relevant content is a huge first step. But it’s only half the battle.
To get the most out of your content, you have to distribute it thoughtfully.
The good news is one piece of content is easy to distribute on multiple channels.
Using video is a great strategy for creating content aimed at B2B audiences. It allows you to deliver the same information about a company that you would normally display on your website and across different channels but in a more engaging way.
OnBoard knows this, which is why its website is ready to present its board management software in both text and video, effectively highlighting how companies can easily create board meeting agendas, meeting minutes, and more with its software.
Data Tracking, Analysis, Iteration, and Experimentation
Now you’re rolling! You’ve built your B2B content strategy based on audience research. You’ve built different types of content for each stage of the funnel, and you have a plan for multi-channel content distribution.
Now’s the last part.
You must analyze content performance and make adjustments as you go.
If your content is not performing as it should, now’s the time for data-backed experimentation to get you on the right track.
Foleon’s analytics lets you drill down to precise engagement metrics for every page and asset in your funnel.
You get real-time insights fast that let you adjust your approach and experiment quickly without much guesswork.
Discover: 5 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
3 Top Strategies to Create Compelling Content
Here are three quick tips for writing more compelling content that offers your potential buyers more than a static webpage.
Create Interactive Content
Interactive content engages your audience more uniquely than static content.
Take, for example, the tea retailer Magic Hour. They offer a tea quiz for inquisitive people who want to find the best tea that fits their personal preferences.
This lets people engage with trying new types of tea and is a brilliant strategy for leading them into the sales funnel. It’s personal, interactive, and fun.
Foleon’s content solutions are an excellent way to build engaging content. We offer an extensive library of content templates for every use case and content type you can think of.
Plus, everything is fully customizable and consistent with your brand without having to add the extra layer of hiring a designer.
Leverage Cross-Department Collaboration
Any marketer who has ever managed a content pipeline understands the dozens of pieces involved and how easily things can fall through the cracks.
Eliminating silos improves the content creation process by putting all of the necessary tasks for smooth content operation in one place.
This is what Foleon does.
You can assign users to different workstations so they can see only the tasks relevant to them. Users can leave and answer comments, manage the pipeline, and empower all teams company-wide to create the content they need without putting it on the marketing team’s waitlist.
Ensure Brand Consistency
Keep your brand voice consistent in all your digital marketing efforts. For instance, if your brand is light and playful, don’t start posting dark or divisive memes on social channels or using sarcasm in your blog posts.
Foleon helps develop and protect your brand by giving you tools to engage your audience, showcase your expertise, and measure your impact all on one platform.
Final Thoughts
Compelling content starts with a data-backed strategy. Understand your audience by researching what matters to them. Next, get creative with how you are the solution to their problems. Build content across the sales funnel that reflects your solutions. Be sure to distribute your content across multiple channels and media formats.
Foleon is the all-in-one platform that will keep you organized, on-brand, and efficient throughout this process.
If you’re ready to take our B2B content strategy to the next level, book a demo with Foleon and see how we can help.
Author bio
Catalina Grigoriev is an incurable optimist with a bubbly personality. That’s what my colleagues say. Secret mission: cat lover disguised as a dog person. Ex-law student who switched into the digital marketing lane. Currently delving into the depths of SEO and content marketing at Planable.
