Content is the cornerstone of successful B2B marketing. And you can’t deliver high-quality content consistently without a well-developed and thoroughly documented content strategy.
Whether you’re a startup or an established enterprise, having a clear content strategy is crucial for attracting, engaging, and retaining your target audience. A robust B2B content strategy will generate leads, nurture them through the sales funnel, and ultimately drive conversions and revenue.
Over several years, the Content Marketing Institute’s annual B2B report has found a direct correlation between a documented strategy and success in content marketing. This has been acknowledged by the industry, and the number of content marketers who record their strategy is increasing. But many fall short in strategy-development because of short term focus, over ambition, and the lack of a holistic vision.
Why you need a content strategy template
There is a lot that goes into creating an effective content marketing strategy. And if you create your B2B content marketing strategy without a definite structure, you can easily overlook vital elements. A comprehensive content strategy template will ensure that everything is considered.
In this article, we detail all the steps to creating an effective B2B content strategy and provide you with the template that you need to deliver content that will resonate with all segments of your audience and drive sustained business success.
Step 1: Outline your objectives
It’s essential to define your content marketing objectives at the outset. Ask yourself, “What do we want to achieve with our content strategy?”.
Growing brand awareness, generating website traffic, creating leads, converting existing leads, and establishing thought leadership are all common goals. But, no matter what your organization’s goal is, it must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Once you have defined your goals, you need to decide how you’re going to evaluate your performance. This means choosing your KPI metrics. Impressions, engagement rate, brand sentiment, audience growth, bounce rate, new leads, and conversion rate are just a few of the many KPIs used to measure content marketing success.
Step 2: Define your audience
All effective content strategies rely on understanding your target audience. This means creating in-depth buyer personas.
In B2B marketing, it’s best to set aside demographic criteria like age and gender and build audience personas based on the Jobs to Be Done theory (JTBD). This more practical approach seeks to gain an understanding based on what needs to be achieved. It considers job roles, industry, interests, level of experience, specific pain points, broader challenges, and goals.
If you have several audience personas, you need to detail each one individually.
Once you have defined your audience personas, you can begin to conduct thorough market research, analyse customer data, and gather insights from sales and customer service teams to identify the topics, formats, and channels that resonate most with each persona.
Step 3: Evaluate your existing content
Conduct a content gap analysis by mapping out the questions, goals, and concerns that arise during your customers’ purchase journeys and comparing them with your existing content to find holes.
A thorough content gap analysis goes beyond looking at just your website content and considers social media content, in-app messages, email topics, and paid ads.
Alongside this, you should assess the performance of your current content in terms of engagement, traffic, and conversions.
Together, these processes will identify gaps, outdated or irrelevant content, and high-performance areas. This will inform future content by providing insights into what’s working well, where you need to add new content, and which pieces of existing content need to be amended to align with your strategic objectives.
Step 4: Create a content calendar
Now that you understand your objectives, audience, and existing content, you can start putting together your content calendar. Every month or so, you’ll need to devise your upcoming publication schedule.
This should outline the key themes, topics, and messaging pillars that you want to cover. This provides a framework that guides content creators when they come to ideate and ensures that you don’t ignore the needs of any segments of your audience.
Within your content calendar, you need to define the release format for each publication. Whether it’s blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, videos, webinars, podcasts, or something else, choose the mix of formats that best convey your message and meet the needs of your audience at each stage of the buying journey.
As well as guiding what should be published, your content calendar will also set expectations around when it will be published. This is crucial to maintaining momentum within the content creation team and a balance in when you address each theme/audience area.
Distribution channels should also be included in your content calendar. Depending on your goals, budget, formats, and audience preference, you’ll need to determine how each piece of content is going to be promoted for maximum reach and engagement.
Step 5: Produce impactful content
With your calendar in place, it’s time to create compelling, high-quality content that educates, entertains, and engages your target audience.
There are several things you can do to ensure your content hits the mark:
- Leverage data, industry insights, and expert opinions to add credibility and authority to your content.
- Ensure consistency in tone, style, and branding across all your content assets to reinforce your identity and messaging.
- Incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) best practices into your content creation process to maximizing visibility and organic traffic.
- Conduct keyword research to identify relevant keywords and phrases that your audience is searching for.
- Optimize your content titles, headings, meta descriptions, and body copy with targeted keywords to improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Focus on creating valuable, user-friendly content that satisfies search intent and provides a seamless browsing experience across devices.
Step 6: Analyse content performance
It’s crucial to track and measure your KPI metrics regularly to evaluate the effectiveness of your B2B content strategy.
You’ll need to set up analytics tools and use them to monitor performance across all your distribution channels, looking at topics, formats, and audience segments individually and together to identify what’s working well and where there are areas for improvement.
To ensure consistency in reporting, it’s a good idea to define a review process and schedule. Ideally, this process should involve a discussion with the content creation team.
Based on analysis and discussion of data, you can continuously refine your content strategy to drive better business outcomes. This means reviewing channel success and tweaking focus and spend accordingly, choosing pieces of content to continually promote organically or through paid advertising, finding areas for improvement in live materials, and determining areas of focus for future content.
To ensure that you have as much valuable data as possible for optimizing future content, you should A/B test elements such as headlines, calls-to-action, and visuals.
Elevate your B2B content today
Building an effective B2B content strategy requires a lot of careful planning. But, with a robust strategy template, you can ensure that everything is covered.
Download our B2B content strategy template to start on the road to successful marketing execution HERE
Want to find out more about Isoline’s expertise in building effective B2B content strategies (and producing content)? Get in touch at hello@isolinecomms.com
