Every day I talk to B2B business leaders whose content strategy is based on guesswork. They primarily create content based on what they think might be helpful for prospects and existing customers and then they just hope that it performs well. They often don’t have a set process for creating content, and they aren’t entirely sure what kinds of results to expect from it or how to even measure its success.
When that strategy fails, they ask questions like, “How do I know what kind of content to create?” and “Who should my content be targeting?” So, today I’m answering those questions and more as I discuss how to create great B2B content that achieves business goals! This B2B content playbook is meant to serve as a general guide for organizations that want to create the kind of content that generates leads, closes deals, and keeps customers happy.
Hopefully, you will find the information provided here valuable enough that you’ll share it within your organization and with your colleagues. If you have any questions as you’re going through it, please reach out to us and we would be glad to discuss your specific business goals and challenges. Let’s get started!
Understanding Your Goals
The first step when creating a B2B content strategy is to define your goals, because if you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t know what you need to do to get there.
The type of content you create, for whom, and how you deliver it will all depend on what your goals are. So, before you start creating anything or making a plan, determine whether the goal of that content is to create brand awareness, improve your brand reputation, build relationships to drive sales, strengthen relationships to increase retention, or something else entirely. Then, use that purpose as a framework to guide every content decision you make!
Focusing on a Specific Audience
You can’t create content for everyone, which means you’ll need to prioritize creating content for a certain audience (or a few key audiences). Your main target audience should be your ideal buyer. However, when creating content with your ideal buyer in mind, you may also need to consider other stakeholders associated with that buyer like a board of advisors or management team that plays a part in the buying process as well.
To really know who you’re creating content for you need to understand your buyer’s journey – where they’re coming from, what they’re looking for, how they make purchasing decisions, and what’s most important to them in the process. This is important because some B2B organizations do a lot of referral business, so they will need to strongly consider their referral partners when creating a content strategy. The same can be true for business coming through industry associations or directories.
Remember, the revenue goal is to sell more of your best products to your best customers!
So, how do you identify your ideal buyer? Creating your ideal client persona is a matter of figuring out:
- What your most profitable products/services are
- Who the most profitable buyers of those products/services are
- Who the decision-makers are in those purchase decisions
The people identified in step three are who you should be creating content for!
Aligning Content with their Buying Journey
Now that you know who to prioritize when creating content, how can you know what they want and need? The key is to align your content with their buying journey by:
- Addressing their pain points with a solution
- Giving them the high-level resources they need during the early research stage
- Offering more specialized content to answer their subsequent questions
- Helping them to identify the right product/service for their needs
- Providing the kind of support they need to convert
To do this well you must thoroughly understand their buying process and the ones that are going to have the most knowledge in this area are your salespeople. Engage your sales team to understand what happens at every step along the buyer’s journey, where they typically experience pushback, and what can go wrong to lose the sale. Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know, so do your research and don’t assume anything!
Including the Right People in the Process
We just touched on this, but it’s important to reiterate that creating an effective B2B content strategy is not strictly your marketing team’s job. Sales needs to be involved as well because they are the ones actually talking to the customer, so they understand who the buyer is, and which steps they’re taking along the way. This should be a hand-in-hand kind of process to gain a true understanding of how the process starts, what happens next, and how the decision is actually made.
Developing a Plan
To develop a plan, start with your contact form submissions and other sources to understand the top of the buying funnel – your leads’ main pain points and areas of interests. Then, pair this knowledge with everything you’ve learned about your ideal buyer.
Determine where you have expertise and what you’re passionate about to figure out what kind of content you’ll be most capable of producing well. Look internally for ways to create compelling content as well as externally for ideas on what to do next. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing, not to copy them but to elevate what they’re doing and beat them at their own game.
When you create content, consider the platform you’ll use to distribute it and aim to host it yourself as often as possible. Obviously, there will be situations where you’ll want to put your content where your audience is consuming content so that it will get noticed (for example, if you host a podcast, you’ll want to have it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well as on your own site) but try to retain as much control as you can. There are many social media platforms that are subject to heavy regulatory scrutiny, which could result in you losing the content you worked hard to create if you only host your content on an external platform and it gets shut down.
As AI integrations become more readily available, use them to supplement your own efforts, not replace them. Use AI to handle time-consuming tasks like generating optimized titles for your content, providing podcast transcriptions, and turning long-form articles into checklists as well as optimizing your efforts by automatically cross-posting content across various social platforms, identifying ideal posting times for social media platforms, and creating voice narration for your blog posts to improve accessibility.
Creating the Right Kind of Content
When creating B2B content, which format should you use? Any format that’s used for B2C content can be used for B2B content as well – articles, videos, checklists, infographics, white papers, case studies, press releases. Furthermore, almost all these types of content can be used at multiple stages of the funnel to aid in the buying process. But whatever the format is, ensure the content you create is building trust with buyers and being delivered at the right moment in their decision-making process.
Following B2B Content Best Practices
Your content strategy should utilize B2B content creation best practices including:
- Being authentic and trustworthy
- Demonstrating knowledge and passion
- Building credibility
- Taking a positive tone
- Using a consistent brand voice
- Following a regular cadence
Your best content likely won’t be the first thing you create, and you can never truly predict what will gain popularity, so stick with it even if you don’t see the results you’re looking for right away. Remember, it’s getting harder to be found online, so you’ll need to commit to putting out good quality content regularly to get in front of prospects and stay top of mind for your leads.
Measuring Your Results
How do you know if your content is succeeding? How can you measure its ROI (Return on Investment)? It’s important to track vital sales metrics like revenue, conversion rate, and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) as well as softer secondary metrics related to engagement like email open rates, CLR (Click-Through Rates), and video views when evaluating where to invest.
Working with a Limited Budget
Regardless of your budget, there’s a content strategy that can work for your company. Obviously, if you have limited funds, you won’t be able to do more sophisticated things A/B and multi-variate testing, or invest in an enterprise-level content management platform. However, you likely also won’t have the needs that necessitate that kind of investment.
Instead, you’ll want to focus on your core offerings and leverage the tools you already have. Often, your best assets are your existing customers, long-time employees, and top competitors.
When it comes to your existing customer base, make it a priority to build relationships and then talk to your best customers. Take them to lunch or schedule a video meeting or short call to ask for open, honest feedback about what you’re doing well and where you can improve. Respect their time by having a specific set of questions that you want answered and encourage them to be blunt so you can get unfiltered feedback. Ask things like:
- How did you hear about us?
- Why did you buy from us instead of one of our competitors?
- How much did price factor into your purchase decision?
- What is your decision-making process when you’re making a purchase like this?
Engage your long-time sales staff and top performers to find out what they know about your best customers. Then, use that information to determine how you can duplicate your ideal customers’ buying process with your future prospects as well.
Research your competitors by looking at their websites, blogs, and social media profiles. Sign up for their emails and events. Look into what they’re doing to find out how you can do more and do it better!
If you need help creating the kind of B2B content that drives results, reach out to our team! We are in the business of working with you to build profitable sustainable revenue streams to grow your company. Our approach is centered on creating a strategic revenue plan that aligns sales and marketing to generate better results. Let’s start a conversation today!
