B2B Content Marketing

Part #4

Introduction

B2B Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focussed on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and engage your target audiences. It involves the creation of many different types of content that address the needs of your targets – with these needs being dictated by multiple factors such as their persona profile and stage in the buying journey.

B2B content marketing strategy is not easy to develop and requires constant attention. This is a perfect example of how and why a modern B2B marketing strategy is an on-going and flexible process that requires consistent maintenance.

For a modern day B2B business, content is fuel to almost all your critical activities. Without a steady stream of content touching each of your key personas at multiple points in the buying journey, then you can find that your entire commercial function slows down – regardless of business size.

Key Reasons to Use B2B Content Marketing

Brand Awareness: Driving sufficient awareness of your brand (company, product, or service) among target audiences in busy markets is a difficult, yet essential task. Brand awareness can almost be seen as a level one goal, it’s a basic necessity that any business needs to survive. With content marketing, you are able to strategically create assets that appeal directly to your target audiences (like their key challenges for example), then distribute these using certain mechanisms and tactics to maximise the chances they will be discovered – driving awareness in the process.
Brand Building: If brand awareness is a level one goal, the brand building is level two. When you have sufficient awareness among target audiences, you can then start using content marketing to build trust, confidence, credibility, and preference in your brand (company, product, or service). Going back to your brand strategy, you will have multiple components that you need to leverage such as your value proposition, positioning, and key messaging. Content marketing can be used in certain ways to help educate your target audiences as to these key pieces, helping to build brand preference along the way.
Lead/Demand Generation: A fundamental component to any B2B business is lead/demand generation. Although this broader topic contains multiple moving parts and the sophistication of a lead/demand generation function will vary depending on multiple factors – on a base level, content marketing is an essential tool for driving your sales funnel at each stage. By creating content focussed on key topics, questions, and pain points specific to a target persona – you naturally create a tool for attracting your target audiences and engaging them with content that resonates.
Lead Nurturing: For leads previously generated and who sit at the top of your funnel or in early stages of the buying journey, content marketing is key in advancing them along their journey towards becoming a customer. By understanding your personas and mapping their typical buying journey, you can create nurturing workflows that strategically transports a lead toward an event or stage you have pre-defined as being valuable to your business.
Customer Retention: With barriers to entry continually falling across key markets and with marketing spend continuing to soar globally, its essential your business enforces a customer retention strategy to fend off competitors vying for your customer’s approval and budget. Once again, content marketing is a key tool to use, not only to retain your current customer base, but to also maximise their value to your business through enabling sales tactics such as up/cross-selling.

There are four main areas that fall within B2B content marketing strategy:

Planning: Firstly, there are multiple strategic considerations to content marketing that need to be explored when planning your content function.
Creating: Secondly, your content assets are planned, then created for different personas in different journey stages.
Distributing: Thirdly, your content is distributed to attract and engage your target audiences.
Measuring: Fourthly, the performance of your content marketing function is analysed and optimised.

1. Planning

This section will cover the key areas that need to be considered when building your content marketing strategy.

1.1 – Using the Buyers Journey to Guide B2B Content Marketing

As a reminder, the buyer’s journey is the process that ‘buyers’ go through from the point of becoming aware of their challenge/needs all the way to them becoming customers of your product or service and beyond. It’s true that a customer’s journey is becoming increasingly dynamic, but this linear model is still a great tool.

This concept can be applied to the broader topic of B2B content marketing to illustrate that your target personas/customers are at different stages of their buying journey – thus the content they require and the call-to-actions that will resonate will be largely decided by the stage they currently occupy.

The below chart illustrates both the key role, and the key content format types for each of the core four stages in the buying journey:

1.2 – B2B Content Marketing Types (Identification Stage)

At this stage, a persona is mainly performing educational research for a problem, opportunity or need that they have. This means that the content is designed to attract the right audience (in terms of your core personas) and convert their awareness into solution interest.

Blogs: Used to inform and educate your target personas on a particular topic or theme that is directly associated to their job role, industry, or company.
Articles: Similar to blogs, but articles can be seen as slightly more proprietary in that this content type is used to relay your business’s personal opinions and perspectives on a particular topic or theme – helping to drive thought leadership.
Social Media Content: Although this can cover all stages of the buying journey, it is particularly useful as identification-based content due to the social channel’s ability to attract new users and drive brand awareness among target audiences.
General Webpage Content: Again, this content type can be used to cover all stages of the buying journey, but general webpages commonly fall under this stage (and consideration) due to the formats natural flexibility with regards to displaying educational based content.
Ebook: A multi-page resource focussed on a particular theme or topic designed to inform, educate, and provide value to target personas – usually requiring a user to download by providing their email address.
General Video: Includes overviews and showcases of your company, product and/or service by introducing key challenges and pain points currently being faced by your target audiences – then mapping your offering accordingly.
Infographic: A creative visual way of presenting statistics and key points in an easily digestible format.
Brochure: Whereas Ebooks are focussed on educating your target audience on a particular topic or theme relevant to them, a brochure asset will commonly be based on your brand/business.
Email Newsletter: Used to collate and distribute key content assets to target audiences (usually those who have already provided consent to allow it).
Podcasts: One of the fastest growing content types in the B2B space is podcasts. Used to cover a multitude of topics and themes pertinent to your target audiences, podcasts are a great way of leveraging your internal experts and thought leaders to drive preference in your brand, company, product and/or service.

1.3 – B2B Content Marketing Types (Consideration Stage)

At this stage, a persona understands that a solution for their problem or need exists and are now exploring the available products, services and solutions that are available. This means that the content is designed to educate interested audiences on your product and/or service at a deeper level whilst beginning to build brand preference.

Research Reports & Surveys: These can be created in-house or with partners and are designed to interpret statistical data into qualitative insight.
Whitepaper: A multi-page resource focussed on deep diving a particular theme or topic that provides objective rationales and justifications through data and facts as opposed to subjective viewpoints.
Expert Solution Guides: Used to assist target audiences in better understanding the challenges they have, and the steps they can take to alleviate them. Naturally, the asset will lead onto your company’s products and services as a solution.
Webinar/Digital Event: The purpose of this content type is very similar to others in the consideration stage, but the key difference here is that webinars provide real-time, two-way dialogue that provides the opportunity for target audiences to ask specific questions and relay their unique perspectives.
Solution Video: These videos differ from identification-stage videos in that they have a more specific focus on a particular product or service that solves a certain set of challenges and pain points (thus these video focus more on your solution).
Product/Service Literature: As the consideration stage is where potential buyers will begin consuming content on the specific products and services you offer, this asset type is key for building your company’s profile with buyers.

1.4 – B2B Content Marketing Types (Decision Stage)

At this stage, a persona has chosen the specific product, service, or solution that they require and is now focussed on selecting the vendor to provide it. This means that the content is designed to drive confidence and credibility with interested audiences that your product and/or service is the optimal solution for their challenges or needs whilst building company/vendor preference.

Comparisons: This content type incudes company/vendor, product and/or service comparisons that pits your proposition against key competitors.
Vendor Information: This relates to content on your business and the key products and services you deliver. The aim here is to present your company as a vendor who is both capable and credible in the short-term, but progressive, innovative, and secure in the long-term.
Case Studies & Testimonials: You would be hard pressed to find an experienced B2B marketer who doesn’t rank case studies as one of the most powerful and important asset types in the content marketing arsenal.
Technical Data/Spec Sheets: Similar to product/service/solution literature found in the consideration stage, but the key difference here is that you are able to start unpacking key technical details and data points related to your offerings.
Product Demonstration: These can be either being a pre-recorded video or a live/virtual event. This asset type is particularly key for software or SaaS based vendors who tend to use demonstrations as a call-to-action to qualify later-stage personas.
Pricing & ROI-Specific Information: As the persona/DMU moves closer towards a purchase, details regarding pricing and expected ROI become greater.
Custom Sales Enablement: These assets such as presentations and proposals will commonly be at the request of sales team members who have identified the need for a custom asset to drive contract close with a particular potential client.

1.5 – B2B Content Marketing Types (Usage Stage)

At this stage, a customer has purchased a specific product, service or solution and is now focussed on actual usage and extracting value. This means that the content is designed to improve the customer experience and remove any obstacles to successful usage whilst driving loyalty and advocacy.

Customer Onboarding: This relates to multiple sub-content asset types such as quick start guides, FAQ’s and user manuals all designed to help onboard and get the customer started with their purchase.
Customer Training: The difference between onboarding and training in this context is that training is less about getting the customer started and comfortable with their purchase and more about extracting the maximum amount of value from it.
Community Hubs: Think of these as being customer service type forums and portals that allow customers to communicate amongst themselves, usually with the participation of supplier/vendor members who will be experts on the product, service, or solution.
Customer Promotion: This is where you take your star clients (perhaps your most innovative client or most valuable client for example) and actively include them in your content assets and distributing them amongst your other current customers.
Customer Appreciation: Think of this as content that boosts loyalty by giving them ‘special attention’ that can take many forms such as inviting them to test a new product beta, asking for their feedback as a star client, offering personalised 1-to-1 training or offering them special discounts for example.

1.6 – Content Topics

Although the topic you choose to focus on will be obvious for several content types (for example, if you create a Product Demonstration asset then the focus topic will obviously be your Product), for many others you have flexibility of what you can utilise the asset for.

Audience-Based: Includes the challenges, pain-points, goals, and aspirations related to your target personas within the context of their professional role.
Industry-Based: Includes key themes and trends directly related to your target markets (where you are selling your product/service) and the industry in which you belong.
Company-Based: Includes information and knowledge directly related to your core business operations, success stories, notable announcements, and collaborative initiatives.
Product/Service-Based: Includes information and knowledge directly related to your core offerings, products, services, and solutions.

1.7 – Content Topic Mapping

There’s a few techniques you can use to actually start ideating exactly what content you should create, but I prefer to focus on the target persona and then ideate questions they are likely to have at each journey stage, then build content assets around answering those key questions.

By using this Question/Answer approach to developing content topics, you can guarantee that the assets contain relevancy and purpose whilst providing the knowledge and understanding that the persona requires at their specific journey stage, improving the chances of progression towards conversion.

To help visualize this, imagine an Enterprise AI company offering SaaS products using the below framework to target their CIO buyer persona.

Ultimately, you should use this framework for every persona you are targeting, and try to formulate 5-10 questions for each of the four journey stages, giving you 20-40 core topics evenly spread across the buying journey for each persona.

1.8 – Content Flow

By strategically creating content for each persona at each stage of their journey, you naturally embed flow and progression, but this doesn’t mean you can neglect installing call-to-actions (CTA’s) in each content asset that clearly explains what the user should do next.

What this means is, you have to make it as easy as possible for the persona to progress from one stage/asset to the next stage/asset when their questions have been successfully answered (via the asset) and they are ready to do so.

Progression CTA: Used to simply move the persona to the next stage in the buying journey – these need to be logical and strong.
Expansion CTA: Used to direct personas to other content assets within the same journey stage. These are very useful as personas will commonly consume multiple content assets (to meet their progression requirements) before moving to the next stage.
Jump CTA: Used to transport a persona directly to a conversion event, commonly found within the decision stage. Thus, you can use these to jump a persona from the start of their journey immediately to the end. These are best used as many personas will sometimes move backwards in their journey despite technically holding a later-stage position.

To help visualize this, the below diagram builds on from the previous and indicates what a common CTA would look like for each asset based on the mapped topic (and question being answered). This isn’t really a difficult task and the key to remember is alignment. By logically aligning content assets in a theoretical flow (using the buyers journey stages and topic mapping framework as a guide), you will find the task of crafting effective CTA’s much easier.

1.9 – Content Audit

A content audit is a method you can use for collecting and analysing key attributes and data related to your previously created (current) content marketing assets. Commonly speaking, a content audit will come very early in the process of assembling your content marketing strategy and forms the basis for you determining your current ‘health’ and situation in terms of content.

How To Conduct An Audit

Step One: Firstly, you need to decide exactly what data points you want to collect for each piece of content.
Step Two: Create a worksheet to easily capture all this information – using any categorisation and filtering you need to better visualise your audit and improve accessibility.
Step Three: Now it’s time to conduct your audit – carefully go through your content cache and begin identifying the data points you are capturing.

What an Audit Provides

A well formulated content audit will provide enormous insight on several different elements:

Content Health: Its invaluable to see at a high-level what content performs well and what doesn’t.
Content Gaps: Through an audit, you can more easily identify the gaps you have in relation to your data points. For example, by marking up what journey stage your content assets relate to, you can use a filter to quickly identify if certain stages are lightweight in content to support it.
Content Opportunity: Building on the above point, and by creating a top-level view of your content cache, you are able to better identify opportunities or areas you should focus on, all related to one or more key data points.
Content Management: Through an audit, you build the foundation from which your content marketing strategy is built. Ultimately, after an audit you will have a better idea of what situation the content function is currently in, meaning you can make more effective plans for creating new content assets.

2. Creating

When it comes to this stage, a well-developed content brief can be used to capture all the below information – streamlining the process of actually creating the asset (whether this will be done internally or externally).

Note that when it comes to the content creation process, there will always be two key classes:

Proactive Content Creation: This is your main approach and relates to the six-step process below. Essentially, proactive creation is where you plan your content topics ahead of time with careful consideration given to your personas, journey stages, content format and CTA’s.
Reactive Content Creation: This is where the requirement for content comes because of an external event or situation. Through the nature of reactive content creation, you will usually find that the persona and topic are already defined (or obvious to define) and that the remaining decisions can be made very easily.

Further to this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all content assets need to be created new, but the reality is, you have a few options when it comes to the approach you take.

New: An obvious one, this is where you create a content asset from scratch, this approach commonly takes the most time and resource so be sure to take this into consideration.
Extend: This is where you take an existing piece of content (say a blog) and reinterpret it into another piece of content (say an infographic). By doing this, you take the core of the content asset and extend it out to squeeze the maximum amount of value from it.
Repurpose: B2B content marketing can sometimes be very frustrating and its common to create a great piece that doesn’t quite resonate with your target personas as expected. After a certain period of time you can take the piece, strip out the best bits, and create another piece containing these key pieces but perhaps with a new angle, narrative or supporting content. This way, you can breathe life into underperforming pieces. If you take this approach, then it would be wise to discard and remove the original piece as not to ‘compete’ against yourself.
Update: This approach can be used for both underperforming and great performing content, and simply refers to adding additional content to the asset to bulk its value.

2.1 – Six Steps to New Content Creation

For the sakes of simplicity, this six-step process will be focussed on content being created that is classed as ‘Proactive’ with the approach of ‘New’ (see above).

Step One: Persona Selection

The first step is to have a clear understanding of who you are writing content for, so refer to the buying personas you created during your Customer Analysis.

Step Two: Stage Selection

Once you have chosen your target persona, decide what stage (identification, consideration, decision, or usage) you want to create content within.

Step Three: Topic Mapping

Once you have chosen the stage(s) to focus on, you can now refer back to your Marketing Intelligence (Section #2) and begin formulating the questions and content requirements your target persona will have at the key stage(s) you have earmarked.

Step Four: Content Type Selection

Once you have defined the persona, journey stage and content topics to focus on – you can now select the most relevant content asset type to utilise.

Step Five: Content Flow & CTA’s

Once you have selected the asset type, now you can clearly define your CTA’s that will resonate, and subsequently push them to another content asset at the next stage. If you do this correctly, you will naturally create a content flow.

Step Six: Content Structure

Now you have made key decisions regarding the topic and type of your content asset, now it’s time to formulate your content structure. This will include textual based elements such as a working title, key themes, supporting research findings/insight, target keywords and section breakdowns. Once you have captured all this information within a content brief, the asset is ready for creation.

2.2 – Creation Considerations

When it comes to creating the content asset, you should keep a few important items in mind:

Verbal (Brand) Identity: It’s crucial to remain within the constraints of this identity to maintain brand consistency, relay the correct tone and to maintain general effectiveness of engaging with target personas (who acted as the foundation when you built your verbal identity).
On-Page SEO: Most of your content assets will be housed within a web entity (web page, landing page, 3^rd party website page etc) so it’s essential to have a good understanding of general on-page SEO tactics.
Wordcount: Generally speaking, both search engines and B2B buyers prefer long-form content as opposed to smaller wordcount pieces. That’s not to say writing short-form content isn’t a good option (for some content pieces it certainly is), but if you place emphasis on educating the reader and answering their key questions, then naturally the piece will become longer in form.

2.3 – Content Calendar

Although you can manage your content creation process on an ad hoc basis, you can improve efficiency, visibility, and throughput by building and maintaining a content calendar. By using a calendar and planning your content in advance, you can significantly increase your department efficiency and improve automation.

Just imagine this as being like any other calendar, but for a specific day/week/month you list the content you and your team plans to create along with some key details:

Persona: Who the content is for and who stands to gain the most value from the asset.
Content Type: What format is being used and what is the most suitable.
Journey stage: At what stage does the asset fall under – either identification, consideration, decision, or usage.
Topic: What is the key topic (and topic type) of the asset and what persona question is it answering (this also explains the key purpose of the piece).
Call-to-Action: What is the primary (and secondary) CTA (and CTA type) you will embed within the asset – this simply answers what you want them to do next.
Content Approach: Tagging your approach as either to create new, extend, repurpose, or update.
Responsibilities: Depending on your resources and strategy, there may be several people involved in the content creation process. From ideating, to writing/creating, to designing creative, to proofreading and distributing – each of these need to be considered and if chosen, made clear in the content calendar.
Timeframes: When will you publish and distribute the piece and subsequently, how much time is needed to create giving you a recommended start date.
Status: By marking up in general when the creation process has begun you can keep track of logistics and make better decisions if needed.

3. Distributing

Gone are the days when just merely writing high-quality content was enough for that piece to gain an audience – in the modern day, you have to place as much proactive effort into distributing your content marketing as you do planning and creating.

There are generally three key categories of content distribution; owned, earned, and paid.

3.1 – Owned Channel Distribution

These are the channels and outlets that you own, or in other words, channels that you have setup and operate on behalf of the organisation.

Website
Social Media
Email
3rd Party Platform
Sales Team

3.2 – Earned Channel Distribution

These are the channels and outlets that have been setup and are operated by an organisation other than your own.

Social Sharing
Organic Influencers
Organic Industry Websites/PR
Guest Spots/Collaboration
Forums/Communities

3.3 – Paid Channel Distribution

These are the channels and outlets that you can utilise as if they were owned, for a fee.

Paid Search
Paid Influencers
Paid Social
Paid Industry Websites/PR

4. Measuring

Essentially, B2B content marketing is an on-going and continuous process that needs refinement and tweaking. This can only be achieved by having a firm understanding of how your content performs against key KPI’s related to your broader marketing objectives.

The majority of content marketing-based metrics can be placed into one of these five categories:

Audience Metrics: These relate to general user-based data points and includes metrics such as Views/Visits, Channel Breakdown and Follower Count.
Engagement Metrics: These relate to how appealing your content is to your audiences and includes metrics such as Bounce Rate, Exit Rate, Time-on-Page, Shares/Republishes/Mentions, Comments and Likes.
Conversion Metrics: These relate to how successful your content is at progressing target audiences across the buyers journey (and down your marketing funnel) and includes metrics such as Leads Generated, Downloads/Form Submissions, CTA Conversion Rate, Click-Through Rate and Sales Generated.
Function Metrics: These relate to the logistical operation of your content marketing function and includes metrics such as Content Throughput and Average Creation Time.
Performance Metrics: These relate to the performance of the individual content assets and includes metrics such as: Load Speed, Keyword Ranking, Keyword Impressions and Number of Backlinks.

Marketing metrics, measurement and reporting is covered in more depth in Part #8: B2B Marketing Measurement of this complete guide.