7 Steps to Create a Powerful B2B Content Marketing Strategy

A good online marketing strategy is instrumental to your website performance. As a B2B company, you will find it challenging to reach potential customers without a powerful strategy backing up your content.

As companies are slowly realizing the potential of having a good content marketing strategy, 45% of marketers say that they are likely to increase their investment in content in 2024. 

With that in mind, let us look into what it takes to create successful B2B content marketing strategies.

What is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

Your B2B content marketing strategy is a diligently outlined plan that details how your business leverages content to attract other businesses to engage and associate with you. 

A comprehensive B2B content marketing strategy can help you achieve important goals for your business and includes several crucial elements and activities to market it. Partnering with a content marketing agency can further streamline your content efforts, ensuring your strategy is data-driven, targeted, and optimized for long-term success.

Why Do You Need a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

We have now looked at what a B2B content strategy framework includes. Let us look at the primary benefits you can reap from a strong B2B content marketing strategy.

1. Increase in Engagement

Content can become a bridge between your business and customers only if it can impress and engage your target audience. Good content can educate your audience, and encourage them to become your customers, but also foster interactions.

2. Improve Brand Reputation and Awareness

You can also use your content to boost your brand’s online reputation and be more visible to your target audience. Your content marketing strategy can help you reach a larger audience and expand your overall reach significantly. 

3. Increase Website Traffic

Perhaps, the most common and critical goal B2B companies want to achieve with their content marketing efforts is a rise in organic website traffic. When you take a strategic approach towards your B2B content marketing strategy, you can boost your organic traffic while ensuring that most of your website visitors are qualified leads.

4. Generate Leads and Conversions

Talking about qualified leads — your B2B content marketing strategy can become a powerful weapon for lead generation and conversions. For a B2B tech company, generating qualified leads that can become paying customers through website content alone can get tricky. However, your content marketing strategy can help you create content that will target visitors who are at different stages in the sales funnel.

5. Establish Website Authority

Establishing your website authority is easier said than done, but your content marketing efforts will give you a definite headstart. By creating more relevant and high-quality content for your target audience, you can slowly start boosting your website’s authority. Having engaging and helpful content can help you in the process because as your readers spend more time with your content, you will become a trustworthy source in your niche.

7 Steps to Create a Powerful B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you know why you need an effective B2B content marketing strategy, it is good to understand the steps that go behind creating one for your website and online presence.

Step 1: Get a Better Understanding of Your Audience

Behind every great strategy is an astute understanding of the audience it is aimed at. When we say understanding, we mean delving deep into your target audience’s needs, behavior, and questions. Doing so will help you come up with various content types tailored for your audience, and to help them carry out a successful transaction.

Say, your B2B brand offers a product that helps to hire managers find the right candidates and automate communication with them. You will want to understand the most common challenges hiring managers face in the process. Having content that addresses these challenges, and positions your product as a solution is the perfect way to engage them.

Step 2: Conduct Thorough Research

Having a better understanding of your target audience will require you to do a lot of research, but more importantly, you will need to dive deeper into the different aspects of your website and content. Conducting thorough market research, and specifically carrying out competitor analysis and keyword research can help strengthen the B2B content marketing strategies that you create.

Through market research, you can identify the market size and potential for your product and understand how it is likely to perform. As a next step, conducting competitor research and analysis will help you understand the different kinds of content that are working for your competitors to generate revenue for them.

Once you have narrowed down your target audience, and the different kinds of content that can work for your brand, you can shift your focus to keyword research. Keyword research will help you get insights into the search patterns and online behaviour of your target audience.

Step 3: Set Goals and Objectives

After conducting comprehensive research, you can set goals and objectives for your content marketing strategy. Clearly defined goals will ensure that you can always track and measure the progress of your content marketing efforts over time.

SMART (Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Realistic-Timebound) objectives can help you stay on track with different kinds of activities and elements that can enhance your content marketing strategy. Once you do this, the next steps will become clearer to you.

You will have answers to questions such as —

• What are the next steps to achieve your SMART goals?
• How important are these goals to the overall success of your business/brand?
• What are the metrics that you will use to measure the accomplishment of your goals?
• What kind of content will align with the goals that you have set for your strategy?

Step 4: Ideate Topics for Customers at Different Stages of the Buying Journey

Once you are ready with your research, an in-depth analysis of your target audience, and the goals that will guide your content marketing strategy, you can start putting together the tangible parts of your strategy. This will start with the ideation of topics that will engage your audience, and help customers that are in various stages of their buying journey.

You can deploy various methods to come up with topic ideas for your website:

• Conduct keyword research which will then help you optimise your SEO efforts and come up with B2B content ideas that you should cover on your website.
• If you have a platform for interacting with your target audience, leverage it to ask them what kind of content they need, to understand what their struggles are, and their preferred platforms for consuming content.
• Carry out content audits to identify what kind of content performs well for you, and the formats that are working for your business. Map all of your content to various stages of a customer’s buying journey so that you can identify which stage should have more relevant content.
• You can also use platforms like Quora, Reddit, and AnswerThePublic to analyze some of the search trends related to your niche or industry.

Step 5: Decide Formats and Create High-Quality Content

Along with covering different kinds of content and topic ideas, there is also a lot of merit in understanding content formats, and content pillars for B2B that you can experiment with. Distributing content in different kinds of content formats and on various channels and platforms will help you target a wider audience effectively.

However, it all starts with understanding the right content formats for your business. You can choose from visual content, blogging, videos, podcasting and more to boost your content online. Once you have narrowed down the formats that you want to utilize, you can move on to the content production part of your strategy.

Next, it is time to start weaving high-quality content for all these formats. Empower your content with solid research and high-performing keywords for an impactful B2B content strategy.

Step 6: Leverage the Right Content Distribution Channels

Stellar B2B content creation is just one part of the game. Once you do have high-quality content ready to be published, finding the right platform to distribute it, is equally important. Your choice of content distribution channel can decide how well your content is likely to perform, and how many potential customers you are likely to engage. Ideally, you want an array of distribution channels to choose from.

Once you decide on the right distribution channel to post a specific piece of content, you should also look at its reusability. To make your content marketing strategy work, it is also necessary for you to consider the content repurposing aspect of it.

For example, as a part of your B2B blog strategy, a great piece of website blog that has suddenly become topically relevant can be repurposed into a video and promoted on video streaming platforms such as YouTube, or your social media profiles. 

Step 7: Come up With a Winning Strategy for Content Promotion

Once your content has been strategically structured, created and distributed on the right platforms, you will want to promote it to your target audience. You can start with organic content promotion strategies, however, if you have a particularly lucrative piece of content that is likely to gain more traction, you want to be able to leverage paid strategies for content promotion too.

You can use your social media channels and website for the initial promotional efforts and slowly graduate to influencer marketing, utilizing paid boosts, and other strategies to double down on your content promotion efforts.

Design the Ultimate B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Your content marketing strategy can easily be one of the most cost-effective and revenue-generating strategies if you know how to utilize it well. Your content marketing strategy can generate a lot of website traffic for your business and keep your audience engaged. But if you use it to its fullest potential, you can even turn it into a revenue-generating tool for your business. Get in touch with us to understand how our seasoned team of content marketers can help create a winning strategy for your business.

Author

Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.