B2B Content Marketing

B2B content marketing is about building and transforming ideas into a variety of content that can be produced and distributed to boost brand awareness, thought leadership, and traffic in a way that encourages demand and lead generation, builds brand equity, and helps boost sales contributing to company growth.

Successful B2B content marketing features personalized, valuable content that appeals to prospects on their preferred channels and provides them with relevant information and solutions to the challenges they face. With the rise of digitization in B2B marketing, most content is currently found and shared online as digital content marketing.

Who Needs a Content Marketing Strategy?

The need for a content marketing strategy depends on the goals and objectives that a company wishes to achieve. Content can be tracked via interactions, downloads, and increases in traffic to evaluate its performance, guide adjustments, and to determine successful content strategies.

If existing content is not giving you the desired results, it’s time to implement a new content marketing strategy. If current content is failing to boost brand awareness and demand generation, developing content marketing strategies can help to achieve these goals.

Content marketing strategies help marketers make the most of their content and maintain a high ROI, while creating lasting equity for their brand.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Converts

Define Goals

Determining the goals that content should achieve is crucial and although this can be partially guided with thorough research, it requires careful planning. After all, content creation and scheduling should align with the broader marketing objectives of a company. However, taking a macro approach can be beneficial with strategic, time-sensitive content and for determining how each piece of the content serves the overall marketing strategy. Attention to detail is crucial.

Tracking different content marketing statistics can be an effective tactic for evaluating performance and whether individual content pieces are achieving their goals.

Objectives should be clearly established from the beginning of the content creation process to give content a greater purpose and define its success. Without this due diligence, solid content ideas are at risk of being poorly optimized and losing out on their potential.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is not only essential for the success of digital content marketing but also helps to guide content creation. Researching and creating an extensive list of keywords that are related to search intent and the products, services, and brand of a company helps to improve SEO.

By determining and regularly updating keyword lists, marketers can optimize their content to match the changing search intent of leads. This research can then be used to guide content creation, repurpose, or edit content, and inspire new ideas.

Managing keywords boosts the search engine rankings of proprietary content and websites and helps to ensure that content appeals to the needs and interests of potential clients while kickstarting the nurturing process.

Map Content

Marketing strategies are only as effective as the planning that goes into their execution. Part of implementing an effective strategy with multiple types of content marketing is creating and regularly updating a content map or calendar. Mapping content allows for work to be prioritized, so that time-sensitive projects on trending topics are not delayed.

Determining the optimal timing for publishing is also important to make sure that readers are not overwhelmed, which could result in content not performing well. It is also essential to consider the best times for publishing, as different target segments will consume content at different times of the day, as well as across a variety of channels.

As such, mapping and spacing out publishing with a content roadmap is an essential feature of a successful B2B content marketing strategy.

Pillar Pages

B2B content marketing strategies, traffic to content site SEO, and site links can be improved with the creation of pillar pages. These are long-form pages that cover in-depth analysis or breakdowns of important topics related to a company’s services, products, or industry. These pages also include target keywords that boost their reach. Pillar pages are an effective way of establishing brand authority and thought leadership by providing detailed, relevant information.

Broad topics covered in pillar pages can then be explored in further detail with shorter types of content marketing that link back to pillar pages such as articles and whitepapers. This capitalizes on reader interest by encouraging them to stay on websites longer and explore more related content. Pillar pages act as a hub for important topics and as a result, are integral to improving the performance of multiple pieces of content.

Content Distribution

Without proper distribution, B2B content marketing is much less likely to succeed in reaching its intended audiences.

Along with content creation, promotion and distribution should also be guided by in-depth knowledge of specific target segments and their preferred channels. Publishing with an omnichannel strategy fueled by these insights can avoid wasted budgets and time.

There are several types of distribution that can implemented depending on the type of channel marketing strategy you are developing and your network: