Three Tactics to Help Build a Solid B2B Content Strategy to Elevate Marketing Success

As more and more B2B businesses turn to content marketing for their lead generation efforts and building their sales pipelines, it seems that they are also are realizing the need to participate in developing an effective B2B content strategy. With doing this also comes the need to create supporting content, but oftentimes these organizations may not have the resources or experience to do so. In fact, according to a recent B2B Content Marketing Report authored by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 32% of B2B marketers do not have a person solely dedicated to content marketing.

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To help you maneuver through some of challenges of content marketing and form a solid B2B content strategy, here are three tips to keep in mind for your company’s content efforts:

1. Focus on Creating Your Content Strategy First

Before you get started on cranking out blog posts, white papers and case studies, take some time to consider your own content strategy and how it can assist in executing your content marketing efforts. According to the same B2B Content Marketing Report mentioned earlier, 21% of B2B marketers do not have a content strategy and 36% have a strategy in mind, but nothing is documented or shared with team members.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to see if you’re a part of that 21% or even the 36%:

• Have you done enough research on your customers and your market to build out your buyer personas?
• Are your marketing goals aligned with your overall business goals?
• Do you have an editorial calendar in place to help organize your content?
• Do you have testing processes and KPIs set up to measure your results?

These are just some of the areas to focus on when developing your content strategy.

2. Leverage Team Members to Help Create Content

For smaller and medium-sized organizations who may have a small marketing team or none at all, finding ways to pump out content can be one of the more challenging aspects of content marketing. But, it doesn’t have to be. By leveraging your team’s wealth of knowledge and experience, you can produce content more easily and efficiently. Another tactic to utilize is repurposing content. You can easily utilize your blog posts as other forms of content such as a guide, white paper or infographic.

Here are some team members to consider when reaching out for help in the content creation process:

CEO and other Executive Team Members

Who better to highlight your company culture, expertise in the industry and thought leadership than your CEO or other executive team members? It might not always be clear cut with what to share as a CEO, but consider these thought leadership strategies and ideas to help you stand out.

Sales Team Members

Reaching out to your sales team for potential blog topics and posts is also a great idea. Remember, these are the folks that are speaking to potential customers and listening to their pain points on a daily basis. They are some of the true experts when it comes to addressing potential customer’s areas of concern.

Customer Success Team Members

On the other side of sales is customer success. Utilizing the expertise and experiences from your customer success team can be incredibly valuable. Customer success team members are constantly communicating with customers about both the good and the bad. They are discussing how your product, solution or service is making their lives better while they also walk through some of the downsides. Both of these can be beneficial from a content development standpoint. You can write about some of the benefits and consistent themes that make your product, solution or service help while executive team members or product team members can use the constructive feedback to improve. Once improvements are made, you can utilize the pre-updates and post-updates to create content and show the end benefits.

3. Use Data to Drive Your Stories

In the world of B2B technology-oriented companies, collecting, analyzing and reporting on data – whether it comes from your marketing efforts, customers or proprietary software – is a critical component of running a successful business. Because of this, it should be top of mind to use the data you collect to complement your customer success stories and other forms of marketing content.

Remember that your audience doesn’t just want to know what you’re doing for your customers, but also how better off they are since using your offering, what were the results of using your offering and how did you help them get to that point?

Need help with your content marketing efforts? We can help with that too! We help B2B technology companies form content strategies that integrated campaigns that gain conversions and revenue. Get started by contacting us or requesting a consultation.