Definitive Guide to B2B Content Marketing

Summary

In both the online and offline space, content is central to building brand identity, awareness, and authority by establishing the value an organisation brings to its target market and specific industry.

As such, developing a B2B content marketing strategy has become essential for creating marketing campaigns that reach and resonate with target audiences—particularly given the rise and dominance of digital marketing in B2B.

Crafting original, high-quality, and valuable content, rather than generating content for its own sake is key to securing competitive positioning, enhancing the buyer’s journey, and ultimately, aiding sales processes.

Click on the buttons below to navigate to the four main areas this guide covers:

WHAT IS B2B CONTENT MARKETING?

B2B content marketing is a powerful strategy centred on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and informative content across various marketing channels to drive sales opportunities by attracting and engaging leads, as well as clients post-conversion. Successful content marketing is built to address specific audience needs, pain points, and goals to contribute to a personalised client experience (CX) and B2B buyer’s journey.

Effective B2B content marketing can also boost brand awareness, authority, and equity. The purpose of content can range from thought leadership to educational materials and even sales collateral to support demand generation and lead generation initiatives (such as lead nurturing), contributing to growth.

In short, B2B content marketing is a dynamic and impactful tool that has the potential to shape and support critical strategies to drive desired business outcomes.

Content audit

Once you have identified your goals, start by performing an audit of your existing content (skip this step if you do not have content). This can be incredibly beneficial for maximising the ROI and performance of your content library and preventing your new content efforts from cannibalising the potential of your older pieces.

The aim of your audit should be to identify the gaps you currently have in your content strategies, and how these can be improved upon while investing resources effectively.

Therefore, to guide your content audit process, be sure to leverage the data analytics you have available to you to measure B2B content marketing performance by:

As part of this assessment, consider also analysing competitor content. This can focus on a few key areas to inform your auditing (and content creation):

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    The topics covered and how they are explored

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    The topics covered and how they are explored

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    How information is presented to support a strong user experience

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    Lead magnets/free tools

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    Keywords

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    Interlinking strategies

Combining this process with your content goals will help you determine the priorities for your content marketing strategies. In the case that you are yet to build out a library of B2B content marketing, many of the variables above still serve as great points of research to inform your planning.

Content audits also represent the perfect opportunity to repurpose key pieces of content. This can range from rewrites of varying degrees, and include adapting content to suit another format to meet the preferences of a target audience, or account (if part of an ABM or ABX strategy).

Repurposing can also help the performance of content across a broader selection of marketing channels and target audiences.

Content map

The last element of your content planning process should be mapping out the content that you aim to produce and distribute to each segment of your target audience.

Given the range of functions that your content is likely to serve in your marketing strategies, long-term planning can help to manage production expectations and ensure a broader range of goals are met on a timely basis.

Your content map also serves as a useful resource for supporting sales and marketing alignment, as it allows sales leaders and their teams to gain oversight into upcoming content and collaborate on how to best leverage it in their outreach strategies.

Here are some considerations for building out your content map:

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    Difficulty (in terms of the subject matter expertise required)

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    Strategies the content supports (the focus of the content)

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    Strategic content needs (ABM/ABX initiatives or time-sensitive content)

While you are unlikely to be able to anticipate all of these variables, planning for them in advance will be critical for guiding the trajectory of your content marketing strategies. Depending on your in-house capabilities and goals, consider mapping out content on a quarterly or monthly basis.

Below is an example of a cybersecurity provider’s content map for a month:

For optimal results, be sure to align your content map with the needs of buyers as they progress through the B2B buyer’s journey.

This involves developing a range of content formats and types to suit the different decision makers at target accounts and the role they play in the buying process. Ensuring a balance of these content needs across your content map will enable your sales teams to drive demand generation with the entirety of the buying group.

How to align content with the B2B buying group

Source: INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer Report 2024

5-step process to producing high-performance B2B content marketing

Below is a streamlined process for maintaining efficient, high-quality content creation divided into whether you have an internal content team, or utilise 3rd-party content experts to fulfill your needs.

Each content creation process will have its own nuances depending on the structure of your team and content creation capabilities.

INFUSE demand experts create and leverage content marketing to meet your objectives as an extension of your team.

Engage your target buyers with INFUSE Custom Content Solutions

#2 Feedback

Collecting direct feedback can be invaluable for guiding your content optimisation efforts. Here are some methods to consider:

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    Client council: As part of your brand evangelism strategy, creating a client council can be an effective way to gain feedback directly from your target audience on a variety of strategies, including your content. Hold regular meetings with clients to determine areas where content can be improved, as well as insights that can inform your content map.

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    Sales leadership feedback: Your sales teams are regularly interacting and broaching conversations with your content. Synchronising with sales leaders to establish a feedback loop to share the top-performing content pieces in sales conversations can be an invaluable insight for your strategies. This can also help to pinpoint the content topics and features that are motivating your prospects the most.

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    Surveys: Depending on the information you are looking to source, these can be activated on your content hub itself on content pages, or via other channels, such as email lead nurturing. However, surveys typically garner more high-quality feedback when they are supported by an incentivisation program. In this case, optimise your budget by prioritising strategic content pieces and narrowing the targeting for surveys.

#3 Analysis

How you analyse your B2B content marketing performance will depend largely on the analytics platform (and its capabilities) you have implemented for tracking your website, and how you define content success internally.

There is an incredibly broad range of metrics to choose from. As a result, grouping them by core areas can be helpful for focusing on specific performance aspects in your reporting:

Be sure to establish a consistent review cadence for your analytics, ideally that matches the length of each phase of your content map.

There are many types of content that can be created and utilised as part of a B2B content marketing strategy, particularly when catering to the unique needs and preferences of different audience segments and buyer personas. Below is an extensive list of the most common content formats (from A to Z), along with tactics for maximising the performance of each one:

Developing and leveraging a wide variety of content marketing pieces suited to the interests and preferences of your target buyers is an effective strategy for driving engagement. Below are four key takeaways from this guide:

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    If developed properly, content marketing has the potential to support multiple strategies across your organisation, from sales outreach, to lead nurturing and lead follow up.

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    Investing time in anchoring your B2B content marketing strategy with specific goals and mapping out content, can boost performance and alignment with other teams leveraging content.

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    Diversifying your content distribution is key to securing quality buyer engagement and greater content performance.

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    Implement regular content analysis to inform optimisations, content repurposing, and innovative new content strategies.

INFUSE demand experts are ready to craft high performance demand generation programs to engage your buyers with new or existing content pieces.

About the Author

Alexander Kesler is a visionary B2B marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building highly successful organisations. As a Founder and the CEO of INFUSE, one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, Alexander specialises in driving growth through demand generation marketing.

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