Creating B2B Content Strategy from Scratch

Every successful B2B business starts with great content and a predefined content strategy.

B2B Content Strategy
Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

Due to a lack of time, business owners often skip the preparation stages and dive right into creating content without any planning.

Although creating content without an outlined strategy could work for a while and give a false hope that content can be produced ad hoc. The problem is that your content is not focused on your buyer personas and creates a lack of content consistency.

It’s one thing to know that having a content strategy is highly essential, but on the other side, it is crucial to understand how to create one from scratch. Before you go online, waste hours of research through a vast sea of no reliable information, so don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

What is a Content strategy?

Consider content strategy as your well-planned vision for all your business marketing efforts – the sum of all input and output of your brainstorming sessions toward a successful marketing strategy in general.

It provides an overview through an organized roadmap to consistently create valuable, relevant, and engaging content that brings the right traffic, and converts them into leads and later into customers.

Your strategy should be a structure of outlined topics and publish dates aligned with the ultimate business goal. 

What your content strategy should define?

  • The audience you’re targeting with your content
  • Questions your strategy will answer for a targeted audience
  • The goals you want to achieve using content marketing
  • How your content will be different from your competition
  • What formats you will use publishing content
  • What are the channels where you will promote content
  • Defined content schedule, management, and publication
  • Define metrics for an accurate measure of the success of a content marketing strategy

So, we will start with the basics so you can outline the main strategic goals toward a successful content action plan. So, let’s dive in!

Set goals

Before any content action, you need to define strict goals for your B2B content marketing strategy. 

What do you want to accomplish with creating content?

The smart way to start is with the SMART definition of content.

Every content produced that brings value need to be:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Timely

The SMART content definition will keep your focus on goals and help you to produce content with a massive impact on the targeted audience.

To increase website visits, generate more leads, and ultimately to increase revenue. However, your goals will define your B2B content marketing strategy, including the type of content you produce and how it will be promoted. A great way to keep all of your marketing workloads under a single platform is utilizing advanced project management software like Nifty.

If your main focus is brand awareness, your content assets will be thought:

  • Leadership articles
  • Blog
  • Comments
  • Research reports
  • Videos

These content assets are easy to create, distribute, and present original insights through market research and thought leadership if you have a detailed action plan.

This type of content will increase your company brand awareness.

But if your focus is on lead generation campaigns. Your content creation assets that are included in lead magnet forms:

  • EBooks
  • White papers
  • Market research reports
  • Product demos
  • Cheat Sheets

With these content assets, your strategy is focused on driving conversions.

The bottom line is that it all depends on what you want to achieve -creating a clear set of goals that will deliver the right content at every stage of the buyer’s journey. 

Define Buyer Personas

As we said earlier, you need to define your audience. It means creating optimal buyer personas – but what are they?

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a hypothesis of your ideal customer/client. Buyer Persona is based on the market and competition research, using existing customers/clients and updating it with new consumers’ habits.

It will help you to understand and link to the target audience you want to deliver your products and services.

Create a Content Audit as a strategy progress check

When you define your Buyer Personas, the next stage is to run a content audit. A content audit is where you keep all of your content assets and distribute them to specific stages of the buyer journey.

The Buyer Journey can be segmented into several stages:

  • Pre-awareness
  • Awareness
  • Education
  • Consideration
  • Evaluation
  • Rationalization
  • Decision
  • Ongoing delivery

Brainstorm content ideas

When you know what you want to achieve, who your target audience is, and what are the pain points of your content. Now it’s time to start brainstorming new content ideas for your B2B content marketing strategy.

A great collaboration with the marketing and sales team is crucial. And try to come up with ideas related to your personas’ pain points. We find that the best way to develop content is to start with an initial idea or topic.

Storytelling ideas for a great B2B content

  • The main character with destiny or mission to fulfill toward a
  • The main character who leave home and family to begin a life journey
  • Wise bearded men who guide the main character
  • The evil villain who the main character must defeat or overcome to achieve an ultimate goal
  • The main character who experiences some kind of redemption

Choose the right content types

Now when content ideas are here, it is time to define the right content type to deliver the right message to the right audience. These days there are a lot of different content types, and each one has its benefits.

For successful B2B marketing content strategy here is a list of most beneficial content types:

  • Video
  • Blogs
  • EBooks
  • Case studies
  • Product demos
  • Pricing documents
  • Market research

Track and report on the performance of the content

At this stage, you need to revisit your main goals through content audit and customer journey, which is outlined at the start B2B content marketing strategy to help you understand your marketing progress.

Then you need an analytics platform or content management system that can track activity, and automate progress reporting, all of which are under a single platform inside your internet browser – creating collaboration and transparency of your workflow.

Set your business up for success with a powerful content strategy

Creating a content strategy is a very complicated process, and it requires a lot of market and competition research, combining with brainstorming sessions. 

Consider this journey as a marathon, not a sprint toward a successful B2B marketing strategy. It will take some time to achieve all your goals – but you always need to monitor your progress to keep in line with all the marketing objectives.

Following the steps above and keeping your eye on the end goal, your business will be on its way to content marketing success.


About the Author

Aleksandar Radosevic

Aleksandar Radosevic – Productivity writer at Nifty, a powerful Monday alternative. My writing is focused on B2B content strategy evolution and productivity hacks. Merging an innovative and data-driven content to optimize digital content performance and user experience.

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