B2B Content Marketing Strategy Guide for Small Content Teams
If you’re a B2B marketer, you can barely make it through the day without encountering at least one message online about content marketing and the need to document your B2B content marketing strategy.
For the past 12 years, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs have been sharing research about what best-in-class and laggard organizations are doing when it comes to content marketing. For 2021, the story hasn’t changed: 62 percent of the most successful B2B marketers in the study have a documented B2B strategy.
Ok, we hear ya. Just click here to skip to downloads.
%
of the most successful B2B content marketing performers have a documented strategy
With that data reported year-over-year, you would think all the companies out there that still don’t have a written B2B content strategy would hop on the bandwagon. Nope. In fact, only 40 percent of those surveyed for the B2B Content Marketing: 2022 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report said they have a written strategy in place.
In past reports, the top reasons reported by participants for not documenting a content strategy in their organizations were:
%
Small Team Size
%
Not Enough Time
%
Not Important
%
Not Needed
%
Other
Benefits of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy
Marketers who find themselves dealing with a lack of time or not enough resources may find their content marketing efforts to be more fruitful if they buckle down and document a strategy. I know — easier said than done, and we’ll talk about potential approaches to help you out later in this guide. But first, let’s look at the benefits.
You’ll waste less time trying to figure out what topics to address.
Your freelance creator and team members who contribute will have a guide to focus their contributions.
You can focus more on managing the execution, measuring outcomes, and refining strategy to ensure you’re meeting business goals.
You can reduce “shiny object” syndrome where you chase the latest trend out of desperation of uncertainty.
When a pandemic (or other emergency) strikes, you can review your documented plan and make changes in a calm and collected manner rather than spinning your wheels in a panic trying to figure out what needs to change.
So are you convinced to give this thing a shot? Since you’re still reading, I’m going to take that as a “yes.” Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Begin with Business Goals
Develop Your Brand Voice and Style
Create Your Content Marketing Calendar
Structure and Systems for Success
Ready to Strategize?
Begin with Business Goals
For your content marketing strategy to be considered a success and gain the support of the executive team, it must support corporate goals. Writing blog posts for the sake of writing blog content isn’t a good B2B content marketing strategy; it’s a sign of confusion or desperation. B2B companies need to get the answers to these questions to ensure the foundation of their strategy is strong.
25 Questions You Need to Ask When Creating a Content Strategy
Careful thought must go into your content strategy for it to be effective. To help you develop yours, we’ve put together a list of 25 questions you and your team should consider as you build your plan, target your audence, and make your content vision and marketing come to life.
You’ve got to know where you’re going before you chart the journey. These questions will help you ensure whatever you do with content will help move the company forward and appeal to B2B buyers.
Develop Personas to Prioritize Buyer and Customer-focused Content
We mentioned the question, “who are we trying to reach?” in the section above. However, just knowing the “who” isn’t enough for a strong buyer and customer-focused content marketing strategy. You have to dig into the “how” and “why” behind each persona so that you can create relevant content. What motivates someone to buy from your business?
So what is a buyer persona? HubSpot defines “buyer persona” as follows: “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
Defining the Who
When you create your buyer persona(s), your goal is to develop a concept — a character of sorts — whom you can understand and even empathize with. Your persona should help you:
Defining the What, How, and Why of a Persona’s Decision to Change
When creating your B2B buyer persona, get a little granular when assessing the buying process. The Buyer Persona Institute defines five different areas of buyer insights that you should consider when crafting personas:
How do I get all this information?
Maybe you’re wondering, “how am I going to get all this data?” If you don’t have the budget to develop your own market survey, use information that is already at your disposal to improve your content and inbound marketing efforts.
Persona Creation Tools
Once you’ve gathered your research together, synthesize your findings to develop your buyer persona. You may even consider giving him or her a name, job title, job description, and other background story elements to help you and your team keep the pertinent facts in mind about what’s important to this persona when he or she researches solutions online.
Develop Your Brand Voice and Style
Woo! We made it past the persona. Now, with your well-researched persona in hand, you can begin to develop or refine your brand’s voice and style. A terrific place to start is by thinking about the personality and style that would appeal to your target buyer.
Are they looking for accounting or finance software — you may want to be confident, friendly, but serious about business. Is your buyer looking for HR solutions to improve workplace culture? You can be friendly, fun, and casual. Think about your brand as a person — would your target audience trust the personification of your brand?
Next, document your content vision, mission, and philosophy to help further develop your brand’s style and voice.
Content Marketing Vision
Your content marketing vision statement should align with your corporate vision statement (if you have one). Your content vision is aspirational and focuses on the big picture (or sometimes future-oriented goals).
The B2B Mix’s content vision (how we hope to help the potential customer through content)
To provide education and information to business owners and sales & marketing professionals to help them achieve business growth and professional goals.
Aligning Your Mission and Vision to Support Your Brand’s Goals
Learn how to craft a content strategy that supports your brand’s mission and vision as well as aligns with the company’s business goals. This post is fifth in a five-part series on developing and executing a content vision for a brand.
Content Marketing Mission
Your content marketing mission explains what you want to accomplish through your content marketing efforts.
The B2B Mix’s content mission (how we hope to serve our business through content)
To help stakeholders in the B2B marketing process evaluate digital marketing options and discover resources available through Jackson Marketing to help their businesses grow.
Content Philosophy
A content philosophy helps you determine how you will fulfill your vision and mission while working to achieve business goals. A content philosophy considers the following questions:
The answer to these questions will help you select the right content philosophy and personality for your business. Will your product be the star of your content? Will you treat the content as a product in and of itself? Or will the content become an extension of your corporate culture? Please read my post on ClearVoice.com to learn more about creating a content philosophy.
Consider your vision and mission in combination with corporate values to start defining your brand’s tone, image, and overall personality.
Content Philosophy: The Question to Answer Before Creating a Thing
What’s your content philosophy? What do you want content to accomplish for your brand? Read how other brands are using content to reach their business goals. This post is fourth in a five-part series on mastering your content vision and mission.
Importance of Brand Consistency: 5 Key Approaches for Keeping Aligned
The more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding – whether via words, design, offerings or perspective. But are you creating content with brand consistency in mind? Learn how it can help build brand awareness and develop trust and loyalty with customers.
Brand Consistency
We live in an age when just about anyone can create something and publish it to the wide world in the blink of an eye. If you don’t have brand guidelines in place, all of your content work and digital marketing efforts could come out as a jumbled mess. Develop brand guidelines to ensure consistency of your brand’s:
Cool Tool Alert
We use 1Brand to create our Brand Guidelines document. This solution makes it easy to put together your brand guidelines.
Psst — ☝? that’s our referral link. We do earn a little money if you buy when you visit this link.
Create Your Content Marketing Calendar
We’re in the home stretch people, how you doing? This process is a lot of work, but I promise you it’s worth it, content marketers!
Now we’ve got information on what the company wants to accomplish, whom we need to reach to help move the needle on corporate goals, and what those people (personas) want to learn to help them make a buying decision. Now it’s time to start planning your content. Yay!
Perform content ideation around the buyer’s journey stages. Think about what the persona may look up, whom they may consult, trade shows they may attend — any steps they may take or influencing events during the buying process.
These and other questions can help you formulate the right topics for your content calendar.
Inventory and audit your existing content. Look at the content currently available on your site. Which pieces still work with your new content strategy? What needs an update or refresh? Should any of these items be repurposed, and which ones should you kill? Use your keyword research to identify opportunities for improvement. Check out our content inventory and audit how-to resource.
Consider content formats and their appropriateness for each stage of the buyer’s journey. The following formats each have their place in a content marketing strategy; however, not all delivery vehicles and formats are created equally for particular stages and personas. Carefully consider how you map topics to the right content formats and sales stages for content marketing success.
Structure and Systems for Success
As we learned from the B2B Content Marketing: 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America report, most B2B content teams are small, with many only having one content creator. That makes this whole endeavor pretty daunting without the right resources, tools, workflow, budget.
Resources
Building Your Content Team
Believe it or not, your small (or solo) content marketing team can produce relevant, quality content even if you don’t have the big bucks. The important thing is to start with a focus on the essential functions and scale as you grow.
If you can’t get approval for new headcount to fill content creator roles, see if you can find in-house resources for some of the core content creation functions. Combine these internal players with a reliable agency partner to cover the six functions below to build a content marketing team.
Six Functions Required for Every Content Team
Content marketing leadership.
Content marketing leaders ensure that the overall content marketing effort is aligned to and supports business goals. Great content that doesn’t help the business is pointless, right? The content marketing leader fills all the functions of the content marketing effort with good people and ensures that everyone works within deadlines and budget constraints. This manager will also collaborate with those who perform the strategy and editorial roles to develop the content strategy.
Editorial guidance.
Editors keep the bigger picture in mind, evaluate the quality and variety of the work, and make sure the team sticks to the schedule spelled out in the editorial calendar. This kind of guidance helps the group meet high standards and ensures that they’ve optimized their work for online engagement and search engine performance.
Research.
Research responsibilities include gathering information about buying personas, studying the market and your competition, looking up and evaluating new keywords, and identifying hot topics that you should cover.
Content creation and production.
This kind of work involves coming up with ideas and finding ways to execute them beautifully. These content creators and producers may be writers, designers, multimedia specialists, etc. You may need to outsource the work to people with more specialized skills, ensuring that your content is stunning and professional.
Distribution and promotion.
If you lose track of distribution, your content will remain offline or unnoticed. Remember to post your content on your site and across a variety of platforms. Come up with creative ways to call attention to it. Consider email, SEO, social media, paid ads, and even offline marketing. Also remember that listening to online conversations is an important key to know how, when, and where to distribute and promote.
Feedback and analyses.
These are ongoing processes. You want to analyze your content’s performance, measure engagement regularly and pay attention to the feedback you receive from multiple sources, including social media chatter and reviews.
The chart below shows you how you can split up these functions between your in-house team, other employees, and a partner agency.
Marketing Team Members
Other Employees
Agency Partner or Freelancer
Leadership
Marketing leader should provide brand leadership.
Agency provides content strategy leadership.
Editing
Marketing leader provides the final review for business/ industry appropriateness.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) review for accuracy.
Agency resource edits for grammar, style, and ensures content creation deadlines are met.
Research
Marketing resource provides guidance and collaborates with agency partner on research (industry, personas, competition, etc.).
SMEs and other employees may assist with research as needed.
Agency resource conducts research to build personas, studies the competition, helps identify industry trends, etc.
Creation & Production
Some content creation may occur in the marketing department if possible.
Employees can help with content idea generation; SMEs provide feedback/interviews to help creators produce content.
Your agency fills skill gaps where needed or takes on most of the content creation and production based on your needs.
Distribution & Promotion
Content distribution and promotion tasks may take place internally based on marketing department capabilities/ resources.
Employees who are active on social media may make great employee advocates for your brand. Explore this idea.
Your agency fills skill gaps where needed or may take on the entire distribution and promotion effort. Partners can also help you create an advocacy program and train your employees.
Feedback & Analyses
Marketing team members gather data from CRM, sales systems, and other internal platforms.
Agency partners help gather data from Google Analytics, marketing automation, ad platforms, and other solutions to combine with client data for analysis and recommendations.
Qualities to Look for in Team Members and Agency Partners
The people who work together to create and promote your content should possess these qualities.
If you feel potential team members – whether a direct employee, freelancer, or agency – don’t have these qualities, they may not be the right fit for your content marketing team.
Tools to Keep the Team on Track
The right technology can go a long way in helping you streamline your content marketing process. Here is our list of favorite tools for each critical area of content marketing planning and execution.
Project management
Time tracking
Some of the project management tools mentioned above have their own time tracking options. However, you may prefer a separate option.
Editorial calendar
Some people may choose to manage their editorial calendar as part of their project management solution. Others may prefer an entirely separate solution for viewing the overall content publication and distribution plan. Also, be sure that social media planning tools aren’t forgotten. Social can play a significant role in content distribution and promotion.
Tools to get the job done
If you keep certain functions in-house, you have to have the right tools for your designers, writers, videographers, and so forth. You will also need tools to help you with marketing automation and measurement. If you outsource portions of content creation, you are off the hook for these software investments.
A Budget
Gartner found that 53 percent of marketing budgets in 2017 – 2018 went to labor and services costs, so the majority of your budget is likely going to pay people or vendors to get the content created. The rest of your budget may go to martech tools, other software, advertising, etc.
%
of marketing budget goes to labor costs*
Carefully evaluate how to make the most out of the budget you have. Are there free or lower-cost alternatives to the technology you want to use? Can you outsource to an agency or freelancers to reduce headcount costs? Are there tactics like content curation and user-generated content sourcing to fill content gaps? All of these approaches have their pros and cons. You have to decide how to make your budget work for you.
Just remember to measure your success by more than vanity metrics. If you can demonstrate an ROI, you have the proof to build the case for a bigger budget next year.
Workflow
Your workflow should make content marketing as streamlined and efficient as possible. Document processes, timeframes, roles and responsibilities to keep the flow of content and promotion going.
Your content plan tells your content team what content assets to create. Your workflow standardizes how content flows through the stages from idea to promoted asset.
Take time to identify the steps that each item must go through. For example, a blog post workflow may look like this:
If you are in a regulated industry, you may even have to have a step for review by legal.
When you take time to create a workflow and project templates, you’ve got a repeatable process for each similar content marketing asset.
Related Resources
How to Organize a Content Marketing Workflow for Your Team | Process Street
The following is a guest post from Gloria Kopp, a digital marketer and a business consultant from Manville city. She works as a content manager at Paper Fellows and is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Academized, and Huffington Post.
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Ready to Strategize?
I know this sounds like a lot of work . . . And it is. However, think of the benefits. With a B2B content marketing strategy, you won’t spend time struggling to come up with content ideas. You will have a clear picture of the resources you need to complete your plan and can budget for them up front instead of struggling to figure it all out later on your own. You will have a method in place for measuring ROI.
If you are one of those many small or solo member content teams out there, we’ve created a template to help you put these pieces together. Download your copy today or contact us to discuss our B2B content marketing services.