We’ve reached the critical point in our content marketing guide where we need to ‘get our hands dirty’ and create an actual content marketing strategy.

This stage can be confusing for many, especially with the amount of best practice articles that you can easily find on the internet. We hope this blog will help clear some confusion and provide you with some structure for your approach.

Every marketing action needs a strategy, with clear objectives that you can track and measure and content marketing is no exception.

No matter the stories your brand wants to tell, they need to follow a content marketing strategy that can facilitate interaction with the target audience. Doing things chaotically will not get you any results and will only waste your valuable resources.

If you find that you’re stuck, start the planning process by answering the following questions. Create an outline of your strategy which you can then expand further.

1. Why am I doing this? What do I want to achieve?

The first step is to set up clear objectives that will give you get a sense of purpose and direction.

Picking some key performance indicators based on your objectives  will help you track and measure the success of your campaign.

In B2B you can focus on KPIs like reach, engagement, sentiment or conversion.

Reach tells you how many people have actually seen your content (unique visits) as well as where the content is more popular (location) or how the audience is consuming the content (what device). 

Engagement is the way people are actually interacting with your content: comments, shares, likes, etc. Other good indicators of how people engage with your content are bounce rates or the time spent on page- having thousands of views on a blog post are not so valuable if people are leaving the page in just a few seconds.  Having many page views is also a valuable goal, because it means that people are constantly coming back to your content.

Sentiment tracks a negative/positive context; this can be achieved  by monitoring comments. This can help you get a better insight into consumers’ attitudes and feelings towards your brand. Social sharing also plays a part here so you have to make sure your content is easily shareable.

Conversions will tell you how many leads you managed to collect. It’s worth considering what represents a conversion/lead for your campaign whether it’s a newsletter sign-up, whitepaper download or a new business enquiry and what value this offers your company. This will help you accurate work out your ROI.

2. Who am I talking to?

For a more targeted approach its worth  creating a persona or various personas based on the knowledge you have on the audience.

This will be a representation of  the person you want to speak to and to whom you should write content for. 

You can also match the different personas with the stages in the buying cycle (discovery, awareness, consideration, preference, decision, post-purchase), and then create content that will support lead generation, nurturing and scoring.

3. How will I talk to them?

The main purpose of content marketing is to educate the audience and establish yourself as an authority in the field. Which is why your content should be valuable and not self promotional, as well as relevant and consistent.

There are many tools that companies can use in their content marketing strategy, but we think this explanation (inspired by HubSpot) offered by Gregory Ciotti (@gregoryciotti) provides  a really good overview of the types of content you should tackle:

• Wheat bread content: in-depth pieces that are related to your industry, in order to demonstrate your knowledge to your readers


• White bread content: content that is easier to read and provides a sense of entertainment; content that is shareable and “snack able”.

When it comes to B2B content marketing,  people have the impression that it’s all about white papers and webinars. Truth is, there are many opportunities to be creative with your content, starting with the company blog to online courses, podcasts, videos, presentations etc.

This image is a very accurate representation of what a content marketing should include

The company blog has become an essential piece in every content strategy, because it’s the easiest way to get information distributed. The Eloqua guide on B2B Content Marketing summed up the importance of a blog perfectly by saying that a company’ s blog is “the sun in the marketer’s solar system”.

The blog can help with traffic rankings and SEO and it’s the perfect way to establish your brand personality and voice.

Regular and relevant updates will slowly build an audience that will think of you as a desired source of information.

The classic whitepaper is still  important because of the role it plays in the consideration stage of the purchase funnel.

A whitepaper can allow you to address topics that require a more extensive explanation and it’s usually very popular among companies that offer SaaS (Software as a Service)or more sophisticated products.  They are also a good method for lead capturing, due to practice of asking for contact details for downloading.

E-books have a longer format and can be created as stand-alone pieces to familiarise a potential lead with the industry.

They can support more visual information and they have to be reader-friendly for skim reading.

Videos are becoming more and more effective in the B2B environment due the fact that people are now more inclined towards visual and condensed content.

A video can be created and used for many purposes such as building brand awareness, product or service demonstration, educate the market, generate leads, etc.

4. How will I distribute my content?

One important aspect in any content strategy is the content promotion, or how you will actually reach the targeted audience.

The dissemination strategy should include multiple channels such as social media, emails, paid advertising (e.g. Adwords, paid advertising on social media, re-marketing).

Social media means more than Facebook or Twitter, there are many bookmarking sites (e.g. Delicious) or news sharing sites (e.g. Reddit) where you can share your content in order to grow its reach.

Another popular and effective tactic in disseminating content is influencer outreach, or building relationships with people from your industry that have a great number of followers in order to get them to promote your content.

This requires quite a lot of time, so don’t be disappointed if you don’t see immediate results.

E-mail newsletters are a great way to disseminate your content based on the prospects stage in the purchase funnel, as well as delivering exclusive content to those subscribed.  They’re the most effective way of getting the content read considering that you already have permission to contact the audience.

This is general advice at how to become successful when doing content marketing but luckily there are many more in-depth resources out there, just a Google search away. Also, we are more than happy to give you any recommendations or answer any questions you have, so feel free to comment. If you found this useful, share it with your followers and spread the knowledge.

In the next post we will discuss some brands that have successfully used content marketing to build their businesses. If you have any suggestions leave them in the comments below or contact us on our social profiles.

See Also:

• Content Marketing in the B2B World
• How is content marketing different from a traditional advertising approach?

Image Source: econsultancy.com