Successful Content Strategy for small B2B Businesses

I am a strong advocate of content marketing as the marketing activity carrying the highest ROI, when it comes to B2B. While it takes effort, consistency and time to execute and see results, content allows you to establish your brand, increase your leads and grow your business exponentially, by simply compounding over time. And the best of it is that's you don't owe Google or Facebook any money. It might be worth looking into content marketing and why it's important in a separate essay. For now, let's focus on content strategy.

What is content strategy in B2B

Let's start with a definition, here. A content strategy is a plan that marketers use to create, maintain and measure the content they publish online. If you are in business-to-business marketing, or if you're the owner of a small B2B company and you realize it's time to do some marketing, it's important to have a well thought-out content strategy so your business will be successful. Content is a great way to generate leads and build long-term demand, as it's the most cost-effective way to attract new customers and drive growth. Bear in mind, though, there are two caveats worth considering, here:

it takes considerable effort to build and roll out a content engine that gets results: you are building a flywheel, and it takes solid effort to get it going. This strategy only works if you have the patience and the perseverance to consistently publish content every week for at least (at the very least) 9-12 months.
the world is littered with content that simply does not work. In 2021, both customers and algorithms know how to recognize and avoid poor content: and yet, marketers still think it's 2014, where the only thing that mattered was how much content you could publish. The only way to make your content marketing strategy work is to build quality content that your target customers need and find valuable. It has to help them and solve their issues. There are no shortcuts, here: publish something mediocre, and you will not get results.

Let's go through the processes for creating your own content strategy and apply to your own B2B business. Let's go👇

1) Define your goals

The first step in creating an effective content strategy is to define your goals. What are you trying to achieve, exactly? For example, are you trying to increase revenue? Are you interested in building a brand and generating awareness? Do you want to become a thought leader in your field?

There’s no right answer for this, it all depends on your business. It could be either one of these things, or a combination of them. It could even be something else entirely. The important part is to make sure you know exactly what you want to do with your content, and then make sure that it aligns with these goals.

Revenue

If revenue is your goal, the focus of your strategy should be on generating leads for what you are selling. You will also need to establish how many leads are necessary in order to reach those goals: for example, if you know that one every 50 leads turns into a customer, and you know how much money you made from one customer (you know that, right?) then you can do the math and calculate how many leads you need to generate in order to achieve your revenue goals.

Brand Awareness

If brand awareness is your goal, the focus of your strategy should be on building a consistent and recognizable presence for your company in order to build an audience that recognizes or knows about it. The process for doing this will involve creating content that people want to relate to, read and share with others.

Make sure you always have the end game in mind.

I have a background in sales and I am strongly biased towards considering revenue as ~~the only thing that matters~~ the most important goal for your content strategy. After all, revenue is the only objective metric that can be measured and determined with absolute certainty. This, in turn, makes measuring your content efforts easier - in fact, it could be as easy as simply checking how much of your website traffic and conversions are generated by all the content you distribute on your website or social media channels.

2) Building trust and authority

Now that we have established a goal for our content efforts, there is something important worth mentioning. Your content strategy is going to help you reach your goals by helping your customers solve their issues and be better at their jobs: the way this is achieved is by building trust and authority. Trust is important because it is what will allow your customers to believe in you and invest their time and resources into listening to what you have to say. If you earn their trust, it becomes probable that, when the right moment comes, you will earn their business, too. Authority is what will have your target audience turn to you, whenever they have questions they need answers to: if you establish yourself as the thought leader in the space and people recognize you as the true expert in the field, they will also trust that your product or service is exactly what they need to solve whatever problems you are trying to help them solve.

If the goal helps you understand the why of your content strategy, trust and authority are the framework for explaining the how.

3) Choose what type of content you need to achieve these goals

You might think that "content" equals starting a blog. While I generally believe starting a blog is a great thing to do for businesses and individuals alike, content doesn't necessarily mean blog posts. There are so many different content types and distribution channels to choose from:

videos,
infographics (yes, they're still legit!),
webinars,
podcasts,
eBooks,
white papers,
Twitter threads,
Clubhouse rooms

You name it. You could build a YouTube channel or even start a paper magazine focused on your industry: all of this is content, and any one of these content types can help you achieve your ultimate goal.

What you choose to do will depend on a few factors:

Budget: how much money can you spend on a quarterly basis? The cash needed to write a blog post is really just about paying someone on Upwork to make some imagery and someone else to proofread. If you want to make a customer testimonial video, and you want to do it professionally, you are looking to spend around $5,000. Choose wisely.
Time: how much time can you or someone in your team allocate to making content? If you're using a consultant or an agency, how many hours are they going to allocate to your project on a weekly basis? Remember: you have to publish content consistently over long periods of time, so pick your battles.
Your audience: this is by far the most important factor in deciding what content type you should focus on is one. What type of content is relevant for the audience you are targeting? What do they like to consume? Just because you like to watch YouTube videos, it doesn't mean that your audience will be interested in them. Where do they hang out online? What is the format they will prefer? If you don't know, just ask them, learn from them: it will become clear what you have to do to provide value.

The sweet spot for the content type you want to develop is the intersection of what your target audience prefers and what you like/are good at doing. For example, if you are a great writer you might want to lean towards e-guides or other forms of written comms.

Let me challenge you a bit, though: if you are the one actually building the content, how about you take this opportunity to get out of your comfort zone and learn a new skill? Maybe if you're shy, making Youtube video tutorials or video explainers might not be the easiest thing to do, but it will certainly teach you a lot. This is a true story: I speak English with a mild but somewhat distinct accent, and sitting in front of a camera is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think about exciting things to do: still, I think there's value in being able to put yourself out there, so I'm actually planning to be active on video (more on this another time 😃).

If you have enough resources, here's another thing worth considering: different content formats can be used at different stages of the buying journey. You can make a Youtube video for awareness purposes; write a few blog posts to teach your target audience something valuable and establish trust; build a 3-email course for warming them up, and finally close them with a downloadable white paper. Sounds nice, eh? It really does. However, this is something you should pursue only if you have a big-enough team or enough budget to pay a content agency - otherwise, this is probably not the time to get fancy: you want to build a content strategy that you can actually deliver on. Avoid overcomplicating things and choose a sustainable way to build content: you're planting the seeds, so you have to make sure you are able to publish high-quality content on a constant basis.

4) Develop a plan to create the desired content

Let's recap a little bit before we move on. You now have a goal (i.e. revenue), you know what you need to get there (establish trust and authority), and what content format you are going to do (i.e. a podcast). Now it's time to develop a plan.

The very first question you need to ask yourself is: what content will help my customers? What is it they are interested in? What issues do they have in their jobs? What would make them look good with their managers?

Building content is not something you are doing for the sake of doing it: you do it because you want to reach your goal, and the goal influences what content you want to build.

For example, say you are selling detergents for swimming pools (🤷) and you really want to start a Youtube channel: if your goal is to establish a brand, you could make fancy videos where you show the incredible swimming pools owned by millionaires, with the purpose of of making your product aspirational and aligning it with the lifestyle of the rich and the famous. On the other hand, if your goal is to generate leads, then a better idea is to target wholesale distributors of swimming pool supplies and give them videos that matters to them. "What matters to them?", you may wonder. Well, ask them. They are likely interested in increasing their business, so you could make videos about how to grow their business: you could make a series of interviews with successful business owners in the field that share their tips to increase sales. You could then take each and every tip they provide and transform it into a dedicated video episode.

The goal shapes the topic you are going to cover in your content strategy. The common theme, however, is to think like your target customer and build content that helps them. In B2B, it is usually a good idea to keep in mind that customers are mostly motivated by things that:

make them money
save them money
save them time

Pick one or more of these angles, and your content is already better than the vast majority of the stuff everyone else publishes.

How to find topics for your content strategy

Google is a phenomenal tool for inspiration. When googling something, pay attention to the autocomplete function: Google will suggest you related searches, and you can use them to figure out what else your target audience is interested in. Another tip is to check the "Related Searches" section at the bottom of the page: similar to the autocomplete feature, it can give you some hints on what type of content you could explore.

Now do this: before you start typing your outline, read the content that shows up on Google, so you learn what Google thinks it's worth proposing to your audience. Bear in mind, if you want to build something people are going to find interesting, I strongly recommend you avoid being a copycat and, instead, take a personal approach. You don't need to write something new, but you need to have a fresh angle, or a new perspective, or a new way of expressing the information.

Once you pick the content, identify five pieces of content you could build today. For practical purposes, lets continue with the swimming pool detergent example - here are five possible pieces:

"5 ways to get your pool ready for summer"
"How to build a swimming pool from scratch"
"10 mistakes to avoid when cleaning the pool"
"3 ways to save money on pool maintenance"
"My best swimming pool cleaning tip"

In each of these pieces, you have various ways to add a plug to your product, although avoid being too sales-y, here. The main objective is to help-the-customer. If your target customers read this article and can't get much value, then it's not even worth building it in the first place.

If you have the budget to hire an agency, I would recommend you ask them to help you with keyword research Keyword research is what search engine optimization (SEO) professionals do to find and research search terms that users google. This can be useful as it will give you direction on what you have to focus on, to get your content to rank on Google.

Now it's time to build.

5) Get ready to spend time building quality content

You should block your calendar and allocate a few hours every single week to research the content topic. Remember to think like your customer. What would they google? What keywords would they type in on Youtube? What LinkedIn resources would they consume? This helps you both make an outline for your piece of content and also give you inspiration for what other content you could build next.

Start putting together an outline so you clarify what you want to cover in your piece, and in what order.

A practical approach

Remember the search you have just made in the previous chapter? Now read through the top 10 pages that show up in the Google results page, then write down all the points that each article makes and all the things they cover. This way, you understand what makes their article so good that Google is ranking it at the top of their organic search result page.

Take note of the opening and closing remarks, pay attention to whether they are using supporting imagery (infographics, explainers, etc.) or supporting videos: try to recognize every pattern. Have you done it? Great, now build your own content including everything you have just learned, and do it with your own voice. This is not my idea: this approach is called the skyscraper technique, as introduced by Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko.

You can also work with a team of writers to divide and conquer the workload, or you could hire a freelancer or an agency to get some help. If you have the budget and you're serious about it, you could potentially start recruiting a content specialist, so that you get someone fully dedicated to this. I personally prefer using agencies here, as they can use data insights or metrics (i.e., how many people are searching for a specific keyword) as a guide on where to focus your content marketing efforts.

There is no limit to how much time you need to spend doing your research: it takes the time that it takes to gather the information you need to build great content. For example, if you are planning to build a "state of the union" report on your industry, a good way to go about it is to interview the thought leaders in the space. These pieces of content are usually wildly successful and have a strong virality element, but they are also very complex to build and extremely time consuming: this stuff can easily take weeks to be built. Try to factor this in, when considering what piece of content you want to build: remember to have a regular cadence in your content publishing, and try to stick to it.

6) Build your content once, distribute it forever

Building content is only half of the job. The other, equally important, half is distributing the content you have just built.

One of my favourite marketers, Ross Simmonds, has this motto: build once, distribute forever.

The idea behind this is simple but incredibly powerful (but hard to put in practice): you can build a piece of content about a specific topic, and then remix it in a variety of formats and content types to distribute the same piece of content multiple times in multiple formats, across multiple channels.

Your Youtube video could be turned into a blog post on your website, that could then be turned into an infographic for Pinterest, and then a series of LinkedIn posts that you could publish over the course of two weeks. You could take that one article you wrote about "top five tips for doing X" and break it down into five different pieces, each one of them being a deep-dive on one of the tips. You can then create a short Instagram video about it, then remix it and send it out as your next newsletter. I could go on forever.

The key is in multiplying that one idea you have into different content pieces, that you can distribute again across multiple channels. Re-mixing the same topic into different formats is your way out of the content hamster wheel, and it allows you to multiply the amount of content assets you can build and distribute. You don't necessarily need a new idea each time you are building content: what you need is to promote your idea to build trust and authority.

7) Measure your results, then repeat

A key factor when implementing your content strategy is patience: it can take months or even years before the benefits are seen. Don't expect immediate results, and don't give up publishing content just because you don't see the flywheel effect just yet. Just because you are publishing content but getting no results, it doesn't mean that your content strategy doesn't work. Give it some time, spend as much effort promoting your content as making it, and keep measuring your results along the way so you know what works and what doesn't, then adjust accordingly.

Use analytics software like Google Analytics to track page views, bounce rates, user engagement (time on site), etc. See what content gets the most traction and what falls flat. For example, you might find out that blog posts have a higher engagement than YouTube videos with your audience, so adjust your content strategy accordingly to increase your engagement: prioritize publishing more blog posts to make sure your content gets more views, comments, likes, etc.

The flywheel effect becomes clear when progress builds on itself, but it takes quite some effort to get started. Give it enough time, and the flywheel starts spinning: you will immediately see your cost of acquisition falling and the number of leads increasing - music to every business owner's hears.

Have you ever thought about building content to increase leads? Have you done it successfully? Drop me a line at simone@marchili.io, I'm very eager to learn more from you.