
A B2B Content Marketing Strategy That Works in 2025
Having a strong B2B content marketing strategy is more important than ever as we enter 2025. It’s a competitive world, and businesses must adapt to new trends and best practices to succeed. Estimates by Statista suggest that American companies will spend nearly $70 billion annually on B2B advertising by 2026, so finding an efficient strategy will be vital.
Content marketing isn’t just about creating articles or blogs; it’s about building relationships, delivering value, and establishing trust with other businesses.
We live in an age of rapid technological advancements, and businesses that stay ahead of the curve will thrive. This article offers some tips to help you create a content marketing plan that speaks to your audience, strengthens your brand, and drives results.
Quick Takeaways
- Ideal customer profiles help B2B companies target qualified leads more effectively, increasing efficiency and revenue.
- Buyer personas focus on decision-makers’ motivations, tailoring content to specific roles for greater engagement.
- Align your buyer journey and sales process to deliver valuable content at the right stage, boosting conversions.
- Sales and marketing team alignment is essential for cohesive content and better customer experiences.
- Diversify content types and distribution channels to engage audiences effectively, ensuring broad reach and impact.
The Foundation of B2B Content Marketing
B2B content marketing is when organizations develop and share valuable content to attract and engage other businesses rather than individual consumers (B2C). B2B deviates from B2C content marketing because there’s a different audience and buying process.
In B2B, multiple people within an organization make decisions, so the buying process is longer and more complex. The focus is less on emotional appeal and more on providing in-depth information that helps solve business problems.
A strong B2B content marketing strategy delivers value through educational and insightful content. By doing so, businesses can become thought leaders in their industry and build trust and credibility with potential clients in the process.
Relationships matter in B2B sales, and content marketing nurtures these relationships by offering solutions, expertise, and insights. Offering this information can support decision-making and build long-term partnerships.
Develop Your Ideal Customer Profile
Making the initial connection with prospective customers used to be the responsibility of sales reps. Today, most users are doing their brand research online, so your company’s content does much of the engagement work that once fell under your sales team.
B2B companies have the unique challenge of selling to both companies and individuals. To do that, they need separate frameworks for defining each target audience. The first is the ideal customer profile (ICP), which includes the organizational attributes that describe your perfect customer — the kind of company that would benefit most from your solutions.
Ideal customer profiles take into account characteristics like company size, industry, budget, location, customer base, and current technologies. They help B2B companies better understand customer pain points and needs and build targeted strategies to address them.
ICPs also help companies shift away from the “everyone is a prospect” mindset — AKA casting the widest net possible and pursuing every single lead. Instead, they focus on pursuing qualified leads that fit the right profile, which leads to better efficiency, higher conversion rates, and increased sales and revenue.
Define Your Buyer Personas
Once you have your ICP completed, it’s time to move on to buyer personas. Every marketer is familiar with the term “persona”, but few actually approach them the right way. Personas should focus not on arbitrary individual traits but rather on what people are trying to accomplish in their roles.
In this way, buyer personas are extremely relevant for B2B companies because they focus on the decision-makers within organizations that fall under your ICP.
You’ll likely have more than one buyer persona under each of your ICPs. Every persona requires tailored messaging that aligns with the specific motivations of someone in that role for seeking your solution. B2B purchase decisions are a big deal to the people who make them — not only do they require a significant financial investment, but they also have larger impacts on that person’s entire organization.
When you craft content that resonates with your buyer’s unique needs and motivations, you put their minds at ease and increase the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase.
Know Your Buyer Journey and Sales Process Inside Out
Up next are your buyer journey and sales process, two related but different components of your B2B content marketing strategy. Your buyer journey describes the journey your buyer goes through on their way to becoming a customer. Your sales process describes how you guide them through that journey.
The buyer journey should dictate your sales process, and never the other way around. You can’t control the actions and behaviors of your prospective customers. Instead, you need to know what they are and align your sales process to them.
You might be wondering: how exactly does this relate to content? Today, most B2B buyers conduct research before they ever get in touch with a brand. In addition, Gartner reports that 64% of B2B buyers in the tech space want a completely digital buying experience.
So, how are they learning about and connecting with your brand during the early stages of the buyer journey?
You guessed it — your content.
When you align your sales process with your buyer journey, you can then create content that’s specifically valuable for each of these stages. This is more important than you might think. If you are just becoming aware of your need for a solution, for example, you need educational content, not a product demo or pricing model. If you’re in the decision stage, however, that kind of information is exactly what you need.
An aligned sales process and buyer journey ensure that the right content gets to the right audience at the right time, delivering the highest possible value and moving people forward through their buyer journey.
Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams
Marketing and sales teams have the same high-level goals, right? They both want to attract more customers and earn more sales for their company. But for some reason, aligning marketing and sales teams is one of the most common challenges companies face as they develop their B2B content marketing strategy.
Many B2B professionals feel that their marketing and sales alignment isn’t as strong as it should be. This holds true even though companies that do align their teams well experience higher retention rates and higher sales.
So what gives?
Most of the time, this is due to a lack of clarity around the separate (but complementary!) roles that these two functions play in acquiring new customers.
Marketing teams are responsible mainly for building awareness. They’re the creative brains behind a company’s content. They work to define the right brand voice, tone, and design. They come up with content ideas and typically have the writers, designers, and editors on staff to create them.
Sales teams, on the other hand, are not creating content — but they are using it. Sales reps are the direct liaisons between a company and their prospective and current customers. They use content to communicate, convert sales, and keep customers happy after a purchase is complete. This is often called sales enablement content.
To optimize your B2B content marketing strategy, there should be a continuous communication loop between your marketing and sales teams. Marketing guides your sales reps through the right messaging and branding, and sales reps provide crucial feedback about how customers are receiving your content.
A good place to start is by collaborating on goal-setting activities. When teams build buy-in together, they’re more likely to stay aligned along the way. Then, foster collaboration with frequent meetings to assess progress, share feedback and ideas, and make adjustments to your strategy that benefit both teams.
Choose Your Content Types and Channels
A hallmark of a strong B2B content marketing strategy is diversity of content and distribution. Your B2B content marketing strategy should include different types of content distributed using a multichannel approach.
Let’s talk first about the content types commonly used by B2B companies:
Blogs
An active blog is a must for every content marketing strategy. It serves as the primary driver of organic web traffic and houses your content library. Blogs should ideally be updated multiple times per week (between 11-16 times per month).
Video
About 92% of marketers say video generates a solid return on investment. It’s also the most in-demand type of content by users B2B companies can use video to provide topical content, webinars, product demos, live event streams, and more.
Infographics
Infographics are an extremely effective way to share a lot of information in one centralized, easily digestible format. Users love infographics and share them more than most other types of content.
Ebooks
Ebooks are educational documents (usually downloadable) that provide extended coverage on a topic of high interest to your audience. They’re usually somewhat casual and have a heavy design element to them.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers share a similar purpose with ebooks but are longer-form and a bit more academic. They deep dive into a topic and are usually positioned for audiences who are already somewhat seasoned in the topic it covers.
Case Studies
Case studies are the best way to demonstrate the real-world applicability of your solutions while showcasing current happy customers. They use storytelling to share how.
Podcasts
Podcasts are all the rage right now, and B2B companies are taking note. They are fairly easy to produce and can be a great way to showcase your company’s expertise on topics related to your industry and important to your customers.
Content Distribution
What about channels? Multichannel distribution is the best way to ensure your content is reaching your target audiences in the places where they’re looking for it. Most companies use 4-6 content distribution channels, but if you’re just building your B2B content marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to start with two and build it out gradually.
While there are some must-include channels like your website and email, it’s up to each company to determine which other channels will be most effective at reaching your target audience.
Create a B2B-Focused Content Plan
Your B2B content marketing strategy needs an execution plan behind it to keep your teams on track and accountable. There are two main components to content planning that you should use: your work plan and your content calendar. Sometimes, both of these plans can live right in the same document.
Your work plan outlines tasks that need to be completed for content creation and publishing, including who is responsible and the deadline for each task. Your content calendar outlines the delivery and publication dates for your content.
Implement Your Content Marketing Strategy
Now it’s time to start publishing! Here are a few best-practice tips to keep in mind as you create your content and execute your plan:
Be SEO-Driven
No matter how great your content is, it won’t drive results unless it appears on search engine results pages. Be sure your marketing team conducts keyword research to find the topics and search terms most relevant to your industry and audience. Then, develop content around those topics using SEO best practices. Building and refining your SEO strategy works wonders in this scenario.
Create Value-First Content
Customers care first and foremost about solving their problems. That’s why your B2B content marketing strategy should always focus on creating value-first content. In other words, content that emphasizes the value and benefits your solutions will deliver rather than product and service features.
Certainly, features have their place in the sales process, but it’s usually in the later stages when customers are making a final decision. And even then, the final purchase choice will likely go to the company best demonstrating how they can make that customer’s life better or job easier.
Let AI Power Your Content Production and Distribution
The amount of data that websites, apps, and businesses are collecting about online behavior and customers is growing at an exponential rate. In fact, worldwide data consumption is expected to reach 180 zettabytes (that’s 21 zeros!) in 2025.
While the sheer volume of this data means that it can be difficult for humans to process and gain insights from, spotting patterns and trends in data is something that machines are very good at.
Artificial intelligence software can now assist in all stages of content marketing — from spotting upcoming topic trends in the research phase and optimizing headlines for maximum impact and click-through rate to automatically determining the best social networks and best times to promote content.
Intelligent software can not only speed up the content production process and make it more efficient, but it can help you to make content that better serves the needs of your audience too.
Provide Personalized or Custom Experiences
AI and increased data collection have also made it possible to deliver a highly personalized experience to each individual member of your audience.
When you have data about demographics, browsing behavior, and previous engagement with your brand, you can use this information to deliver “hyper-personalized” content experiences to each user, custom-designed to be as useful and engaging as possible.
Customers expect personalized conveniences like connected processes (think omnichannel communication), sellers who understand how they want/need to use products and services, and instant, on-demand engagement).
As anyone on the sales team knows, it’s making this human connection with someone who can make a sale. The same is true in content marketing. When your content is targeted in its delivery, prioritizes topics that your customers care about, and has a responsive design for seamless consumption, you can expect your leads to stick around.
By personalizing your B2B content marketing strategy, you not only streamline your sales funnel and improve your conversion rate but also help build relationships with the individuals making purchase decisions for their companies.
Use Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are high-value, usually downloadable assets offered in exchange for a prospective customer’s contact information. They typically aim to help prospects solve a problem they’re facing or accomplish an important task.
When used effectively, lead magnets can increase opt-in rates. So, those ebooks, whitepapers, and how-to guides you’re already creating as part of your strategy? Turn them into lead magnets for even bigger results!
Include Strong Calls to Action
Your prospective customers won’t know what to do next unless you tell them! That’s why calls to action (CTAs) are so important to include in every single piece of content you publish.
CTAs tell users what the next logical step is that they should take to continue on their buyer journey.
Make Your Content Shareable
Did you know that content can turn current and prospective customers into brand advocates? Think about it: you see content shared on social media every day. When your B2B content marketing strategy covers topics that are relevant and interesting to your audience, they are likely to share that content through their own channels.
That’s if you make it shareable. Fortunately, creating shareable content is pretty easy. Two simple steps you can take to encourage sharing are adding social sharing buttons to your blog posts and sharing your blog posts and other content on your own social pages.
Lead with Employee Generated Content (EGC)
Influencer marketing can certainly be effective, but it can also be challenging to carry out in a B2B setting.
The answer is to use your own employees as influencers — the people who work for you are the best advocates for your business.
Employees who advocate for their companies (such as by sharing brand content!) also help drive significant growth.
Of course, for employee influencers to be engaging, genuine, and persuasive, it’s vital that they really believe in your brand and are passionate about the business succeeding.
Your internal influencers can tell the story of your brand in a way that nobody else can. But it’s essential that you nurture a positive culture of growth and support at work and do whatever you can to make every individual employee feel as if they are an integral part of the company and the brand.
Each individual can give a unique viewpoint, and consumers tend to trust content with a human face more than a generic brand. Each employee can also bring his or her unique ideas to your content plan to keep things fresh and ensure you’re never stuck for content ideas.
Your employees can be your most effective salespeople so make sure you invest in employee engagement as much as you do in your content marketing strategy.
Making Your Content Strategy Data-Driven
Content marketing is no longer an optional part of your marketing strategy but a must-have. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a business or brand that didn’t engage in some form of content marketing.
Today, successful B2B content marketers have increasingly sophisticated, data-driven content strategies with measurable goals and insights-based optimization that delivers higher ROI.
Consider this — while most businesses use content marketing in some capacity, only 3% say their strategy is extremely effective.
Many don’t even know if their strategy is successful or not. For those companies, a missing piece to their puzzle is a lack of data insights.
Those businesses that are serious about content marketing will use insights from available data to construct their B2B content marketing strategy and plan, then analyze the results to ensure success. They’ll look for ways to refine and continually improve their strategy to find, engage, and convert the right audiences.
Along with this increasing sophistication in content marketing will come more reliance on tools and technology to deal with the data and manage strategy. The number of martech solutions is continuing to grow rapidly year on year, and there are definitely some exciting developments to watch out for in the future.
Hiring a B2B Content Marketing Agency
You may not think of hiring a content strategy agency as a way to improve your own B2B content marketing strategy, but it’s fast becoming one of the top ways companies level up their execution. Here’s why — content marketing requires many moving parts and frequent, high-quality, high-volume content publishing. When you are running a business and focusing on serving your customers, content inevitably takes a back seat sometimes.
The problem is that your strategy then loses momentum, and you then lose potential customers to your competitors.
When you hire an agency, you have a dedicated, full-time team focused on your content. You can count on optimized content, reliable delivery, frequent publishing, and a data-driven approach. While it may mean a financial investment upfront to hire your new agency, outsourcing content marketing ultimately saves companies money compared to what they’d pay to hire, equip, and manage an internal content team.
Building Trust with Thought Leadership and Personalization
Positioning Your Business as an Industry Leader
Thought leadership builds trust and credibility. When your business consistently shares high-value, informative content that addresses industry challenges, it positions itself as an expert and leader in your field.
Sharing thought leadership content like insightful articles, white papers, and case studies demonstrates your knowledge and offers ideas that attract potential clients. Doing so will establish authority and build long-lasting trust with your audience.
The Power of Personalization
Personalization can also build connections with your audience. Tailoring content to specific customer segments or individual needs enhances the user experience by making your content more relevant and engaging.
Whether through personalized email campaigns, targeted resources, or custom solutions, adapting your content to address unique pain points shows that your business understands and values each client’s needs. Personalization builds deeper relationships, making customers feel seen and understood, driving long-term success.
Start Your Content Marketing Journey
A well-planned B2B content marketing strategy can make a difference for your company. You can build stronger relationships and create long-term growth by delivering real value to your audience, leveraging data-driven insights, and staying flexible. As trends and technologies evolve, altering your approach to meet your market’s needs can set you apart from the crowd.
Marketing Insider Group has solutions, such as our Content Builder Services, that can push you in the right direction. We’ll create content that builds relationships with your target audience and establishes your brand as a thought leader. Contact MIG for more information or book a free appointment with our team.