Content Marketing
A B2B Content Marketing Strategy That Works in 2023

A B2B Content Marketing Strategy That Works in 2023

August 3, 2023
13 min read

Do you feel like your B2B content marketing strategy has become stale and your methods don’t seem to be getting the results they used to?

It’s vital to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and tactics if you want to stay relevant to your audience and avoid falling behind your competitors. If you haven’t changed up your content strategy in the last 12 months, it’s time to take stock, figure out what’s working, and consider what new tactics you can employ to make the most out of your content.

In this in-depth article — call it ultimate guide, if you will — we’ll cover the steps to building a B2B content marketing strategy that:

  • targets the right audience
  • optimizes your internal processes
  • produces high-value content
  • improves lead generation and conversion rates

Let’s get started!

Quick Takeaways:

  • Marketing and sales alignment makes B2B content marketing strategies more effective.
  • For best results, companies should create multiple types of content delivered across multiple channels.
  • B2B companies can leverage AI to produce and promote content at optimal levels.
  • Personalized content improves your conversion rates and builds one-to-one brand-customer relationships.
  • Your employees can tell your brand story more convincingly than anyone else.
  • Data enables companies to continually improve and refine their strategies based on real-time insights.
  • Content marketing agencies help save costs and execute more scalable strategies.

Develop Your Ideal Customer Profile

Making the initial connection with prospective customers used to be the responsibility of sales reps. Today, in a digital landscape where most users are doing their brand research online, 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 describes 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.

Attributes covered in ICP framework.

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 can 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 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.

Here’s a good visual that shows the relationship between your ICP and buyer personas:

Visual showing the relationship between ICP and buyer personas.

As you can see, 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, they 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.

Here’s a good example of a sales process aligned with a buyer journey:

Sales process aligned with buyer journey.

You might be wondering: how exactly does this relate to content? Today, B2B buyers conduct between 57-70% of their research before they ever get in touch with a brand. 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 do need.

In summary, an aligned sales process and buyer journey ensures 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.

Recent research found that 58% of B2B professionals feel that their marketing and sales alignment isn’t as strong as it should be. This, even though companies that do align their teams well experience higher retention rates, higher sales, and are 67% better at closing deals.

So what gives?

Most of the time, this is due to 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 brain 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 it.

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 effectively, convert sales, and keep customers happy after a purchase is complete. This is often called sales enablement content.

You can see here how marketing and sales roles align with a traditional sales funnel:

Marketing and sales funnel

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

Video is predicted to account for 82% of all web traffic by the end of this year. 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 your products and services have made a positive impact on current customer organizations (you can see some MIG examples on our dedicated case studies page).

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.

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.

You can see below the many different types of channels B2B companies have to choose from:

List of multichannel marketing channels.

Image Source

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 (at MIG, ours does).

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.

To help you get started, you can view and download the content marketing planning template we use at MIG.

List of multichannel marketing channels.

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. Read our guide on building and refining your SEO strategy for more resources on this.

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.

Here’s more on how you can create content that’s value-driven:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6FfJNSOiAU&feature=youtu.be

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 174 zettabytes (that’s 21 zeros!) by 2024 — nearly double it’s 2021 rate.

Worldwide data consumption is expected to reach 174 zettabytes by 2024, nearly double its 2021 rate.

While the sheer volume of this data means that it can be difficult for humans to process effectively 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.

Salesforce reports that 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number (AKA receiving personalized attention) is very important to winning their business. This applies as much for B2C content marketing as it does in the B2B context.

Further, 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).

Salesforce research shows 84% of buyers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.

Image Source: Salesforce UK

As anyone on the sales team knows, it’s making this human connection with someone that 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 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 helps 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 by up to 85%. 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. Check out our guide to optimizing calls to action to develop CTAs that deliver.

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. It’s for this reason that over 70% of marketers use their employees as influencers.

Employees who advocate for their companies (such as by sharing brand content!) also help drive significant growth — employee-shared posts reach a staggering 571% wider audiences, and the leads they generate are 7X more likely to convert to sales.

Statistics showing that employee advocacy drives company growth, including by reaching a 571% larger audience with shared posts, and generating leads that are 7X more likely to convert.

Image Source: Peer to Peer Marketing

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 generic bra. 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.

Leverage live video

HubSpot’s most recent State of Video report highlights exactly why it’s more important than ever to make video part of your digital content strategy. Their survey found that 90% of marketers say video has increased leads for their company — up from 86% in 2022 and the highest rate ever reported since the survey has been conducted.

Graph showing finding from HubSpot's State of Video Report that 90% of marketers say video has increased leads for their business.

Other must-know stats from the survey drive this point home even further:

  • 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 96% see it as a critical part of their strategy
  • 92% of marketers say video gives them a positive ROI (another all-time high)
  • 87% of marketers say video has a direct positive impact on sales
  • 96%  say it helps increase user understanding of their products and services
  • 96% of consumers say they watch videos to learn about products and services
  • 79% say video has directly convinced them to make a purchase

The takeaway — if you aren’t already using marketing in your content marketing strategy, the time to start is right now.

And while all types of video will continue to grow in popularity in 2023, live video, in particular, is one strategy that is certainly worth considering integrating into your content strategy.

Live video is becoming an increasingly important part of several social networks. 80% of consumers would rather watch a live video than read a blog post. And Facebook has said that users spend 3 times longer watching live videos than standard videos.

As live video is unedited, it’s a great way to demonstrate authenticity and transparency, and build trust in your brand. Live video can also be interactive and is effective at engaging your audience.

As well as being a popular content format, live content converts extremely well. One survey found that 67% of people watching a livestream would go on to make a purchase.

67% of livestream viewers purchase a ticket to a similar event.

Making Your Content Strategy Data-Driven

Content marketing is no longer an optional part of your marketing strategy, but a must-have in today’s digital age. 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 94% of businesses use content marketing in some capacity, only 9% say their strategy is very successful. Many don’t even know if their strategy is successful or not. For those companies, I’d strongly venture to guess a missing piece to their puzzle is lack of data insights. Further, an overwhelming majority of marketers — 87% — say data is their most underutilized asset.

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 up front to hire your new agency, outsourcing content marketing ultimately saves companies up to 90% compared to what they’d pay to hire, equip, and manage an internal content team.

Boost Results from Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy Today

An effective B2B content marketing strategy starts with great content. Content marketing offers too many benefits to ignore, but not everyone has the time or resources to be able to write and produce their own content in-house. Hiring a writer or the services of a content marketing agency like ours help you to produce higher quality content, save you time and money, and put you in a better position to achieve your business goals.

Marketing Insider Group’s team of writers and SEO experts can deliver optimized, ready-to-publish content for you every week for a complete year or more.

If you’re interested in getting more traffic and leads for your website, or documenting your content marketing strategy, check out our Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to get started!

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of "Mean People Suck" and "The Content Formula", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group. Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.

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