A B2B content marketing strategy is crafted to amplify the reach of B2B brands and help their target audience see how the brand can solve their problem.
If you own or work at a B2B company, your content marketing strategy should not only increase brand awareness but also show your target audience why they should do business with you instead of your competitors.
Achieving this is not as easy as making a long list of keywords or publishing 1,000-word articles on your company blog once a week.
In this post, you’ll learn what a B2B content marketing strategy is, the characteristics of a good content marketing strategy, how to design a multichannel B2B content marketing channel, and some real-life companies that can inspire you with their highly effective strategies.
What Is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?
A B2B content marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how a business will create and use content to increase brand awareness, develop brand loyalty, drive qualified leads, and generate sales. It’s a roadmap that guides organizations on the types of content to create, the channels to distribute it through, and how to measure the success of the strategy.
What differentiates a B2B content marketing strategy from other types of content strategies is that a B2B strategy is created specifically for businesses whose products cater to other businesses—like an email marketing tool that other businesses use to connect with and nurture their prospects.
For a B2B content marketing strategy to be successful, the content itself has to be relevant, engaging, and useful to your readers. If your readers can’t apply the actionable parts of your content to their situation, the entire strategy is moot. As a B2B content marketer, each piece of content you create should hit the mark with your readers. This is the only way to showcase your expertise and position the business as a leading resource for professionals in your industry.
What Should a B2B Content Marketing Strategy Accomplish?
Content marketing is a popular promotional method for B2B businesses because it can deliver a high return on investment (ROI). This is largely because it’s a low-cost channel. You’ll need to pay writers, of course (if you need them), and pay for any content creation tools (if you use them) like generative AI. But as a whole, B2B content marketing doesn’t incur the large costs that are customary with advertising and event marketing.
When put into action, here’s what a B2B content marketing strategy should accomplish:
- Drive valuable traffic to your website and increase brand awareness
- Foster meaningful interactions and build trust with your prospects and customers
- Increase your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Generate qualified leads for your business
- Establish your brand as an authority in your industry
- Earn backlinks that drive traffic and improve your SEO
- Give you an edge over your competitors in terms of traffic, SERP rankings, and sales generation
Types of B2B Content
Here are the different types of B2B content you can use in your content marketing strategy:
- Blog Posts, eBooks, and Whitepapers: You can use blog posts, eBooks, and whitepapers to drive traffic to your site, educate your audience about your brand/industry, collect email addresses, and nurture leads through the marketing funnel.
- Case Studies: These detailed accounts of customer success with your business/product show prospects that your product is effective.
- Research Reports: Publishing original research can help position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Research reports can also help you generate backlinks and press coverage, which drive traffic to your site and improve your SEO.
- Webinars: Webinars are an excellent way to communicate directly with your target audience, answer their burning questions, collect their contact information, and promote your new products.
- Video Content: You can use engaging business videos, product demos, tutorials, and interviews to help prospective customers understand the features and benefits of your product.
- Podcasts: These long-form audio recordings allow your target audience to learn more about the industry through your discussions with other industry experts. This positions your brand as a thought leader and generates backlinks and qualified leads for your business.
- Social Media Content: You can post content on social media platforms including Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to engage with your target audience, increase brand awareness, and promote your product.
Impactful Content: 5 Characteristics of a Great B2B Content Marketing Strategy
To craft a great B2B content marketing strategy, there are certain elements you must include in your plan. Here are five of them:
- Audience Research
For your content to be effective, you need to know the kind of people who’d be reading and engaging with it and some key facts about them:
- Demographics (age, gender, profession, marital status, physical location, education level, income level, nationality, etc.)
- Psychographics (interests, opinions, values, beliefs, lifestyle, pain points, etc.)
- Behavior (social media use, website visits, the kind of content they like to consume, what time they use these online channels, buying habits including brand preferences and product usage, etc.)
When you know this information, you’ll be able to tailor your content to be applicable and helpful to them. You’ll know the topics to cover to address their pain points and offer them the solution they’re looking for.
- Keyword Research
If you’ll be using blog posts in your content marketing strategy (and you should), you’ll need to do keyword research to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords you can optimize your content for.
Optimizing your content for these keywords helps search engine algorithms figure out what your content is about. Then, they can rank it for the right search queries. This improves your SERP rankings and increases visibility for your brand.
You can do keyword research with SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest.
- Content Audit
If you already have existing content on your blog, social media channels, and/or podcast channels, you should do a content audit before executing a new B2B content marketing strategy. A content audit helps you spot the following:
- Existing content with untapped potential
- Any gaps within the content “buckets” that you already have
- Low-quality content that can hurt your brand’s reputation and site performance in Google search
You can conduct a content audit for free using Google Analytics (GA). GA allows you to see a breakdown of the performance of all your web pages. A low number of visits, users, engagement time, or conversions could mean that your content isn’t providing what your audience wants and that there’s room for improvement.
You can also use Google Search Console to see how your pages are performing in Google Search. In there, you’ll be able to see:
- Impressions: The number of times your web pages appeared in visible search results
- Clicks: The number of organic clicks from Google Search
- Click-through Rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in organic clicks
- Position: The average position of your web pages’ organic rankings
- Queries: The search queries/keywords your web pages rank for
If you find high-quality existing content on your site, you can use that as a promotional tool within your new strategy. You can also update low-quality blog posts. Not only is this easier than creating high-quality posts from scratch, but updated posts also rank higher in the SERPs more easily than new posts. Then, you can fill up any gaps you find with brand-new content.
- TOFU/MOFU/BOFU Content
A great B2B content marketing strategy should contain content that caters to people in all three phases of the marketing funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
This “funnel” refers to the concept of your target audience getting smaller as they make the journey from simply hearing about your brand to buying your product(s).
The types of content that cater to these phases are:
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU): This content educates your target audience about your business and exposes them to the problems that you can solve—e.g., blog posts, infographics, etc. It drives traffic and increases brand awareness.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): This content caters to people who realize that they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution—e.g., eBooks, in-depth guides, whitepapers, etc. MOFU content guides prospects through the decision-making process.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): This content caters to people who are ready to make a buying decision. At this stage, BOFU content aims to convince them to choose you over your competitors—e.g., product overviews, customer reviews, case studies, product demos, etc.
Creating content for people at each stage of the funnel not only reduces the risk of them dropping out of the funnel but also increases the chances of turning more prospects into loyal customers.
- Content Optimization
Content optimization is the process of improving the quality of content to increase its visibility and effectiveness. There are many ways to optimize content, including:
- Optimizing for Search Engines: Search engine optimization (SEO) is divided into three parts:
- On-page SEO: This involves adding target (and semantic) keywords naturally to the content’s title, (sub)headings, body, image alt texts, meta description, and URL, fulfilling search intent with in-depth content, and adding internal links for easy crawling and navigation.
- Off-page SEO: This encompasses backlink building, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and event marketing, among other things.
- Technical SEO: This involves improving your page load speed, creating a Google-friendly site structure, submitting your sitemap to Google, finding and fixing duplicate content, and making your site mobile-friendly.
- Optimizing the style of your content: This involves writing in a way that’s easy for readers to understand. To optimize the style of your content, vary your average sentence length, write shorter paragraphs, and personalize your content so readers feel you’re speaking directly to them. Also, use simple words (“use” instead of “utilize”) and maintain a consistent tone of voice in your writing.
- Optimizing content for conversions: To increase the conversion rate of your content, use the language and terminology that your target audience is familiar with, use clear and well-positioned calls-to-action (CTA) within your content, and write persuasively. Use visuals, tables, and bullet points to catch your readers’ attention.
- Write as though you’re having a conversation with your audience—one that focuses on how your product can solve their pain points.
How To: Designing a Multi-Channel B2B Content Marketing Strategy
A multi-channel B2B content marketing strategy is one that’s designed to serve your target audience at several touchpoints, as opposed to a singular channel. The goal is to produce content that existing and/or prospective customers can find on the different channels through which they consume content.
The advantage of multi-channel marketing is that if one channel performs better than another, you can adjust your focus and capitalize on that performance.
Creating an effective multi-channel B2B content marketing strategy, however, involves more than just filling up a spreadsheet with target keywords. Here are the steps to follow:
- Conduct Audience Research
Understanding the kinds of businesses you’re targeting—specifically, the key decision-makers who work at those companies—will help you create content that recognizes their problems and offers the right solution(s). You’ll also know where and when to publish content so that they’ll find it.
If you already have a blog, you can learn about your existing visitors in Google Analytics. In GA, you can see the breakdown of users by country, gender, age group, language, and more. You can also check the channels through which they found your website. This gives you an idea of your audience’s demographics and the online platforms through which they consume content, among other things.
Pro tip: Use the information you get from your research to create audience or buyer personas. Segment these personas based on their interests, buying behavior, and interaction with your brand and competitors.
You can also learn more about your target audience’s pain points and proposed solutions by working with your customer success teams and listening in on sales calls.
- Define Your Content Marketing Goals
Every marketing strategy needs a goal. Without goals, you’re playing a guessing game. Establishing goals and objectives gives your content marketing campaign direction, which helps you succeed.
Before creating content, figure out what you want to achieve. Your campaign will likely have multiple goals spread out across the different channels you’ll be using. These goals may include:
- Website traffic and brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Conversions
- Thought leadership
Once you’ve set your goals, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure the performance of your campaign. Tracking these metrics will let you know if your campaign is successful or not.
- Pick Your Core Content Formats and Channels
Next, you’ll need to choose your main content formats and the channels through which you’ll distribute this content.
To guide your decision, ask yourself:
- What kind of TOFU content do I need to create to increase brand awareness?
- For prospects who already know my brand, will in-depth guides and tutorials help them understand my product(s) better?
- What kind of BOFU content should I create to convince prospects who are ready to make a purchase to choose my product?
You should also consider your audience preferences while making your picks. What kinds of content do they engage with? Where do they like to engage with this content? For example, if your target audience likes to read articles they find through Google, then SEO is a viable channel. If they interact with bite-sized videos a lot, you may consider Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
Also, consider your target audience’s occupation. Decision-makers in companies are often busy people, so the content formats you choose must be concise and easy to digest like short blog posts, videos, and infographics. If your product is robust, you’ll need in-depth guides, case studies, customer reviews, and product demos to convert decision-makers into paying customers.
- Build a Streamlined Content Workflow
At this point, you have your target keyphrases, a deep knowledge of your target audience, your core content formats, and your channels for distribution. What’s next is to create your content.
Creating content for a multi-channel B2B content marketing strategy is strenuous and time-consuming. To make things easier, create a streamlined workflow that outlines your process from content ideation to content distribution. Here are some steps to take to build this workflow:
- Hire Content Specialists: You can’t do the work alone. Hiring in-house content specialists or outsourcing content creation to freelancers or content marketing agencies will help you produce more content in less time.
- Define All the Steps in the Content Process: If you hire in-house content specialists, document the steps that they should follow before publishing content. For example, a content process can look like this: Ideate > Create brief > Create outline > Write > Edit > Publish > Distribute. This process will guide your internal content team and help everyone know what they should be doing at a given point in time.
- Create a Content Calendar: Having a content calendar can prevent you from forgetting to create content for certain days or publishing a piece of content on the wrong day.
- Repurpose your content: You can’t always create a new piece of content from scratch. To get around this, repurpose your existing content into other formats. For example, you can repurpose a podcast episode into several blog posts.
- Use content tools: To save time and increase productivity, incorporate content tools into your workflow. These tools include:
- SEO tools for content audits, backlink opportunities, and on-page optimization
- Visual content creation tools like Canva to create infographics and videos
- Social media management tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Hypefury to create and schedule social media posts in advance
- Project management tools like Asana and ClickUp to manage projects and tasks effectively
- Learning management systems like LearnWorlds to create, market and sell online courses or deliver training to your audience.
- Distribute Your Content Effectively
Content distribution is an important aspect of a B2B content marketing strategy because the channels you choose will determine whether or not your target audience can find your content.
Below are some of the most popular distribution channels in B2B content marketing:
- Blogs (SEO): Publishing high-quality, SEO-optimized blog posts is a great way to generate organic (unpaid) traffic.
- Email Marketing: You can use email campaigns to communicate directly with prospective customers, nurture leads, and promote your product(s) and special offers.
- Social Media: LinkedIn is a networking site for business professionals, so many B2B companies distribute content there. Some companies like HubSpot, however, also create content for other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter).
- Paid Ads: If you have a sizeable budget, you can run paid ads through search engines and social media platforms. This is a great way to drive near-instant traffic while you build your organic traffic.
- Guest Posts and PR Articles: Publishing posts on other reputable websites can help you build your backlink profile and improve your search ranking.
- Track Your Progress
Remember those KPIs we talked about earlier? This is where they come into play.
According to Ascend2’s 2022 report, The State of Multi-Channel Marketing, 61% of B2B marketers believe that accurate measurement of performance is the most essential element of a successful multi-channel marketing strategy.
As you distribute your content, keep an eye on your analytics dashboard to see how well your content is performing at each stage of the campaign. The KPIs and metrics you track may differ depending on the distribution channels, you choose.
For example, if you’re using your blog/SEO as a distribution channel, you should track:
- Website Traffic
- Bounce rate
- Time of engagement
- Conversion rate
But if you’re publishing content on social media, your top metrics to measure would likely be:
- Total impressions/views
- Engagement rate (comments, number of shares, etc.)
- Click-through rate
- Total conversions (free trial sign-ups, email subscribers, purchases, etc.)
Monitoring your performance and tracking your metrics helps you know if you’ll meet your goals and if your marketing efforts are worthwhile.
B2B Content Marketing Strategy Examples
To see an effective multi-channel B2B content marketing strategy in action, here are three companies that are killing it with their strategies:
As the pioneer in inbound marketing, it’s no surprise that HubSpot’s B2B content marketing strategy is tight, robust, and effective.
The HubSpot blog is divided into five distinct categories: marketing, sales, service (customer success), website, and The Hustle (their email newsletters)—all of which bring in over 12 million readers every month.
These blogs contain engaging, in-depth articles that are laser-focused on these audience segments—which is great because HubSpot offers separate products for each segment, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub.
HubSpot also offers a ton of other valuable resources, from free eBooks/guides/original reports to free templates to free courses in the HubSpot Academy—all of which position the company as a leading expert in the marketing industry.
The company runs six podcasts centered around success, new business ideas, business and tech news, and even breakdowns of the best pitches on Shark Tank. As if that’s not engaging enough, HubSpot initiates conversations and interactions with prospective and existing customers through its social media channels.
The official HubSpot Instagram account is filled with mild, but product-centric humor that gets people to engage. The Reels effectively mix in this humor with snippets from the podcasts, behind-the-scenes content from events, and advice on how to use HubSpot’s products.
HubSpot isn’t afraid to try out new channels and tactics to bolster its reach. Its marketers familiarize themselves with the strong points of each channel/tactic, learn how users engage with it, and see how they can offer value to their customers and prospects through it.
Zendesk, a customer service and sales CRM, offers tools like FAQ knowledge bases, online help desks, and live chats to other businesses across different industries to help them offer better customer service and generate more sales.
To create awareness about the brand and educate its target audience on what the product can do, Zendesk’s blog explores these themes:
Zendesk also offers virtual and in-person events and webinars that cover topics like women in leadership, re-engaging your remote workforce, and incorporating Zendesk tools into a business marketing strategy.
To help decision-makers see how effective Zendesk’s tools are, there are nearly 400 case studies on the website that show how Zendesk’s tools help businesses in various industries scale their regional sales, drive self-service, and increase ROI.
But Zendesk didn’t stop there. The brand also created post-purchase resources in the form of online courses to teach Admin, Agent, Sales, and Developer teams how to get the best results from Zendesk’s tools.
Canva, the popular graphic design platform, takes a slightly different approach to content marketing. For Canva, the blog is not the star of the show—the templates are.
Canva currently has over 1 million design templates (free and paid) on its platform, all of which attract a wide range of prospective business customers through search and other channels.
Canva also published a slew of case studies that show decision-makers how Canva for Teams (Canva’s version for businesses) helped other B2B companies like Salesforce and Zoom save design time, improve remote collaboration, and scale teams.
And just like Zendesk, Canva provides post-purchase content in the form of Design School—which is chockfull of online courses and tutorials that teach teams how to design and collaborate with one another through Canva. Canva also holds live lesson sessions where attendees learn how to design like a pro and hear from industry experts.
Make Content Your Most Valuable Marketing Asset
Crafting and executing a multi-channel B2B content marketing strategy is no small feat. It is challenging and strenuous, but extremely rewarding at the same time. It is the gift that keeps on giving, especially with methods like SEO that can drive organic traffic to your company website for years.
To achieve this, however, you need a content strategy that fulfills the needs of your target audience and gains their trust. The steps outlined above can help you create this strategy, which will bolster your reach and give you an edge over your competitors.
If you’re looking to increase organic traffic, generate leads, and drive sales, Serps Growth is where you need to be. Serps Growth is a leading SEO agency that has a proven track record of helping businesses across various industries improve their ROI and optimize their marketing and ad spend. We offer SEO research, a strategy that’s tailored to your brand, SEO implementation, and monitoring to ensure that you’re hitting your goals.
Reach out to Serps Growth’s team today.
Alex Birkett is a co-founder of Omniscient Digital. He loves experimentation, building things, and adventurous sports (scuba diving, skiing, and jiu jitsu primarily). He lives in Austin, Texas with his dog Biscuit.
