How to create a B2B content marketing strategy that actually works

There’s a reason why marketers talk about sales pipelines and not faucets. Leads should come in a continuous flow — and content marketing isn’t something you should turn on and off as time and resources allow.

Consistently good B2B content marketing starts with a solid B2B content marketing strategy. 

Let’s take a look at how it’s done.

How to create a B2B content marketing strategy

A lot happens behind the scenes of a B2B blog, LinkedIn post, or whitepaper. 

If you jump ahead to create and publish content without a strategy, you risk wasting time, money, and the massive sales opportunity that content marketing represents.

Here are the steps that all good B2B content marketing strategies follow:

1. Define your content goal(s)

2. Understand your audience

3. Map your dream customer’s journey

4. Research competitors and industry trends

5. Develop key messaging and positioning

6. Choose your content distribution channels

7. Create a content calendar

8. Optimize for search and discoverability

9. Publish and repurpose your content

1. Define your content goal(s)

First, what do you want your content marketing to achieve?

In the B2B space, content can perform multiple jobs. It can capture interest from new leads, nurture warm prospects, and create affinity within your existing customer base, to name just a few. 

You don’t need to pick just one content goal, but you do need to get clear on what success will look like.

The right B2B content strategy can drive:

• Lead generation

• Brand awareness

• Market penetration and positioning

• Prospect nurturing

• Customer retention

• Strategic partnerships

• Raising funds

Hint: You can read about all the benefits of B2B content marketing here.

Once they build a strong content strategy, B2B businesses can focus on lead generation, nurturing prospects, brand awareness, and more.

Which of these is most valuable to you?

2. Understand your audience

Now that you’re clear on why you’re creating content, who are you creating it for?

Don’t hold back on the nuance here. Enrich your buyer personas with details like name, job title, daily pain points (in work and life), location, barriers to purchase, preferred content channels, and interactions with other key decision-makers. 

3. Map your dream customer’s journey

The sales and marketing “funnel” provides a good blueprint for a B2B content strategy framework. 

Different content formats work better at different stages of the marketing funnel and the customer journey. For example:

• Top-of-the-funnel B2B content, like an industry report, can position your brand as an expert in its space. This raises brand awareness among your audience and keeps you top of mind.

• Middle-funnel B2B content, like an email nurture sequence, will remind leads of your product/service and build a case for the value you deliver.

• Bottom-of-the-funnel B2B content, like a customer success story, builds social proof, imbues trust, and positions your product or service as a must-have solution.

A B2B content marketing strategy should consider what types of content will be most powerful at each part of your dream customer’s journey.

4. Research competitors and industry trends

In B2B marketing, a content strategy should have one eye on what’s happening inside your business and the prospects you’re nurturing. The other will observe what’s happening outside your business — like competitors and industry trends.

• Who can you emulate (and why)? 

• What content are businesses in adjacent markets creating, and could this be helpful for you?

• Which direct competitors can you beat at their own game by doubling down on SEO? 

• Who do you not want to do content like (and why)? 

• What gaps can you look to fill with your content production? 

Use this data to plan and hone your B2B content strategy. 

5. Develop key messaging and positioning

Every piece of B2B content you produce is an opportunity to reinforce what your brand stands for. And this message needs to be consistent across your different content channels. Call it what you like — brand story, key messaging, north star — but getting this right is an essential step in B2B content marketing strategies. 

When establishing your key messages and positioning, think about:

• The tone of voice you want to use (and why)

• What you want your product or service to be known for (and why)

• The customer pain points you solve best (and why)

• How you want to be seen and remembered versus your competitors (and why)

• Your values, behaviors, and principles, and how these will influence your messaging. For example, if your brand stands for “making complex processes simple”, then your content needs to be clear and jargon-free.

6. Choose your content distribution channels

Typical B2B content channels include:

• SEO and organic search

• Social media (particularly LinkedIn)

• Your company website, blog, and case studies

• Guest posts on partner publications

• Email marketing and nurture campaigns

It’s good practice to use several channels (a “multi-channel content strategy”) to meet prospects where they are. 

But how do you choose? Refer back to your buyer persona: which channel(s) is your dream customer most likely to engage with and trust? What are they reading, and where, when they’re open to marketing messages? How can you leverage the right content channels to build trust and nurture leads?

Content distribution is a huge topic and one that’s worth exploring on its own. Check out our dedicated guide to B2B content distribution and how to get started.

7. Create a content calendar

They say that if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. That’s true when it comes to content marketing. A content calendar outlines what you’ll post, on which channels, when, and who is responsible for posting it.

Be reasonable with your content plan and set realistic, achievable goals. Many internal teams won’t have the bandwidth to sustain a daily, multi-channel content strategy (that’s why they turn to a B2B content marketing agency like Scribly for help). Take an honest look at your resources and scope out your content calendar from there — and/or get in touch with Scribly to see how we can help support your content production at scale.

8. Optimize for search and discoverability

Following SEO best practices can increase the visibility of your content. 

A B2B SEO content strategy will consider:

• The relevant top-, middle-, and bottom-funnel keywords for your product or service

• Your unique point of view (to avoid publishing the same content per keyword as your competitors)

• The formatting of your content and how this differs by channel (scannable text for blogs, punchy visuals for social, etc.)

• Internal linking to other web pages, posts, and content

• How to optimize your content for search and how changes in tech will influence this (ranking for AI overviews, for example)

• How to best write and structure your B2B content for Google’s EEAT and SEO criteria

• … while also ensuring your content is empathetic and human-centred (to keep buyers coming back for more)

9. Publish and repurpose your content

You can get a lot of mileage from one great piece of B2B content. Once a blog has been published on your website, for example, it can spin off into a LinkedIn campaign, email newsletter, or whitepaper.

Of course, be sure to check all your content for spelling and formatting before it goes live. Then cross-promote the heck out of it via your relevant marketing channels.

6 B2B content marketing tactics to try

Okay, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of content creation and how to make content rank for B2B. 

These are some of the most impactful B2B content marketing tactics to use in your content marketing strategy:

1. Create pillar and cluster posts

2. Address pain points

3. Send regular newsletters

4. Try gated content

5. Tell your brand’s story

6. Build a portfolio of case studies
   

1. Create pillar and cluster posts

Building a library of pillar and cluster posts is one of the most popular content marketing strategies for B2B businesses. A content pillar is a high-level theme or topic that’s relevant to your audience, normally focused on a key pain point or need. For example, in the e-learning sector, a set of content pillars could be: training and development, employee engagement, employee retention, and digital learning management systems. 

Clusters are more focused topics that sit under each pillar. Cluster content typically targets longer tail keywords, offers more detailed information, and sits further down the marketing funnel.

The pillar-cluster model works as a B2B content marketing tactic for several reasons:

• The pillar-cluster format drives SEO performance through strategic use of keywords and search terms

• By creating pillar pages that link to shorter cluster articles, you’ve got the start of a successful internal linking strategy (also good for SEO)

• Organizing content by pillar can help you develop content ideas that keep your prospective buyer’s needs top of mind

2. Address pain points

Speaking of pain points, using content to address customer pain points is one of the most effective B2B content marketing tactics out there. Whether you create a how-to guide, a template, or a tutorial, content that directly speaks to (and solves) a pain point positions your brand as helpful, credible, and trustworthy.

Top tip: why not get the wider team involved here? Your sales team and account managers will have all sorts of insights from the work they’ve done on your product or service, and/or with your customer base. What have they learned about how to get the most value from your product or service? What’s been their biggest ah-ha moment when problem-solving alongside a client? 

Plus, you can transform and repurpose internal workflows and best practices into public-facing content to reach more of the B2B buyers you want to engage.

3. Send regular newsletters

Email newsletters aren’t going anywhere in B2B. Yes, they are widely used as a nurturing tool, which means your audience receives many every week. But with the right strategy, they can still cut through and convert.

To follow B2B content marketing best practices, email newsletters should be consistent, relevant, and delivered in bite-sized chunks. Remember, readers are much more likely to scan a newsletter than read it word for word, so break up your content into sections and use clear signposting throughout. 

The monthly newsletter from Cheesecake Labs, The Labs Report, is a great digest of trending topics, recent blog articles, and must-know tech industry news. It’s also posted via email and LinkedIn, increasing its reach. A multi-channel approach like this is a powerful B2B content marketing tactic.

4. Try gated content

For content marketing to drive sales, you want to capture leads at the top of the funnel and nurture them right through to making a purchase. Gated content plays an important role in capture and nurture, because it trades something valuable (your high-quality content) for something else that’s valuable (a prospective buyer’s email address). 

How-to ebooks, data-led whitepapers, industry reports, template frameworks, ROI calculators, and checklists are all examples of content that’s often gated in B2B. But there’s no limit to what you can gate. Think about what your business does best and what would be most insightful to your audience.

Clean energy leader, RatedPower, uses gated content to position itself as an expert in the solar PV space. Their guides educate and empower buyers to build their own business case for switching to solar. This is a smart use of gated content because it provides indisputable value to the reader while also presenting RatedPower as the solution to their needs.

5. Tell your brand’s story

B2B content marketing isn’t all about driving sales. It’s also about building your brand, sharing your values, and maintaining a consistent positioning and tone of voice. Together, this will build trust within your client and prospect base — boosting commercial performance. 

In recent Gartner research, 48% of high-growth companies said they’d increased brand investment in the last 12 months, compared to 29% of companies that reported low growth. 

So what does this look like in practice? Well, for one, your brand should be a golden thread that runs through all B2B content marketing. It comes through in what you say (e.g., content pillars and clusters) as well as how you say it (e.g., tone of voice and your content distribution channels). 

Your brand values and personality can help you decide whether your email newsletter should come from a person in the company (real or not) and whether you drop the occasional F-bomb in your social posts. The “hero copy” on your homepage is also a crucial opportunity to set up your brand story.

6. Build a portfolio of case studies

Social proof carries a lot of weight in B2B. If a business is considering you as a trusted partner, it helps if they can hear from other companies that’ve benefited from your support.

Case studies can come in many shapes and sizes. A written case study is often the quickest to produce — and the easiest for prospects to review. Video case studies can be impactful too, if you have the time and budget. 

Either way, make sure to:

• Feature a real client (named, ideally)

• Establish what their challenge was before you started working with them

• Explain how you helped solve it — with concrete results

This helps build trust and showcases your offering in action.

Scribly can help you create your perfect B2B content marketing strategy

And those are the nine key steps to a winning B2B content strategy and why they’re important. 

But, we get it. That’s a lot of work to do — and a lot of time to free up. 

If you’re struggling to make it happen or find yourself stuck at one stage of the process, we can help. Book a free content strategy call with Scribly. We only offer a handful of free strategy calls each week to ensure each one gets our full attention. So grab your slot before they fill up!