Creating a B2B Content Strategy

For many B2B companies, finding the best content and tactic for generating enough leads for a healthy pipeline is often considered somewhat of a dark art.

This is clouded even more for businesses who have a much longer period between the initial enquiry to signing off a deal. Sometimes months or even years can pass before seeing that first entry on your balance sheet.

However, lead generation for B2B doesn’t have to be shrouded in secrecy! With more professionals making business decisions online than ever before, there are huge opportunities to keep your sales team busy.

By building out a careful approach which utilises modern digital marketing strategies, you no longer have to rely on old school techniques. Say goodbye to cold calling, seat drops or knocking on doors to keep your enquiries rolling in.

Justifying the cost of content marketing

Businesses who are starting out online for the first time and are looking to tap into the potential an online presence can provide them often approach us. Here are some key questions we ask to try to get an idea of what would work best:

• What does a good lead look like to your sales team?
• Do you focus more towards quantity or quality?
• What barriers do your customers face?

Knowing this information helps us focus our efforts in places where we’re more likely to see a decent return and set metrics to track activity. This give us more insight than just the number of enquiries coming through.

There’s not a one size fits all approach, and what may work for some businesses might not work on others. But whether it’s PPC, social media, blogging, email or even video – there are options out there for you to help drive activity through to your website.

If you’re struggling to get sign off on a new marketing campaign from key stakeholders, speak to your sales team. You can find out more about their pain points or common queries that prospects face them with.

It could be that the same questions come up time and time again. They struggle to pinpoint your company’s USPs or that more supporting material is required to convince a prospect that your company is the best option on the market.

All of this can be rectified by a comprehensive content marketing plan. As a result, this will help attract new leads, convert existing leads and identify new opportunities for existing customers.

Content Marketing for B2B

The cornerstone of any good B2B lead generation campaign is content – the term ‘Content Is King’ still rings true. In this arena, ‘content’ can be just about any material or medium that helps your prospects filter further down the sales funnel.

Whilst most businesses will have their own version, the B2B sales funnel tends to look a little something like this:

Many marketers are adept at creating content to cater for the awareness side, driving traffic and visits to the website. However, it starts to get more complicated further down the funnel.

Finding the right content to use

Your first port of call when planning your content is to think about your audience and their objectives. What’s keeping them from making an informed purchase decision? What materials would help them move towards pulling the trigger on this decision?

Sales and marketing can be notoriously fickle when collaborating, but it’s crucial that you speak to your sales team. Find out what issues prospects face and how your product or service can solve this.

Time is money; spending the first half of a meeting explaining your proposition from a standing start could be wasting valuable time. Going in with a warmer lead can help conversation and conversions flow.

Your customer service team can also be a valuable asset here. Cover commonly asked questions in a detailed section on your website. Additionally, you could have a series of informative blogs to help reduce the time they are spending reacting to enquiries.

Set clear goals

It’s common for businesses to have revenue targets and for sales team to have a pipeline of leads to convert. Attempting to reach those targets by monitoring the number of leads generated, might not give you a clear picture of your contents performance.

By monitoring social shares, utilising a tool such as BuzzSumo, you can get an idea of what types of topics are driving engagement within your audience.

On-site metrics are also useful to keep track of, especially sessions and bounce rate. If your sessions are higher than usual but enquiries are down, look at methods of optimising your landing pages. Alternatively, try providing other methods of lead capture.

Rather than using a phone or email link, including a contact form or a Live Chat helps to capture important contact data for follow ups.

Creating content

Once you start to build out your content, it can be hard to juggle creating materials whilst managing your day to day responsibilities.

Creating a content calendar can help you to plan what needs creating and when. This gives you and your team visibility on when they can expect to complete materials by. This is ideal for planning ahead if you have peak sales periods or if you need to meet a specific deadline.

You should also look for opportunities to re-purpose the same topic into multiple types of content. If you’ve created a blog post for instance, could the main points be conveyed in an infographic or a series or social media posts? Or can a video interview be transcribed to create an accompanying article?

It’s also incredibly important to delegate the creative side of things to the creative minds in the business. If your sales team are bringing in important revenue, are they more valuable speaking to prospects or writing a blog?

If you need a sales spin on it then get your sales team to sit with marketing, ask questions and record the dialogue. You can shape this up into content or find new topics to cover quickly and easily without keeping them tied up for too long.

Above all, with any marketing plan the aim is to create compelling material that benefits your audience, rather than publishing content for content’s sake.