Fortunately, creating a B2B content marketing strategy isn’t an impossible task. With the right tools, you can create a winning strategy regardless of your company’s offerings or size. The process becomes more complicated the more buyer personas and products you have, but the basic process is the same.
Step 1: Learn More About Your Audience
In content marketing, your audience determines your content, so don’t skip this step. The more you know about your audience, the more meaningful — and successful — your content will be.
Step 2: Know Your Product
This one seems like a no-brainer, but it’s especially important if you partner with an agency to craft and execute your content marketing strategy. Ensure everyone on the team understands exactly what service(s) or product(s) you offer and how they work. Share product demos with your content marketers or grant them access to a free trial so they can see the product in action.
Step 3: Establish or Refine Your Brand Voice
Before you start creating, establish your brand’s voice and keep your audience’s preferences top of mind. They may not appreciate tongue-in-cheek jokes — no matter how brilliant or well executed — when researching a problem that threatens their bottom line.
Step 4: Identify Your KPIs
Now that you know your audience, your product, and identify your brand voice, establish what you want to accomplish with your content before you move any further. Your goals must be realistic and clear to guide your decision-making in the next steps. They also need to be measurable so you can gauge your strategy’s success and make informed adjustments in the future.
Step 5: Prioritize Your Content Types
You’re almost ready to start brainstorming content ideas, but you need to decide what types of content you want to focus your strategy on. Now you have all the Content Strategy you brainstormed in one place, but you need to strategize what order in which you’ll create content. It might be tempting to tackle all the high search volume terms first if increasing traffic is your goal, but since that strategy doesn’t consider other factors like keyword difficulty, it probably won’t help you meet your goals.
Step 6: Distribute and Promote Content
Once your content has been drafted, revised, and polished, you can finally share it with the world. Use website SEO to guarantee Google sees and returns your content in search results. If your website isn’t returned in search results, no one will see your content — no matter how great it is.
Step 7: Measure Content Performance
Once your content gets out in the world, give it time to do its thing. After a month or so, start measuring its performance against your KPIs, but don’t be surprised if you don’t see any meaningful results immediately — it can take up to nine months to see a meaningful return on your content marketing investment.
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