Your Guide To A Winning B2B Content Strategy // Part 1
[With Content Strategy Toolkit & Templates]
Whether you are increasing brand awareness, creating demand or ramping up sales enablement, content is the medium for you to achieve reach, build connections and actively progress your audience to the desired goal.
While content marketing has been a movement for the best part of 5+ years, some companies are just starting to understand the symbiotic relationship between marketing and content. The challenge now is making sure that your organisation does not equate activity to results, aka write something, anything, now! A slightly alarming statistic from Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 annual report, indicated that only 37% of B2B organisations have a documented content strategy. My question would then be: how do you know what to create, for who, when and importantly, how do you know when you are successful?
By building a smart content strategy, sure – it’s a little heavy lifting upfront, however, it will actually shortcut your planning, development and execution of programs exponentially.
Here are our 12 steps to building a winning content strategy with best practice examples throughout:
Step 1: Understand your goals & KPIs
Step 2: Build your personas
Step 3: Complete a competitive analysis
Step 4: Identify content themes or pillars
Step 5: Complete keyword research
Step 6: Complete a content audit
Step 7: Nail your buyer journeys
Step 8: Develop your content allocation & plan
Step 9: Map your distribution channels
Step 10: Nurture strategy
Step 11: Systems, systems, systems
Step 12: Measure & optimise
We’ve split this over two how-to articles as we see there being two key phases to complete – Foundations (Step 1-6) and Journey to Execution (Step 7-12)
Step 1: Understand your strategic or organisation goals
Are you driving brand awareness, focused on existing customer retention or looking to build an always-on demand generation engine. By starting with your overarching objectives, both strategic and revenue, you can ensure all content efforts are moving in line with these.
This is a great opportunity to develop a content purpose/mission: “Is the content you are creating and distributing to your customers different to anything else out there?”
In a content landscape that is close to saturation, there are a few principles that we apply at Content Unicorn to build reputation and trust quickly:
+ Identify where you can be a true authority and create unique content based on topical events, research and evidence.
+ Build radically engaging and/or exceptional content, don't add to the noise.
+ Identify niches or networks where content is still gaining traction.
+ Amplify only to the people who matter.
Step 2: Build your personas
Who are your ‘buyers’ – build profiles of all contact types who influence, approve or decide on your solutions or products. These can range from C-Suite to Head of Department and even end-users if you’re a software or technology provider. It makes sense to group or cluster role types with similar interests or motivations.
Throughout the process of building persona profiles, you will get 'into the head' of buyers and understand their challenges, desires and drivers. By intimately understanding customers, you can quickly identify where you are a solution to their problem and focus resource and effort on developing tailored stories and content to address these.
An important addition to standard persona research is understanding the content consumption behaviour (formats, channels and communities) of each buyer. This can be achieved through web research to identify annual content consumption reports (example here), looking at historical data within your own digital marketing systems or asking customers what type of content they prefer and their go-to channels or information sources.
>> Download your 'Building Your Persona' templates here.
Step 3: Complete a competitive analysis
Without knowing your USPs or differentiating market position, it is very difficult to decipher which content themes you should focus on. When we look at the competitive analysis, we generally choose 3-4 key competitors that operate in the same market as you. Then compare the following from a positioning perspective:
+ Company purpose and positioning
+ Location/markets served
+ Product or service offerings
+ Existing customers
We then complete a deep dive into the service offerings or product features to identify where there is the least competition or where your solution has a true USP. They could be your product features, simplicity or business model, unique connections, industry experience or some other secret sauce that no-one else has.
>> Download your 'Competitive Analysis' templates here.
Step 4: Identify content themes or pillars
When producing content, how do you know what to talk about? I hear a lot of executives say they produce scatter-gun content believing that activity equates to results. Instead, take some time to identify the industry or business topics that strike a happy balance between your buyer's drivers, market or industry trends and your value proposition – and write about these, all of the time.
Leverage sales feedback plus digital, search and social insights - what have your customers talked about, searched for and shared (BuzzSumo is a great tool for this) - to determine which conversations you want to own and/or be an authority.
How do you identify these themes?
1. Buyer Drivers: if you’re targeting CEO’s, research online what CEO’s in 2018 (even better, in their industry) are challenged with or see as a priority. It could be readying their business for emerging technologies, employee retention or digital transformation.
2. Market Drivers: This could be government regulation, economic downturns, GDPR or import/export changes that are affecting the way your customers do business and where you could be a solution to this problem.
3. Your company USPs: What do you do better than your competitors or where do you have a unique market position that you can inspire and educate.
Complete the table below for all key personas, collate these (there should be cross-over) and prioritise 4-5 themes you believe would be most attractive to your customers and align best with your value proposition. You can use the remaining themes as ‘always on’ or evergreen content topics.
Why is it important to identify these themes?
Simply, it provides structure to your content strategy and plan. Given lean resourcing within most organisations, fewer more impactful content assets should be the mantra therefore we encourage teams to develop a ‘big rock’ or defining piece of content aligned to one content theme per quarter or 6 months. Already you can see the efficiencies, right?
Moreover, this is a fantastic opportunity to own topics and gain mindshare of your customers and make sure your executives, sales and marketing teams are well, singing from the same hymn sheet. The net effect of all employees sharing POV or aligned messages at similar times is that each subsequent impression touching your prospects amplifies or lifts the next, i.e. 1 + 1 = 3.
These will also inform the buyer journey maps that will be the basis of your workflows or lead nurturing tracks. More to come on this in our second how-to article Part 2 - Journey to Execution (Step 7-12) released 1 June.
Step 5: Complete keyword research
SEO and keyword strategy is really about content marketing, and vice versa - they overlap, a lot. In our experience, particularly in B2B organisations with buying committees, a strong content strategy incorporating an understanding of key search terms but primarily focused on the development of relevant, engaging content and thoughtful distribution/publishing to external sites will tick most boxes.
In saying that, it is important to have a baseline of keywords that align with your content topics. The easiest approach here is to deep dive into long-tail keyword research and identify the best keywords for your 1) your brand and 2) your content themes.
Keywordtool.io - Is a fantastic, free tool that will deliver keyword research by search engine. If you are looking for YouTube or Facebook keywords, for instance, this can generate intuitive ideas.
Based on your keyword research, shortlist priority keyword target(s) for content development and share these with any content creators to ensure coverage in new assets.
Step 6: Complete a content audit
Before you start building your buyer journey, you will need to understand what content already exists to reuse vs what needs to be developed, refreshed or curated. The content should be mapped to persona, buyer stage, key theme and content format. A number of content marketing folks recommend this as a first step however without understanding your goals, audience and themes, it is difficult to categorise each asset against these criteria. We have included a simple template and instructions in the Toolkit.
>> Access the Content Audit template here.
Good news, you're more than halfway there on completion of these 6 steps. Content strategy is an incredibly linear and systematic process: personas and USPs inform your content themes, personas and content themes inform your buyer journeys, buyer journeys inform your content plan and your content plan informs your demand generation plan and execution.
Follow this methodology and you will have a tight content strategy and a simple execution plan in just a few weeks.
Access your Content Strategy Toolkit & Templates, complete the form below:
Look out for Part 2 - Journey to Execution (Step 7-12) guide and templates launching Friday 1 June. In the meantime if you want to receive fresh digital + content ideas, subscribe to our Unicorn Community below.