Definitive Guide to B2B Content Marketing

In both the online and offline space, content is central to building brand identity, awareness, and authority by establishing the value an organization brings to its target market and specific industry.

As such, developing a B2B content marketing strategy has become essential for creating marketing campaigns that reach and resonate with target audiences—particularly given the rise and dominance of digital marketing in B2B.

Crafting original, high-quality, and valuable content, rather than generating content for its own sake is key to securing competitive positioning, enhancing the buyer’s journey, and ultimately, aiding sales processes.

Click on the buttons below to navigate to the four main areas this guide covers:

WHAT IS B2B CONTENT MARKETING?

B2B content marketing is a powerful strategy centered on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and informative content across various marketing channels to drive sales opportunities by attracting and engaging leads, as well as clients post-conversion. Successful content marketing is built to address specific audience needs, pain points, and goals to contribute to a personalized client experience (CX) and B2B buyer’s journey.

Effective B2B content marketing can also boost brand awareness, authority, and equity. The purpose of content can range from thought leadership to educational materials and even sales collateral to support demand generation and lead generation initiatives (such as lead nurturing), contributing to growth.

In short, B2B content marketing is a dynamic and impactful tool that has the potential to shape and support critical strategies to drive desired business outcomes.

Who needs a B2B content marketing strategy?

The flexibility of B2B content marketing strategies often leads to them boasting a high Return on Investment (ROI), costing up to 62% less than traditional marketing, while delivering three times the leads (Demand Metric). This, in tandem with the capacity of B2B content marketing to drive performance for multiple teams, and support conversions, has understandably resulted in developing content becoming a priority strategy for many.

However, perhaps the greatest strength of content marketing is how it can be crafted to support strategies such as lead nurturing or contribute to the building of user journeys for campaigns targeting specific audiences.

For example, if an organization is looking to feed its sales pipeline with top of funnel (TOFU), qualified leads, content marketing assets can be produced to support this process. In turn, content can play a significant role in motivating the progression of these TOFU leads along their buyer’s journey.

This guide breaks down how to build a B2B content marketing strategy that empowers your teams to drive sales opportunities and ultimately, conversions into four core steps.

How to create a B2B content marketing strategy that converts: A 4-step guide

Developing and implementing a B2B content marketing strategy that achieves performance goals requires a solid foundation of processes that can be replicated and refined for future iterations.

Here are the four core areas of B2B content marketing that this guide covers:

1. How to plan your B2B content marketing strategy

As with any strategy, adequate preparation and planning are key to the success of your content marketing. While flexibility is also definitely important, having a detailed game plan from which to deviate is essential.

Content goals

Start by determining the goals that you want your content to accomplish. Not only will this serve as a guide for the rest of your planning and the steps that follow, but this will also ensure that content has a clear function and fulfills its purpose.

For example, limiting the scope of your content is an important factor in avoiding poor content performance by trying to appeal to an overly broad audience. More general goals may include demonstrating content ROI or the role of your content in your buyer’s journey—to assess performance.

Balancing goals is, therefore, an important element of your content planning to ensure that content performs as intended, and for the specific functions you have in mind.

Below are different goals to consider for your content, along with its correlating function and examples of relevant content formats:

Content audit

Once you have identified your goals, start by performing an audit of your existing content (skip this step if you do not have content). This can be incredibly beneficial for maximizing the ROI and performance of your content library and preventing your new content efforts from cannibalizing the potential of your older pieces.

The aim of your audit should be to identify the gaps you currently have in your content strategies, and how these can be improved upon while investing resources effectively.

Therefore, to guide your content audit process, be sure to leverage the data analytics you have available to you to measure B2B content marketing performance by:

As part of this assessment, consider also analyzing competitor content. This can focus on a few key areas to inform your auditing (and content creation):

The topics covered and how they are explored
The topics covered and how they are explored
How information is presented to support a strong user experience

Lead magnets/free tools
Keywords
Interlinking strategies

Combining this process with your content goals will help you determine the priorities for your content marketing strategies. In the case that you are yet to build out a library of B2B content marketing, many of the variables above still serve as great points of research to inform your planning.

Content audits also represent the perfect opportunity to repurpose key pieces of content. This can range from rewrites of varying degrees, and include adapting content to suit another format to meet the preferences of a target audience, or account (if part of an ABM or ABX strategy).

Repurposing can also help the performance of content across a broader selection of marketing channels and target audiences.

Maximize your content value with repurposing strategies

Content map

The last element of your content planning process should be mapping out the content that you aim to produce and distribute to each segment of your target audience. Given the range of functions that your content is likely to serve in your marketing strategies, long-term planning can help to manage production expectations and ensure a broader range of goals are met on a timely basis. Your content map also serves as a useful resource for supporting sales and marketing alignment, as it allows sales leaders and their teams to gain oversight into upcoming content and collaborate on how to best leverage it in their outreach strategies. Here are some considerations for building out your content map:

Funnel stage
Buyer persona
Format (see types of B2B content marketing)
Topic (ideally your core topics)

Difficulty (in terms of the subject matter expertise required)
Strategies the content supports (the focus of the content)
Strategic content needs (ABM/ABX initiatives or time-sensitive content)

While you are unlikely to be able to anticipate all of these variables, planning for them in advance will be critical for guiding the trajectory of your content marketing strategies. Depending on your in-house capabilities and goals, consider mapping out content on a quarterly or monthly basis.

Looking to build your B2B content marketing strategy?

INFUSE demand experts craft high performance demand generation programs supported by your existing content, and new content creation to drive buyer engagement

Below is an example of a cybersecurity provider’s content map for a month:

For optimal results, be sure to align your content map with the needs of buyers as they progress through the B2B buyer’s journey. This involves developing a range of content formats and types to suit the different decision makers at target accounts and the role they play in the buying process. Ensuring a balance of these content needs across your content map will enable your sales teams to drive demand generation with the entirety of the buying group.

How to align content with the B2B buying group

Source: INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer Report 2024

guide

Discover how to address buyer priorities and engage decision makers

2. How to produce high-performance B2B content marketing

Consistently producing content marketing that meets your established goals requires the right processes to ensure quality and performance.

Style guide

Whether your content efforts are outsourced or in-house, developing a style guide is a powerful resource for ensuring that your content meets your standards—and supports your brand identity. Much like your content plan, your style guide will give your content a clear direction. Here are some core elements to consider for your style guide:

In essence, your style guide should act as a reference point for the features that you consider to be the most important for your content. Tone, word choice, and writing style are among the most important elements of your B2B content marketing, as they will contribute to a consistent voice for your brand.

5-step process to producing high-performance B2B content marketing

Below is a streamlined process for maintaining efficient, high-quality content creation divided into whether you have an internal content team, or utilize 3rd-party content experts to fulfill your needs.

Each content creation process will have its own nuances depending on the structure of your team and content creation capabilities.

INFUSE demand experts create and leverage content marketing to meet your objectives as an extension of your team.

Engage your target buyers with INFUSE Custom Content Solutions

3. B2B content marketing distribution and promotion

Without proper distribution, your content marketing is much less likely to succeed in reaching its intended audience. Promoting and distribution are critical elements of your strategy that should be informed by in-depth knowledge of target buyer personas and their preferred channels. Activating content across a range of channels with an omnichannel strategy guided by these insights can avoid wasted budgets and resources. There are several types of content distribution that can be implemented depending on your marketing channel strategy and the networks available to you:

Owned content distribution: This approach leverages the channels that you control, such as your proprietary website.
Earned content distribution: A type of earned media, which occurs when channels owned by third parties share your content. This could be from guest posts, review sites, social platforms, or even journalists.
Paid content distribution: This could include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, targeted display, influencer or affiliate marketing, content distribution networks, or sponsorships.

Each distribution method comes with its own set of benefits and drawbacks, as well as an ability to support a range of strategies. As a result, utilizing a combination of all three approaches is ideal—the more relevant channels you distribute your content to, the better.

Below are some examples of marketing channels and strategies for boosting B2B content marketing engagement and performance:

Although this should be outlined in your content marketing plan, considering how your content serves as sales enablement will also impact its distribution. Be sure to synchronize with your sales teams to ensure that your content meets their diverse needs and is being leveraged effectively in sales outreach.

4. B2B content marketing analysis and optimization

Measuring the success of your B2B content marketing strategy is crucial for informing your content process—and allowing you to create an iterative cycle that allows for high-quality and innovative content.

To yield a broader range of actionable data insights, consider dividing your analysis and optimization efforts into three core areas:

#1 Testing

As you continually evolve your B2B content marketing, testing new content features and ideas is an effective strategy for identifying the drivers of your content performance. The most common method for this is A/B testing. This involves launching two versions of content distributed in a campaign to determine which achieves the best performance. In the case of new features, this could be a comparison between the original content version versus the new version.

#2 Feedback

Collecting direct feedback can be invaluable for guiding your content optimization efforts. Here are some methods to consider:

Client council: As part of your brand evangelism strategy, creating a client council can be an effective way to gain feedback directly from your target audience on a variety of strategies, including your content. Hold regular meetings with clients to determine areas where content can be improved, as well as insights that can inform your content map.
Sales leadership feedback: Your sales teams are regularly interacting and broaching conversations with your content. Synchronizing with sales leaders to establish a feedback loop to share the top-performing content pieces in sales conversations can be an invaluable insight for your strategies. This can also help to pinpoint the content topics and features that are motivating your prospects the most.
Surveys: Depending on the information you are looking to source, these can be activated on your content hub itself on content pages, or via other channels, such as email lead nurturing. However, surveys typically garner more high-quality feedback when they are supported by an incentivization program. In this case, optimize your budget by prioritizing strategic content pieces and narrowing the targeting for surveys.

guide

Discover 7 ways to leverage actionable insights from B2B surveys

#3 Analysis

How you analyze your B2B content marketing performance will depend largely on the analytics platform (and its capabilities) you have implemented for tracking your website, and how you define content success internally. There is an incredibly broad range of metrics to choose from. As a result, grouping them by core areas can be helpful for focusing on specific performance aspects in your reporting:

Be sure to establish a consistent review cadence for your analytics, ideally that matches the length of each phase of your content map.

Types of B2B content marketing

There are many types of content that can be created and utilized as part of a B2B content marketing strategy, particularly when catering to the unique needs and preferences of different audience segments and buyer personas. Below is an extensive list of the most common content formats (from A to Z), along with tactics for maximizing the performance of each one:

Discover the top-performing content types in our INFUSE Insights report

Key takeaways

Developing and leveraging a wide variety of content marketing pieces suited to the interests and preferences of your target buyers is an effective strategy for driving engagement. Below are four key takeaways from this guide:

If developed properly, content marketing has the potential to support multiple strategies across your organization, from sales outreach, to lead nurturing and lead follow up.
Investing time in anchoring your B2B content marketing strategy with specific goals and mapping out content, can boost performance and alignment with other teams leveraging content.
Diversifying your content distribution is key to securing quality buyer engagement and greater content performance.
Implement regular content analysis to inform optimizations, content repurposing, and innovative new content strategies.

INFUSE demand experts are ready to craft high performance demand generation programs to engage your buyers with new or existing content pieces.

Get in touch with the team to kickstart your B2B content marketing strategy

About the Author

Alexander Kesler is a visionary B2B marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in building highly successful organizations. As a Founder and the CEO of INFUSE, one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, Alexander specializes in driving growth through demand generation marketing.