How to Drive Your Revenue with B2B Content Marketing
By Joseph Braue, VP Custom Content Solutions

Summary

Synopsis:

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    How to correlate content marketing performance with revenue and GTM goals

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    How to analyze the buyer’s journey to optimize your content and channel mix

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    Strategies for futureproofing your content marketing

Establishing a clear connection between content marketing and revenue can be challenging, especially when considering the length of B2B sales cycles, which are ever increasing, with ever larger buying committees.

However, there are frameworks and best practices that can support you in tracking and optimizing content performance, helping to identify its influence on ROI.

This article breaks down a content-to-revenue framework to determine the outcomes of your strategy, as well as tactics for futureproofing your B2B content marketing strategies to establish a predictable sales pipeline.

#1 Implement a framework to attribute content to revenue

Attributing content marketing activities to revenue can be complex, especially since most buyer engagement in B2B organizations takes place in the dark funnel or is sales-led—emphasizing the diverse and important role content plays in the B2B buyer’s journey.

While achieving full visibility into B2B content marketing outcomes is challenging, establishing a framework that facilitates a connection between revenue and content efforts is key to determine the success of content marketing strategies.

Below are three steps to take to build up a content-revenue framework:

1. Determine metrics

Metrics serve as the foundation of your content-to-revenue framework, making it important to select KPIs that can demonstrate how your content marketing drives revenue. Therefore, selecting metrics that can be directly correlated with your sales strategy and lead pipeline velocity is key to demonstrating the value and ROI of content marketing.

Below are sample metrics, however, be sure to tailor them to the unique content needs of your organization and add additional measurements to this framework as required:

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2. Analyze and optimize the buyer’s journey with content marketing

The buyer’s journey in 2024 has been shaped by substantial changes in buyer behavior over the past five years, particularly influenced by the rise of digitization, as well as by the subsequent acceleration and deceleration of the tech market (amplified by AI and cloud modernization).

This phenomenon culminated in the B2B tech stall and rise of buyer scrutiny among buying groups, who are now more likely to increase in size, with decision makers adding relevant stakeholders to ensure the best fit for their business needs.

According to the INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer 2024 report, 68% of buyers are determining tech purchases according to their priority business opportunities, followed by 50% addressing tech compatibility issues. Additionally, 55% of sales cycles last over six months, meaning that brand experiences must nurture prospects for at least two quarters to achieve results—especially in organizations where sales cycles are traditionally lengthy.

Below is a framework to guide your buyer’s journey analysis and content-led optimizations:

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3. Prioritize cost-effective channels and formats

Building your content distribution with channels that drive high engagement at a low cost is key to maximizing ROI from your content marketing.

According to the 2024 Content Marketing Institute B2B Trends report, 69% of marketers increased their investment in video in 2024, followed by thought leadership, which demonstrates the value attributed to short-form and authoritative content. However, successfully activating these content formats to achieve performance requires the right mix of marketing channels.

Below is a list of cost-effective channels and formats for driving maximum ROI with B2B demand generation:

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By adopting these channels and content marketing formats, you can build your B2B demand generation strategy and establish a pipeline for attracting, nurturing, and converting prospects into loyal clients.

#2 Futureproof with personalizable content and offerings

Part of establishing a cost-effective B2B content marketing library and distribution strategy is ensuring that content can be easily personalized and repurposed.

While content can be written in advance for personas, each buyer has their unique set of preferences. In addition, 40% of buyers consume an average of 4-6 content pieces throughout their buying journey (INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer, 2024), placing greater emphasis on the accuracy of the content utilized at each touchpoint.

Given the increase in buyer-led research and the fact that 78% of buyers establish their purchase requirements before contacting sales (6sense Buyer Experience Report, 2023), the content they consume is pivotal in determining their purchase priorities.

Therefore, personalization plays a vital role in ensuring that the touchpoints buyers engage with are truly memorable and relevant, improving demand generation and reducing churn.

Below are three ways to futureproof your B2B content marketing strategy:

1. Craft customizable, scannable assets for each buyer persona

Create short content with a clear value proposition that can be consumed quickly by prospects and easily personalized to address a specific buyer’s needs.

For example, you can develop three variants of a one-pager to appeal to specific niches within a buyer persona (by propensity to buy, for example), allowing sales to use the version that fits best with the prospect they are contacting. To increase the customization of your assets and enable content repurposing, you can also develop templates that can be easily edited to rearrange elements according to each prospect.

Repurposing content is the simplest way to counter common challenges when producing content marketing, which according to the 2024 Content Marketing Institute B2B Trends report are ensuring consistency (54%) and differentiation (54%).

The level of customization possible depends on your capacity, however, if an account based marketing (ABM) approach is already adopted, taking this level of care can elevate your strategies to support an account based experience (ABX) framework.

2. Encourage thought leaders to record short videos

It is well known that video is growing as a key medium for buyers, with 91% of marketers utilizing video in 2023 (Video Marketing Statistics 2024, Wyzowl) and a separate survey ranking video as the fourth most effective medium for engaging buyers (INFUSE Voice of the Marketer 2024). This popularity can be attributed to the rise of short-form video content across social media platforms as a quick way to glean insights.

Therefore, B2B organizations can leverage this trend by incorporating short-form video into their social selling and social media content calendars to address pain points succinctly. Videos can also be leveraged in email marketing and LinkedIn InMail, with sales representatives recording short clips to engage buyers in creative and innovative ways.

AI tools can help with the generation of assets for capturing attention in social media feeds (such as a unique GIF for a LinkedIn post), as long as this adheres to your brand guidelines.

3. Collect lead intelligence to inform optimizations for future campaigns

Lead intelligence is data on your buyers that is primed for actionability. Therefore, it represents a powerful resource for determining new approaches to improve the performance of your B2B content marketing strategy. Lead intelligence can include insights into key topics, the most relevant keywords for messaging, targeted ad performance, and more.

By collecting lead intelligence on a quarterly basis, you can continuously gain insights to perfect future iterations of your content and B2B demand generation programs, steering them in the right direction to engage your audience.

#3 Benchmark content for performance

Assessing the accuracy of your B2B content marketing strategy and buyer persona personalization can be achieved with performance benchmarks. This includes utilizing the metrics covered in step one and combining your evaluation with revisiting your business goals to ensure content is fulfilling its intended purpose.

At this final stage, the link between content and revenue should be clear, allowing you to determine the ROI of your content strategy and identify opportunities for improvement.

Below are two steps to follow when benchmarking your content against revenue goals:

1. Align your content-revenue metrics with GTM goals

Your content should always support your business goals, and adopting a Go-To-Market (GTM) approach is the optimal way to anchor the function of your B2B content marketing and correlate its performance with organizational growth and revenue.

Therefore, after each quarter/semester/year, compile your metrics and compare them with the outcomes achieved to evaluate its effectiveness. Then, determine if GTM goals were met in the same timeframe in prior years, and how content supported those goals.

For example, a GTM goal could be promoting a new product to a key buyer persona. Depending on the success of this initiative and the content performance metrics collected, you can determine how your content strategy supported the results. This can be further attested by checking sales funnel checkpoints and interviewing clients about their content consumption and favorite brand assets.

It is also possible to directly assign specific metrics to GTM goals (depending on the GTM model you are using). This can be straightforward for product-led growth, however, for community and partner-led approaches this may require input from third parties to benchmark performance.

Evaluating the performance of your B2B content marketing strategy is a never-ending process that should be continually optimized to ensure that success is accurately defined and that your content continues to meet organizational goals.

2. Determine the most cost-efficient channels and formats

In this step, evaluate the channels and B2B content marketing formats that you previously selected to determine which drove ROI.

This process will allow you to align your channel mix with the needs and preferences of your target buyers to support the best ROI possible.

Keep a close eye on conversion rates per channel, and your overall lead acquisition cost, to determine the best avenues for engaging your audience. Client surveys are also key, as you can ask which channels they used to discover and engage with your brand.

Below are some recommended metrics for this step:

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Key Takeaways

When driving revenue with content, keep in mind these three takeaways to bolster your performance:

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    Track metrics that can easily be correlated to revenue and GTM objectives: To steer your B2B content marketing strategy in the right direction, it is important to prioritize metrics that support optimizations, while associating content performance with organizational growth

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    Prioritize low-cost channels and formats: When launching a content strategy, it is best to identify the channels and formats that drive the highest engagement at a low cost. Start with a pilot and expand as needed based on performance

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    Futureproof with lead intelligence: Glean data on campaigns to determine the elements of high-impact content and optimize content regularly to continuously enhance its performance

ENGAGE YOUR TARGET BUYERS WITH CONTENT MARKETING PRIMED FOR B2B DEMAND GENERATION

INFUSE demand experts craft and leverage your existing content marketing library with omnichannel strategies fueled by demand programs tailored to your unique needs.

CONTACT THE TEAM AT [email protected]

Joseph Braue
About the Author
Joseph Braue is a digital media, marketing, and content innovator with expertise in growing B2B revenue streams. Joseph has started multiple marketing services in different media companies and grown them into multi-million dollar enterprises. Currently, he leads the INFUSE content services team and helps clients optimize their content performance for demand outcomes.

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