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.
Definitive Guide to B2B Content Marketing 
Summary
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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?
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
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: