6 Key Elements of an Effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy

As great as it is to see so many B2B companies jumping onto the content marketing bandwagon,
the reality is that many of them will struggle to drive meaningful business results. Why? Because
they often overlook a simple reality: To create and deliver content that attracts and retains
customers, a haphazard approach just won’t cut it. You need a strategic framework for
conceptualizing, designing, and scaling your efforts.

While developing an effective content marketing strategy isn’t easy, becoming familiar with its
core components is the first step for moving in the right direction.

At Open View, for example, we have built our content marketing strategy around six key
elements:

1. Well-defined targets

The key to effective content marketing is to be sharply focused. It’s virtually impossible to
successfully market to everyone all at once, so instead you may find it easier if you concentrate
your efforts where you think you can move the needle most.
Start by focusing your content efforts on just one customer segment at a time — the segment that
includes your best customer. This customer should then serve as the model for your target buyer
persona.

2. A deep contextual understanding

Regardless of who your target buyers are, it’s going to be virtually impossible to create content
that resonates with them until you understand the unique context of their situation. In addition to
knowing who your buyers are, you need to understand what they care about and what their path
to making a purchase looks like. You also need to get your head around which points throughout
their buyer journey you need to influence to drive conversions and move them through the sales
funnel.

To create content that will resonate with your buyers, you first need to learn:

 Their motivations, pain points, and role in the buying process

 Where along their buyer journey they are most likely to get stuck
 What assistance and information you can provide to help get them unstuck and propel
them forward

One of the best ways to develop that understanding is by creating buyer personas and taking the
time to analyze and understand the buyer journey. It also never hurts to reach out to your target
audience directly — interviewing and surveying its members to get a better understanding of
their individual concerns. The information you gather can then be used to inform your persona
development efforts and give them more context.

3. Clear conversion goals

Once you understand who your target buyers are, what they care about, and the steps they take
along their buyer journey, it’s time to figure out what actions you want them to take as result of
consuming your content.

Each of those actions is a conversion. As your ultimate marketing goal is to convert your target
buyers into paying customers, your content strategy should be centered around a set of smaller
conversion goals that will collectively help propel them through the buyer’s journey. In addition
to leading prospects toward your desired destination, these smaller goals also serve as
benchmarks that can help you track and measure the performance of your content along the way.

When setting your conversion goals, make sure that each is appropriate for the stage of the buyer
journey you are targeting. For example, top of the funnel conversion goals might include opening
an email or visiting your website, while later in the buyer journey you may want to encourage
prospects to download a report or sign up for a free trial.

4. Appropriate points of contact

Another important aspect of content marketing strategy is deciding how you are going to initiate
conversations with your target buyers, and get them to be receptive to receiving your content
offerings. For example, you can choose to contact them directly through emails, phone calls, text
messages, or tweets. Alternately, they might make the first move by reaching out after
discovering your business through search engine queries, online forums, or advertisements.
Another option is to arrange for prospects to be contacted by third parties — such as their fellow
consumers, friends, colleagues, or industry analysts — on your behalf.

When deciding which options to pursue as part of your content marketing strategy, keep these
tips in mind:

 Always consider your buyer and their context when selecting a method of contact.
  Your method of contact must be effective enough to drive whatever conversion goals you
have set.
 Less expensive forms of contact are often better than more expensive ones.
 Because your target’s preferred media channels, formats, and communication styles may
vary widely, plan on utilizing multiple vehicles, programs, and points of contact in your
outreach efforts.
 The less work you have to do to make contact, the better.

Finding the right ways to make contact with your target buyers is just as important as creating
content that reflects your understanding of them.

5. A process for alignment

The next step in developing your content marketing strategy is to figure out how to pull it all
together — i.e., how to align your contextual understanding of your buyers and their journey
with your conversion goals, the points of contact you are going to use to deliver your content,
and the actual content you are going to create. The best way to do that is by creating a matrix that
will help you keep track of all these moving parts, such as the one shown below:
Doing so creates a strategic framework for designing and executing the kinds of campaigns that
successfully drive conversions and result in real business impact.

6. The ability to scale

The last major point to consider when developing a content strategy is how to tackle one of the
biggest challenges many B2B content marketers say that they face: producing enough content to
satisfy their buyers’ appetite. The best way to do so is by building a plan for repurposing,
repackaging, and recycling the content you create for ongoing use. Here are three approaches to
consider:

 Repurpose the big stuff: The true value of a large piece of content isn’t just the asset
itself, but also all of the smaller pieces of content that you can turn it into. For example,
consider repurposing long-form content like eBooks, white papers, and reports into
shorter content formats, like articles and blog posts.

 Repackage the small stuff: The same principle can also be applied in reverse. If your
company produces a lot of short-form content, take inventory of it and look for common
themes. You may find opportunities to combine those smaller pieces of content into a
larger resource.

 Recycle the evergreen stuff: When you create something remarkable that your audience
truly values and shares, don’t stop there. Turn it into a series of evergreen content that
can be updated and recycled (i.e., republished) on a regular basis.

If your content marketing strategy contains these six elements, you will be in a much better
position to start creating real business value.