There is no secret that successful content marketing comes from great content.
The ROIs, the case studies and the whole “how I did it” as well as “what results does it give” (and not only!) stories we all love to share – they are all created by someone, somewhere and for some reason or other.
What makes a great content? It could be anything: an e-book, a blog post, a podcast episode, a video… and anything else too! But what should you do (if your resources allow you to do so) is to implement a B2B content strategy in order to increase readership and get better results with your company’s blog or website .
So how do you create such a strategy which will help you maximize your content marketing efforts?
1. Define your goals
The first thing you need to do is not to create a strategy but rather identify the reasons behind it. Why are you doing this in the first place? What are you striving for? What exactly are your goals? Some businesses have purely financial goals whereas others prefer to set higher service standards as their main targets. You should be totally clear on what they are and then build a plan of action accordingly. It might be that some parts of the strategy conflict with each other, so make sure that everything is perfectly inline before you continue
2. Choose your strategies
Once you know what your specific goals are, it’s time to choose how exactly you want to implement your content marketing strategy. There are basically two paths you can take: the inbound path and the outbound one. Both work well but it’s up to you which one suits your business model better. Inbound means that you focus more on creating high quality, informative and useful content that gives something back to your audience – like additional knowledge or advice (think of eBooks, white papers, webinars etc.). The aim of this approach is to attract organic traffic from search engines as well as social media channels rather than buying ads and promoting yourself through other ways (like email marketing). The other road is all about paid promotion where you first promote your content and then see what happens with it afterwards (like banner ads on relevant websites). Both of these strategies can and should co-exist together, not one on another.
3. Find your target group
Since you know what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts, the next step is to find out who exactly will be reading it. If you’re creating eBooks or whitepapers for example, your primary audience is most likely people working in a specific industry (and actually interested in what you have to say). You might even narrow it down by using different segments like size of company, location of business etc. Once you’ve defined who’s going to read your blog posts and other types of content later on, it’s time to figure out where they live online: their social media channels and communities , forums they visit and trust . It’s also a good idea to find out if there is any way you can segment your content so that it caters to different audiences or at least give them the opportunity to consume it in a way they prefer.
4. Create your editorial calendar
The next step (and one of the most important) is creating an editorial calendar which will serve as your guide for creating and promoting content. You need to define what types of posts you’re going to write, when exactly are they going live, who will be responsible for each task and how often should you do all this (how many blog posts would you like to put out per week? month? year?)? It’s really important to make sure that everything is properly planned because any mishap in the execution of your content marketing strategy can be detrimental to its success.
5. Get your resources together
Now that you’ve defined what you are going to write about and how often, it’s time to come up with a plan for implementing all of this into reality. It would be great if you could do all this on your own (and don’t forget about blogging) but as we know, Non Woven Fabric Buyers such an approach is quite demanding and not always possible (especially if you’re already overloaded with work). So whether it’s outsourcing or hiring someone internally, make sure that there will be at least one person dedicated to managing your B2B content strategy (of course depending on its scale and size).
6. Execute and measure
To make sure that everything is moving in the right direction it’s important to be properly organized and measure things like:
There are also different tools that let you analyze your content (and marketing) performance or automate at least some of your tasks.
7. Improve and optimize
After measuring things for a while you’ll realize what works and what doesn’t so always try to find new ways how to improve your current strategy. You can experiment with different types of content, different channels where you promote yourself, as well as go after certain influencers who might help amplify your efforts. Remember that implementing changes into your strategy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to start from scratch – just polish the already existing elements and use them better instead.
8. Rinse and repeat
Once you have your new strategy implemented, test it then measure its performance again after some time to see what’s working and what isn’t. And once you’re done with that keep this whole process going because there are always new ways how you can improve yourself!
What do you think about these tips? Do you have any other advice on how to build a B2B content marketing strategy? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
