What is the best way to determine the content mix for your B2B marketing strategy?

When defining goals and metrics for your B2B content strategy, align them with your broader business objectives and the customer journey. Beyond tracking standard metrics like website traffic or downloads, focus on engagement quality—how content fosters progress from awareness to decision. Tailor your goals to guide prospects through each journey stage, ensuring content acts not just as isolated efforts but as a cohesive pathway towards conversion. This approach not only meets specific metrics but also drives meaningful engagement, turning prospects into customers and brand advocates.

Determining the right content mix for your B2B marketing strategy involves understanding your audience, setting clear goals, and experimenting with different types of content. Here are some steps you can take: Know Your Audience: Understand their needs and interests. Set Goals: Define what you want to achieve with your content. Plan: Use a content calendar for consistent content flow. Experiment: Try different content types to see what works best. Analyze: Use analytics to track content performance and adjust strategy. Use User-Generated Content: Leverage reviews and testimonials for credibility.

It's essential to determine the primary and secondary goals from your content marketing activities. If your primary focus is on lead generation, then it makes sense to prioritize building & distributing more mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content such as demo videos, infographics, case studies sales battlecards, product-focused blog-posts and e-books etc. If your focus is on thought leadership and awareness-building, then prioritize more top-of-funnel content, such as blog-posts, e-books and other informative content pieces.

Determining the ideal content mix for your B2B marketing strategy requires a strategic approach. Start by understanding your target audience's preferences, interests, and pain points. Conduct market research and analyze past performance data to identify which content formats and topics resonate most with your audience. Consider leveraging a mix of formats, such as blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, videos, webinars, and infographics, to cater to different preferences and stages of the buyer's journey. Continuously monitor and analyze performance metrics to refine your content mix and ensure it aligns with your overall marketing objectives. By prioritizing audience insights and data-driven decision-making, you can create content easily.

To decide on the content mix for B2B you have to set clear business objectives and thoroughly understand your product! For some businesses, working years on blogs will not get the ROI that they can get out of one video content campaign.

In my experience, talking to customers should be the FIRST stop for any marketer. Too often there are barriers to having these conversations and we rely on platforms for competitor analysis when the best indicator of success and what to replicate is the person who already believes in your brand and is a customer. Start at the biggest metric of success (a happy customer) and work backward from there, and you will be able to create meaningful personas, understand your target channel mix and keep your strategy honed in.

The B2B journey is notoriously complex and likened to a big bowl of spaghetti (Gartner) - you just don't know who is going to start looking in your area, where, when and how long they will stay there. But how do you make it as tasty? Furthermore, in more cases than not, there will be multiple decision makers all with varied motivations, KPIs and job roles. So the first step once the brief and KPIs have been agreed, is to undertake SEO research into the search space and look at where these varied roles are in their journey. For example someone starting in procurement will likely be exploring answers from a different point of view than a CFO. From here map out which content format and channel will target the different decision makers.

As a content creator, I long to dive into every type of content. However, that's not what your brand needs. Too much is sometimes just that-too much. Examine what your customers are engaging with. Are your webinars getting traction? Blog posts getting views? Infographics getting the most comments? Then these are the content types you need to explore. There is still some trial and error involved. You can always take a look at what competitors are doing for ideas, but please don't copy them. A/B test your content types for a few weeks and that will give you a good idea of which direction to go. You may find customers are drawn to longer vs shorter content. Either way, you can optimize accordingly.