7 Steps to Content Marketing Success

Content marketing is an essential go-to-market function on the modern B2B revenue team, and it’s not necessarily because sales and marketing leaders want it that way. Rather, customers demand quality, timely, topical content, and what’s important to customers is important to your business. Always.

Today’s B2B buyers are decidedly digital-first, and increasingly, they prefer self-service. As such, they begin their buying journeys anonymously, with their activities, for a large part, cloaked from potential vendors and suppliers.?

Buyers start their buying journeys with an insatiable appetite for content—they need information and data to move them forward in their buying journeys. Those initial steps of awareness and education are reliant on content, and eventually that content seeds the inbound motion and creates inbound sales pipeline.

But, that’s not all! Content also fuels the outbound motions of the revenue team, from Sales to Marketing to Customer Success. All proactive, outbound revenue team tactics require content to move customers forward in their journey.

With customers needing content, revenue team leadership needs a content producing function. However, like most every value-add along the revenue journey, producing the right content at the right time, all at a high level of quality, is not easy. Following the eight tips below, though, sure makes it a heck of a lot easier.

Map Your Customer Journey(s)

For content to be effective, it has to meet the needs of customers along their buying journeys. That’s the sole accountability of content—to add value to customers along their buying journeys and facilitate those journeys forward. Unless you’re into the “hope and pray” strategy, a prerequisite for all marketers is to understand your journeys.

Mapping your most prevalent customer journeys is not an easy task, particularly if you have multiple product lines and the like. So, there’s a tendency to map customer journeys and then assume they’re relatively unchanged for a good while.

Frequently check to see if your mapped customers journeys are relevant. Do so by going directly to the source: ask your customers! Once you understand clearly how your customers eventually get to decision-making points for your products, services, and/or solutions, then you can start to think about the necessary content.?

Conduct a Content Audit (and Create a Content Library)

Before you can create content to facilitate the buying journey, you should get a handle on the existing content your organization has at its disposal. There are probably some great collateral assets already in existence, and in too many cases, wonderful assets that have been forgotten as new assets were produced over time.?

Rediscover the existing content that can work immediately, and identify those assets that need some editing or refreshing. Oftentimes, revisions are relatively low-hanging fruit in publishing additional content assets.

As you conduct the content audit, digitally organize collateral assets by content type (blog post, eBook, solution brief, etc.), topic/theme, targeted persona, and stage in the buying journey. At the completion of your content audit you will have … a content library to share with the revenue team.?

Consistently educate your revenue team on how to use the content library to easily find collateral assets to insert into their customer facing processes. And, of course, as content assets are created, add them to your library.?

Bridge Content Gaps

Once you have audited your content, you have a great understanding of what you have. However, before you go off and create new content, you will be more efficient in your content delivery if you have an equally as deep understanding of the content assets your customers and revenue teammates require.?

Ask your teammates, particularly those in Sales and Customer Success functions, what obstacles they face in the accomplishment of their goals. For ideas around content creation, ask them to complete the question, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had … ?”

Your teammates will identify content opportunities, and in a great many instances, they may already exist—go back to that content library! But when new assets are ideated, you’ve just identified a content gap that will help you prioritize your production.??

Immerse Yourself in Industry News

Perhaps no organizations have the pulse on what’s topical and timely within an industry than trade-specific media outlets. Their stories typically either reflect the conversations happening in the business or serve as catalysts to start the conversations themselves.?

As you immerse yourself in the news, potential storylines will leap out at you. One of my favorite sources on industry-specific news is Industry Dive , which covers 34 different industries. Subscribe for daily alerts that include both original and curated content and news.?

Once you’ve identified timely topics, insert your organization into the ongoing discussion by publishing quality content on the subject. Speed is often of the essence before conversations shift to other topics, so pay attention to the news daily.?

Stoke the Content Engine

While the accountability for content often resides within Marketing, it originates from the entire organization. Subject matter experts abound throughout your business, both on the product and service sides.?

Uncover your subject matter experts and mine them for content. Sometimes they can create their own content. Other times, you might need to interview them and then create the content yourself (perhaps as a ghostwriter, to use the SME’s name on the byline).

If your subject matter experts are comfortable, use them in short videos. Those content assets can stand alone on YouTube and your website, and also be embedded into other assets, like blog posts and eBooks.?

Put the ‘O’ in SEO

Get the maximum out of your content by maximizing search engine optimization (SEO). This is particularly important as you join into existing conversations around topics in the news (see above).?

Uncover the keywords that most frequently engage your customers along their digital buying journeys, and produce relevant content that appeals to customer needs. As you publish, use every tool at your resource, like meta descriptions, alt text for images, transcripts for videos, etc. Additionally, supplement organic SEO tactics with paid, as the combination of the two has a synergistic effect.?

Be certain to revisit your list of primary key words often. Topics change quickly online, and it’s better to stay ahead than play catch up, not only to your customers, of course, but to your competition as well.?

Publish at a High Cadence

How many days do you typically go without reading or watching something on the internet? None? How are you different from the audience you’re trying to reach??

Your targeted audience is likely thirsty for content, and you have your hands on the spigot’s valve. So, give your audience what they crave before someone else, like any of your competitors, does.

Position your digital ecosystem, with your website being front and center, as the valued resource your targeted audience uses to become better at whatever it is they, and you, do. Use your corporate blog as the centerpiece, and ensure it’s updated regularly (at least once a week).?

Build out a resource library for customers by creating content along every medium, as customers preferred to consume their content in different manners. Some like to read short-form, others like long-form. Others prefer to watch and/or listen. It’s not up to you to decide what to offer. Rather, it’s up to you to deliver the content to your customers in the manner that works best for them.?

Publishing content at a high cadence not only suits the needs of customers, but it captures the attention of search bots every bit as much. Frequent publishing further drives all your SEO goodness.

TL;DR

To move the needle on revenue team performance, purposeful, high-quality content is required. Customers require information, and as such, content drives their inbound, self-directed buying journeys. For proactive, outbound motions from Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success, content serves as fuel, allowing customer touchpoints to be centered on collateral assets that help customers move forward in the buying journeys.?

Winning at content not only wins customers, but wins leadership in the market. Gain an upper hand by first building a solid content foundation with the following seven action steps.

1. Map your customer journey(s). Understanding how customers get to buying decisions lays the framework for the content necessary to facilitate buying journeys.
2. Conduct a Content Audit (and Create a Content Library). Uncover and organize existing content by type, topic/theme, targeted persona, and stage of buying journey. A completed audit then serves as an organization’s content library. Update as new content goes online.
3. Bridge content gaps. Ask your fellow revenue team members what content assets are needed to better their go-to-market processes and compare with your content library. Prioritize closing critical gaps before ideating new content.
4. Immerse yourself in industry news. Stories in trade media will point toward the topics most important to your customers and their businesses. Interject yourself into those conversations with timely and relevant content collateral.
5. Stoke the content engine. You might be responsible for content production, but you’re very likely not the best content contributor. Engage the subject matter experts throughout your organization for their thoughts on key issues, opportunities, and producers in the marketplace.
6. Put the ‘O’ in SEO. Winning at search is critical, both with human consumers and search bots. Leverage your SEO skills and tools to pop in search.
7. Publish at a high cadence. The marketplace is dynamic and your customers are always on the search for the latest and greatest. Serve their need for content and establish yourself as the authoritative industry expert.