7 Steps to a Great Content Strategy

There’s no shortage of information on B2B content marketing but much of it tends to focus on desired outcomes rather than practicalities of getting there. As with anything, it’s possible to make content marketing very complex with lots of stakeholders, buyer journey stages, and cross-team hand offs – and hey, throw in some AI while you’re at it - but you can also simplify quite a bit with laser focus and proper planning.

After many years delivering sales and marketing content and defining content strategies for global B2B organizations, here's my list of what you need to know and watch out for to create a successful content marketing strategy.

Step 0: Know your product

This step precedes all the others but I’m going to gloss over it because if you can’t articulate your solution’s capabilities and benefits to the people you want to use it, you have some homework to do before you tackle content strategy. Once you have done this, however, you can get started generating ideas and this article on creating content that resonates with audiences can help you get started.

Step 1: Know your brand

Your brand is much more than a logo or tagline because it embodies the emotions inspired by your company, products and services. Defining your brand story is a topic in its own right - and please reach out if you'd like to discuss - but for the purposes of this article, if your content strategy doesn’t start and end with your brand, you run the risk of delivering an inconsistent and confusing experience to your audience. Your brand must be consistently represented across all buyer and customer touchpoints in tone, style, and appearance.

Step 2: Know your buyer

At a very basic level, you are always addressing all or a subset of the following audiences. I’m not talking about personas here, although they also play an important role, i.e. if you sell recruiting software, your value prop for HR will likely differ from your value prop for line managers or IT. So, you can’t ignore personas but it’s even more basic than that.

I’m talking about people who are looking for a solution like yours today, people who aren’t looking today but may be looking in future, and people who need your solution today but don’t yet know it. People who already bought your solution but may be in the market for add on solutions can be included in any or all of these, and each audience will be best served by different kinds of content:

Step 3: Know your decision makers

If you don't already know your key messages for the people who would typically use your solution, you may want to read Content Strategy Essentials, which includes useful links for creating actionable content marketing personas. However, chances are they aren’t the people who will ultimately make the buy or ‘do nothing’ decision. That means that if you don’t also cultivate decision makers before, during and after the decision is made, there’s a big chance something that has had their attention for a longer period will win out when it comes down to shelling out money. 

So, how do you get executive attention with your content strategy, given that most decision makers probably won’t click your social posts, hang out on your website or read your solution white papers? 

There are a couple of options you can try that don’t need to be complex or expensive:

• Executive events where your spokespeople or customers present - your content includes the presentation itself as well as any leave behind materials
• Thought leadership content in digestible chunks (i.e. blog posts, short videos, articles, etc.) from credible sources like analysts or other executives in similar industries
• Try something unusual like a product brochure tucked in a personalized gift such as a leather notebook or box of chocolates, perhaps timed to a personal milestone
• Personal outreach, perhaps referencing something the executive has presented or written and offering a free piece of valuable content on a similar topic or an analyst report – an effective approach for account executives as well
• Content targeted to the people close to the decision maker, i.e., if you are trying to influence the CEO, offer great content for the Controller

Note that any content presented to decision makers (executive team, Board members, etc.) should be relentlessly focused on quantifiable business benefits and evidence rather than product details. They’ll assume the solution has already been validated by the selection team and unless they’ll actually be using the solution, they'll be more interested in why they should pay for it than how it works.

Step 4: Know your customers

Building a positive and personal relationship with customers is fundamental to business success but more specifically, customer advocacy should be a key pillar of your content strategy. Nothing you as a marketer can say about your solution will carry the same weight as the same message given by a customer or concrete examples of customer success. You can’t create effective messaging, campaigns and sales tools unless you understand how your customers use and talk about your solutions in their language. You can never have too many happy customer stories… and even if you can, you probably don’t.

Step 5: Know your channels

Assuming you’ve done everything else right, this is where your content strategy can still fail. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most common challenge is lack of clarity about who owns what. Here’s the thing: Everyone agrees you need a content and a distribution strategy and most would probably agree on a high level that product marketing owns messaging, content marketing owns content, demand generation owns global promotion and – in a global organization – field marketing owns local promotion. Of course you can combine these functions, but this is a hypothetical starting point.

It seems straight-forward but it starts to crumble as soon as, say, field marketing claims product marketing should define the channel strategy for each persona, or that the content team owns the distribution strategy, or that content strategy should include web strategy, or demand generation needs the content team to tell them which content to use for which promotion, or the content team gets pulled into a local initiative, or field marketing starts creating their own content, or… I could go on, but you get the idea. 

My point is that it isn’t as clear cut as it seems so it’s absolutely critical to agree on roles and responsibilities as early as possible as well as any obvious capacity or skills gaps. Once you’ve done that, defining a distribution strategy is pretty straightforward, so I’ll leave off here and refer you to an excellent guide to content distribution strategy from CMI.

A quick plug for social media, although I realize not everyone’s a huge fan: Compared to other distribution channels it’s extremely cost effective, and the opportunity cost can be kept quite low as well with a well-stocked content and thumbnail library. It’s a fast, free and easy way to conduct AB testing, acquire NMLs (new marketing leads) at $0 CPC (cost per click) and get eyes on your headlines even if people don’t click.

Step 6: Know your business

Patty Azzarello, one of my favorite business coaches and authors, wrote an excellent post recently about why business strategy doesn’t get implemented and the number one reason is that companies confuse guidance with goals.  Lacking proper guidance on how to implement the goals, people come up with their own interpretations and chaos ensues with parallel work steams that suck up limited creative capacity. 

One of the most important jobs of leadership is to focus the work around the most impactful initiatives. The starting point for this is being surgically focused on the market you are in and which strategies are most effective for that market. For example, if you operate in B2C or even mid-market, it’s essential to nail your SEO strategy – even at the expense of other initiatives - because people who won’t have heard of your product will likely be using Google search to find solutions for specific business needs. If you operate in the Enterprise space, however, word of mouth and analyst endorsement are your door openers, so more of your focus will probably be on thought leadership, executive events, customer advocacy, targeted or account-based marketing and/or influencing your market influencers. 

No matter your target market you need a great website that makes it easy to find relevant content, but to be truly effective you need to be truly focused on where the biggest impact is. If you try to do everything you will either do nothing very well or - in the best case - have siloed pockets of excellence in a few areas.

Step 7: Know your goals

In all the years I’ve worked in marketing, using various CRM and content management solutions, I have yet to see content analytics that bring together website performance, content downloads, social media engagement, paid media performance, etc. To get the full picture of how your content is performing by channel your marketing ops team – or you - will probably have to cobble together agency reports, website analytics, Google analytics, content management system analytics and CRM data. However you get it, you need content performance data by channel in order to refine your content strategy. Again, you need to be very clear about your content goals or you may draw the wrong conclusions. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• If you only measure lead performance, tactics focused on building awareness or customer value may seem like a bad investment.
• A high bounce rate on your website may be a bad sign but it may also mean a visitor found what they wanted quickly. 
• Successfully increasing website traffic may sound like a win but may not correlate to higher leads or sales in the Enterprise market.
• Under-performing content may point to a problem with promotion or website navigation rather than the content itself.

Bring it all together:

Defining a great content strategy means being clear about your goals, your priorities, your audience, what you want to say and who does what. Everything else is just execution. : )

PS I know, it’s really 8 steps.