The challenge: You’ve built a website that generates good organic traffic. People find your site, stay a bit, and then leave.
You’ve got the numbers. So, where are the leads? How do you capture them? Clearly, you have enough quality content to attract readers in the first place. Why aren’t they engaged enough to stay?
When faced with this dilemma in their content marketing strategy, B2B companies tend to think the answer is “more content!”
After all, every marketer’s ears ring with the eternal chant of “Content is King!”. So, more content must be the answer.
When you create more content to close the traffic vs. leads gap, frustration mounts, which doesn’t help the situation.
What do you do now? You have content. Mountains of it. So where are all these leads everyone promises you?
Having content isn’t enough. You’ve got to leverage it strategically if you want to win leads.
And that’s what this article is all about—content marketing strategy, B2B leads edition.
How to optimize your content marketing strategy (B2B edition)
As we’ve established, the quantity of content is seldom the issue. Quality may not be the issue either.
The issue is a stark disconnect between content that attracts potential customers and content that makes them convert.
We know content marketing results in lead generation. Forbes Advisor’s consolidation of marketing trends for 2024 shows that, while lead generation remains the biggest challenge for B2B marketers, 74% reported that content marketing increased the number of their leads.
Content marketing works. You just need to figure out what’s stopping yours from getting there.
So, the first step is to audit the content you already have. This means going on a gathering mission.
Consolidate your content
If you speak to members of other departments, you may be shocked to find most team members outside the marketing department have no idea what you do.
Even worse, team members in your department may not know what resides in your content library.
The typical reasons for this are a lack of organization and the disruption of turnover.
Without a centralized, easy-to-access hub that all team members know and participate in, content will fall through the cracks from quarter to quarter.
Content leads may know that you have written X content pieces on a particular topic and unpublished or stored Y of them for any number of reasons, but that content lead will not be in that role forever.
What happens if they get promoted or leave for their next opportunity? Who will know where all the content lives?
Another issue is shifting priorities. Because any content marketing strategy takes time to see ROI, many marketing leaders are under pressure from the higher-ups to provide positive metrics, which results in new priorities and goals every quarter.
This results in half-finished or never-started content projects that sink into the ether, never to be seen again.
Your first job is to make sense of this mess. Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate!
Make a list of places to look for content floating around company-wide. Send out a memo asking for any content assets other departments have created that you may not know about (Customer Success and Sales Teams in particular).
Consolidate the lists everyone sends you into one master doc.
You don’t want to add to the chaos by having a dozen Excel sheets bumping around during this process.
Next, go on a search mission of your own.
Put on your anthropologist hat and start digging through your:
- Content management tools (Asana, Notion, Monday, etc)
- Design Tools (Canva, image banks, etc.)
- Social Media Scheduler Tools
- Content management systems
- Email Platforms
- Google Drive
- CRM Tools
- Dropbox
Think through every platform your company has created or stored content, currently or in the past, and add them to the list.
Do a content audit
Now that your content is in one place, it’s time to audit.
Start by separating by type of content. Have a category for each: blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, visual content, etc.
Now, you’re going to separate the star performers from the duds.
Analyze each piece of content on these criteria:
- Conversion rates
- Keyword volume
- Backlink profile
- Organic traffic
- Engagement
- Bounce rate
- Shares
The above list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a good place to start determining which pieces are performing well and which are not.
The results from this audit are the blueprints for your new content strategy. Take your best performers and those with the most potential and create a plan to update each.
For some, this will be a refresher of the top-performing keywords. For others, it will include extended examples, templates, or use-case stories.
Each piece needs something different to reach its full potential.
It may be tempting to implement global changes, but it’s best to analyze content piece by piece. Your goal is not to complete the updates as quickly as possible but to optimize each piece of content to its fullest conversion potential.
Pro Tip: If you have a piece that performs well for low-volume keywords, don’t immediately throw it out as “unsuccessful.” A high-ranking article with a low search volume makes you the de facto expert on that topic. There’s less competition, and you’re providing niche information that some people are interested in.
Build a content marketing strategy B2B sales funnel
You’ve done your audit, and you can see your star players by type of content at a glance. You have a plan to update and maximize the full conversion potential of each piece.
Now, sort all content by sales funnel type.
As a quick refresher, a sales funnel helps move prospects through the psychological stages of the buying process.
Marketers visualize this process through a framework called a sales funnel (also called the customer journey).
A content marketing sales funnel consists of three primary stages.
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
These stages are also known as top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU).
Each stage of the sales funnel requires its own content type.
Here are some examples of sales funnel stages by type of content:
Awareness stage
- Social media posts
- Email marketing
- Digital ads
- Blog posts
- Web pages
- Podcasts
This content is where you introduce potential buyers to your brand and product and explain how you can solve their problems.
Consideration stage
- Feature breakdowns and explanations
- Segmented email campaigns
- Research and whitepapers
- Webinars and Workshops
- Video tutorials
- Product demos
In this stage, you educate your target audience about your product, nurturing them toward a buying decision by giving them more information to answer their questions and ease their concerns.
Decision stage
- Discounts and Limited Time Offers
- Product Previews
- Case Studies
- FAQ Pages
In this final stage, you answer any lingering questions or doubts your B2B audience has and give them a small taste of the product or incentive to buy, solidifying the trust you’ve been building in the previous two stages.
Fill out your sales funnel
Sort your audited content by buyer journey stage.
Doing this shows you where your sales funnel content is weak.
Where are you coming up short? Do you have 600 blog posts and only 1 case study? Do you have 23 podcast episodes and zero comparison guides?
These results are your roadmap of what to work on next.
Fill in the remaining space in your content calendar with necessary sales funnel content optimized for conversions, just like your updated pieces.
Align sales and marketing teams
You’ve got your content strategy, content calendar, and sales funnel. You’ve built a plan to optimize all your existing content and understand what types of content you need to create next.
But there’s one last step to make this exercise successful: aligning sales and marketing.
Remember why all this labor was necessary. You had mountains of content spread throughout your organization.
If your company is like many B2B companies, the greatest disconnect is between your sales and marketing team.
This divide wastes huge potential for landing potential customers. Sales and marketing ultimately have the same goal: to win conversions.
But far too often, the two departments don’t communicate at all. They’re on different paths with different KPIs, and each regards the other with a bombastic side-eye.
Even worse, C-suite executives overwhelmingly believe that their product, sales, and marketing teams are aligned, when a Q2 2024 study by Forrester found that 65% of the boots-on-the-ground professionals in those departments reported feeling a lack of alignment, including lack of communication, teamwork, and trust.
Get your sales and marketing departments on the same team. Build a pipeline between sales and marketing so each side can get the content/updates/stats they need to do their jobs effectively.
To begin building this alignment, start here:
- Encourage suggestions on ways to improve marketing assets
- Set up regular sync meetings for open communication
- Foster a collaborative environment to ask questions
- Align public-facing messaging from both departments
- Align KPIs to revenue for both departments
- Facilitate interdepartmental education
The goal is for each department to understand and appreciate the other’s work and to agree on lead capturing and conversion.
Write for humans
Finally, remember that you are writing for humans, not bots.
In the mad dash to build traffic and attract leads, it’s easy to forget that you’re not ultimately writing for algorithms.
There are real people out there with real problems that you can solve.
As you audit your content and build out your sales funnel, remember that your goal is to match search intent and add value to the person interacting with your content.
Don’t get lost in keyword stuffing and algorithm pandering. Write for humans.
Content marketing strategy B2B distribution
The final step in the content creation process is content distribution.
In the past, distribution involved pasting a URL on social media channels and hoping for clicks.
Now, it’s a little more complex.
At its best, distribution amplifies the impact of each piece of content far beyond what it would reach on only one channel or by solely relying on organic traffic.
One piece of high-quality content works for you repeatedly by breaking one piece of long-form content into 5-7 pieces and distributing it across several marketing channels.
For instance, you can break instructional videos into 5-10 smaller clips for social media reels and use the same videos in email newsletters.
You can extend the newsletters into blog posts by breaking them into sound bytes for text-based social media platforms.
Make all pieces of content work for you as much as possible. When you have spent the resources making valuable content, don’t let it go to waste. With as many distribution channels as you have, there is no reason to let content stagnate.
Here are some high-ROI content formats to consider for your distribution strategy.
- Short-form videos
- Email marketing
- LinkedIn posts
- Case studies
- Webinars
Get the most out of your content
B2B businesses create content to increase conversion rates, but sheer volume isn’t enough. Your content marketing plans must include valuable content optimized for its highest conversion rate potential.
To do this, audit all your content. Consolidate all types of B2B content company-wide and evaluate it using content performance metrics that are most relevant to your business goals.
Next, fill out your sales funnel by sorting your content by sales stage. Doing this gives you a blueprint for your content goals. Create more types of content for the stages with the fewest content pieces available.
Finally, align your sales and marketing departments so that communication runs seamlessly, resources are shared, and you accomplish all your goals.
Remember that you’re writing for your ideal customers—real people, not bots and algorithms. Keep your content plan human, valuable, and accessible, and evaluate its impact on your content marketing success.
As you explore ways to get high ROI from your content marketing efforts, we’d love to help. We offer link-building services that have helped hundreds of brands reach their SEO goals. We want to help you, too.
