B2B content marketing isn’t about churning out random blog posts and hoping something sticks.
It’s about creating a strategy that aligns with how your customers research, evaluate, and make decisions.
In this post, we’ll break down four practical tips that will help you build a smarter, more effective B2B content engine—from mapping the Buyer’s Journey to refining your keyword strategy and embracing video.
Identify the Buyer’s Journey for Your Customers
The first step to building a content strategy for a B2B business is to identify your ideal customer, and understand what their Buyer’s Journey is.
Typically, a Buyer’s Journey will have three stages (sometimes more if you want to get really granular).
- Step 1: Awareness – The customer has a feeling that they have a problem, and are doing research to learn more about it. Their searches at this point are largely informational. They’re gathering data!
- Step 2: Consideration – After a while, the customer has identified the intricacies of their problem and started to look for solutions. They’re returning to resources they looked at before, weighing their options for products or services that can help them out.
- Step 3: Decision – Once the customer has narrowed down their options to a select few, they start making their decision. They’ll continue reading about processes and results, trying to validate their gut-feeling. At the end of this stage, they’ll have picked a business that seems like the best fit for their problem.
Think about how this buyer’s journey might apply to your customers. What problems do they have in the Awareness stage? What helps them narrow down options in the Consideration stage? And ultimately, what leads them to choose your business (or your competitors) in the Decision stage?
Then, build content to match these stages. For example, if you create renewable energy plans for manufacturers looking to decrease energy costs, you could create a funnel of content like this:
- Awareness: A blog titled “5 Tips for Reducing Energy Expenditure in Manufacturing Plants”
- Consideration: A blog titled “Why Solar is the Best Option for Small Parts Manufacturers”
- Decision: Case study for a client titled “Decreasing Manufacturing Energy Cost With Custom Solar Grids”
This is a rough example, but you see how the content gradually leads toward more detail-oriented, complex topics? Model your content around the Journey and it will make it easier for leads to identify you as a thought-leader and choose your service.
Build an Interlinking Strategy
Once you’ve locked in the Buyer’s Journey and thought about what kind of content you should be producing, you need to link that content accordingly.
Think of your interlinking strategy as the road signs your readers use to travel along their Journey. They’re relying on you to tell them where to go next.
You want to direct the Awareness-stage people to the Consideration stage, and so on. But, don’t make the mistake of linking Decision-stage content too soon.
It would be a bad idea to link the client case study in the “5 Tips” blog post, because at that point, readers might not care about the gritty details of a solar grid plan. They’re gathering information, yes, but they’re doing so in a broad sense.
Instead, think about what other content you have that will build on their research-gathering. Maybe you can link another Awareness post about the leading energy sinks manufacturers encounter. Try to match their energy before throwing them the CTA-bone. You should only be linking your end-of-funnel CTAs in the Decision case studies and webpages.
Slash Your Keyword List
One of the biggest mistakes content specialists make when planning a B2B content strategy is targeting the wrong keywords.
There’s a lot of pressure to get traffic to your business’ site, so you might be tempted to hone in on high-volume, global keywords. While this approach can bring in traffic, it’s not the right kind of traffic.
Terms that have a high volume of searches per month indicate that there’s a lot of people looking for that thing, all of which are probably at different stages of the buyers journey.
For example, if you offer ecommerce management and optimization services, you would probably want to avoid spamming “ecommerce services” as a primary keyword.
It has decent volume and low difficulty, but the cost per click (CPC) is relatively low, and it’s also been flagged as an “informational” keyword.
Instead, consider a more refined keyword. “Ecommerce optimization services” has a lower difficulty, lower volume, and a much higher CPC. This indicates that it’s a valuable conversion keyword. The people who are being more specific about their search queries are more intent on finding the right kind of service, product, or information.
What does that mean for you? They’re more educated and ready to find an answer to their problems. I would almost guarantee that you’d get more leads from this keyword than you would from “ecommerce services”.
Traffic is nice, but at the end of the day, converting that traffic is your job. Take another look at your target keywords. Which can you ditch because they’re too broad? Refine your list for better results.
Don’t Sleep on Video Media
Not so long ago, written content was the prime focus for B2B marketers. You’d write blogs, webpages, and emails, and that was the strategy.
Now, video content has solidified itself as the next best content marketing tool.
According to a study from Wyzowl, 89% of content marketers consider video to be a core part of their strategy this year. Explainer videos, testimonials, and product demos are great uses of video for B2B.
AI tools have really upped the ante on video marketing, with voice over and AI influencer tools making it easier than ever to break into the scene.
You should be using video to supplement your traditional written content, even if it’s just short videos for LinkedIn. As search engines adapt to the changing landscape, we predict that video will become perhaps more important than on-site content in the scheme of building authority.
B2B Content Marketing Doesn’t Need to Be Difficult
If you’re just getting started with your B2B content strategy, there’s a lot to consider, and it can feel overwhelming. But don’t get caught in the weeds focusing on specific blogs or video scripts.
Make sure you plan out your strategy from a high level by identifying your Buyer’s Journey, creating an interlinking plan, and optimizing your keywords. After you’ve done that, actually writing and filming the content will be a breeze.