How to create an inbound content strategy: a guide for B2B marketing
“Marketing isn’t magic. There is a science to it.” — Dan ZaZrrella
According to the most recent annual research report from the Content Marketing Institute, the key to content marketing success for B2B enterprises is having a well-documented content strategy. There’s no better way to road map your activities or ensure that you’re creating high-quality, high-converting content.
These days, most B2B enterprises make some effort to attract new clients through web, blog or social media content.
However, very few organisations actually manage to achieve their desired results. Rather than attracting clients, you’re far more likely to hear B2B companies bemoaning their poor web traffic or complaining about how their sales teams are constantly engaging with unqualified leads.
If that sounds like your business, there’s a good chance you’re missing an inbound content strategy. Without a well-defined inbound content strategy, you’re likely to suffer from a range of common inbound content marketing headaches.
But fear not! We’ve produced a step-by-step guide to help you create a bulletproof inbound content marketing strategy for your B2B enterprise.
So let’s get started!
What is an inbound content marketing strategy and why do you need one?
An inbound content strategy is a documented plan of attack that will help you plan, produce, distribute and track content optimized content to draw visitors to your website and nurture them over time with insightful content, until they are ready to become customers. Inbound content strategies turn strangers into prospects, customers and promoters of your business.
A documented inbound content strategy is a roadmap that will keep you and your team on task, on time, and on target for the duration of your inbound marketing efforts.
Without one, you’re liable to miscalculate your timelines, skew your messaging, and (worst of all) muck up your budget.
So save yourself the unnecessary stress, wasted time and squandered funds by pinning down a bulletproof content strategy as early as possible.
A good content strategy should specify:
- Your financial goals
- Your OKRs, KPIs and campaign success metrics
- Your target audiences
- Your core top of funnel, middle of funnel and conversion messaging
- Your content formats and channels
- Your production process, budget and timeline
- Your distribution tactics, budget and timeline
Building a B2B Inbound Content Strategy
Ok, so you need a content strategy. But where to begin?
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Defining your business goals
The very first thing you’ll need to do to prepare an effective inbound content strategy is to define your business objectives.
You’ll need to ensure that all of your inbound content marketing efforts will actually be working to benefit your bottom line, and for that, you’ll need clear targets.
Your targets should be based on three things:
- How much revenue you need to generate from online/digital channels
- How many clients you’ll need to generate that revenue
- How many leads you’ll need to generate that number of clients (based on your anticipated conversion rates)
Together, these three numbers should help you definitively state how inbound content marketing will impact your business.
While filling in these targets, remember to keep your goals “S-M-A-R-T.”
- Specific: The more specific your goals are, the more easily you can define how you’re going to achieve them.
Ex: We want to increase the number of website visits by 15% in the next three months.
- Measurable: Set numerical goals. Quantifiable targets will help you keep track of your progress and evaluate your performance down the line.
Ex: We want to increase email sign-ups by 5% month on month.
- Attainable: Set realistic KPIs. Overly ambitious goals will only set you up for failure and discourage your team. It’s best practice to base your targets on previous accomplishments and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Ex: We will increase search traffic by 10% (from 7,000/month to 7,700/month) in the next three months.
- Relevant: Always tie your inbound marketing goals to concrete business objectives. If you can’t demonstrate precisely how your efforts are impacting the bottom line you might as well be burning money. Which doesn’t go down well in the boardroom.
Ex: Increasing newsletter subscriptions by 10% will help us nurture an additional 200 marketing qualified leads next quarter.
- Time-bound: Set specific time frames for your inbound marketing goals. This will help keep you accountable to the business and keep your teams on track.
Ex: We will achieve a positive ROI on our marketing spend by the close of Q3.
By defining your ultimate business goals you’ll be able to articulate the precise purpose of your inbound marketing, and develop your messaging and distribution tactics accordingly.
If your business is new to digital marketing, you may have a difficult time ball-parking your conversion rates like in the examples above. Don’t panic! Inbound marketing is a long game and you’ll soon start gathering data you can use as a benchmark to improve upon.
The first objective is simply to increase your brand awareness. As potential customers get familiar with your brand, they’ll gradually become more and more amenable to making a purchase. We’ll return to this point later on in our section on buyer journeys. For now, enhancing your brand awareness is the goal.
Building brand awareness is all about two things, consistency and customer relationships. As a result, your initial content should be customer-focused (rather than product-focused). That means pinning down your core brand and business offering and finding a compelling way to link it with your customer’s pain points with creative communications.
Read more: 4 Content Marketing Goals That Really Matter to the Business
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Defining your buyer personas
To pin down your messaging and make the most of your inbound marketing you’ll need to research your audience thoroughly.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on extensive data and research with real customers and prospects.
They’ll help you clarify who you’re writing for and precisely what their needs and wants are. If you want your content to actually convert, you’ll need a crystal clear picture of your buyer personas.
The more specific your personas are, the more you’ll be able to fine-tune your messaging and distribute your content to the right people at the right time once it’s been produced. You should strive for as much granularity as possible, don’t just settle for age, location or job title.
Determine what your personas are watching, reading, wearing, buying — anything to help you get a better handle on who they are as people. You want to generate a holistic impression of both their rational and emotional concerns. What keeps them up at night, who they report to and how they make decisions.
There are two surefire ways to develop accurate buyer personas, interviews and questionnaires:
- Interviews: The most effective way to flesh out a buyer persona is to conduct a series of in-depth interviews. By engaging your customers in real conversations you’ll be able to suss out their nuanced hang-ups and desires. What’s more, you’ll be able to identify patterns of behaviour that inform or influence your target audiences’ purchasing decisions. Talk to your own salespeople to get a better idea of who you should be approaching for interviews and how to reach them. For best results, interview at least 5–7 individuals.
- Questionnaires: Interviews take time, and people are busy. So the next best thing is to compile a questionnaire that you can simply drop into a contact’s inbox. Note that every business and every client is unique, so you’ll absolutely need to customize your questionnaires on a case by case basis. Remember to construct your questionnaires as if you were trying to get to know a person, anticipate their likely responses and pose some follow up questions accordingly.
After conducting interviews and/or receiving a sufficient number of completed questionnaires, you’re ready to begin building out your buyer personas. Save yourself the extra time and trouble with this helpful Buyer Persona Template.
Identifying pain points
With your buyer personas developed you’ll now be able to suss out their specific pain points.
Pain points are the challenges and obstacles that prevent your prospective customers from achieving their goals. You’ll want to position your products and services as direct solutions to these pain points; the more accurately you can describe them, the more effective your content will be.
According to WordStream, there are four broad categories of pain points to look for with B2B clients:
- Financial pain points: These are problems related to money.
Ex: We generate a ton of revenue, but our profit margins are still too low.
- Productivity pain points: These are concerns about the productivity of existing activities.
Ex: We spend too much time on sales without any real results. We need to be more selective with our targeted sales campaigns.
- Process pain points: These are issues related to the internal processes of a business.
Ex: Our teams have trouble communicating with one another and business-critical intel is getting siloed. We need to find more efficient ways of communicating.
- Support pain points: These are issues caused by insufficient support at critical stages.
Ex: Our customers are all on social media but we only provide tech support through our website. We need to diversify our support channels.
In some cases, your customer base may not even be aware of their own pain points yet. Either way, your mission is to put yourself in their shoes, understand the challenges they face and show them precisely how your products or services will help.
Remember that what you or your business intuitively want to say about your products or services isn’t necessarily what your customers are actually interested in hearing. So plan your content around specific, well-researched customer pain points instead.
This will ensure that you’re delivering genuinely useful content while improving your SEO. After all, most people turn to search engines with strong intent when they need to solve specific challenges. Speak to these challenges in a direct and effective way and your content is far more likely to be rewarded with an improved search engine ranking (and greater organic web traffic as a result).
To really get to the bottom of your customers’ pain points you’ll need to comb through your transcribed interviews and questionnaires with an exceptional eye for detail. To reiterate, your potential customers may not be able to articulate their pain-points explicitly, so you’ll need to think critically about both the rational and emotional components underlying the challenges they face.
If you’re unable to suss out the root causes of your customers’ pain points, you can always fall back on a bit of competitive market research. Take a glance at your competitors’ content and look out for any angles that you may have missed on your own. Of course, you’ll never want to simply parrot your competitors. As with any other business effort, you should always strive to distinguish yourself from the competition. At the end of the day, it’s unique and authentic content that performs best.
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Mapping buyer journeys
With buyer personas established and pain points identified, it’s now time to talk about buyer journeys.
A buyer journey is a process a customer goes through from first identifying a product or service right down to making a purchase. Buyers’ needs, wants and hang-ups will change as they progress through the various stages of this journey. You’ll want to fine-tune your messaging to continuously meet these changing needs.
Buyer journeys are usually broken down into three distinct stages: awareness, consideration and decision.
Let’s see what these three stages entail:
- Awareness stage
Prospects: At this stage, a buyer is encountering some kind of challenge and is searching for a solution online. In some cases, they may lack the precise vocabulary to describe their problem, or they may not yet realize where they’ve gone wrong.
How to approach them: This is where a thorough understanding of customers’ pain points will really begin to pay-off. If you’ve nailed down your customers’ pain points you’ll have a far better shot of turning up at the right time, with the right messaging, on the right channels.
Content: It’s too early for an explicit sales pitch to really be effective, so focus on educating potential customers instead. Show that you understand the challenges they’re facing and demonstrate that you can provide meaningful solutions through insightful content.
- Consideration stage
Prospects: At this point, a customer has identified their problem and learned a bit more about potential solutions. Their main concern will now be researching and comparing those solutions in greater detail.
How to approach them: At this point, you want to provide as much useful information as possible. The goal is to convince potential customers that you’re a knowledgeable and reliable source of solutions.
Content: Continue focusing on educational or informative content but aim for more engaging, interactive and/or actionable material. This is where things like guides, how-tos and quizzes will come in handy. Be patient, and avoid coming off as overly salesy. Building trust and cultivating a relationship is still the goal.
- Decision stage:
Prospects: This is when a potential customer has identified their preferred solution and is actively deciding between vendors. They will compare your offer to those of your competitors and will ultimately make or decline a purchase.
How to approach: It’s now time to let potential customers know all about your specific products and services. You’ll want to articulate any competitive edge you have and reiterate precisely how your products or services will ameliorate their pain points.
Content: This is when you’ll want to pull out all the stops. Show off your products and services with concrete case studies and high profile testimonials. Better yet, offer potential customers a trial or test demo to really sweeten the deal.
While awareness, consideration and decision are the three major stages of any buyer journey, the complete customer experience doesn’t end there. It’s important to consider your customer relationships at the post-purchase stage too.
Strive to keep your customers engaged with follow-up content like newsletters, product updates and useful downloadables. Post-purchase updates like this will help you maintain long-lasting relationships with your clients. They’ll strengthen your brand and increase the odds of securing referrals or further purchases down the line.
In fact, it costs most B2B enterprises far less money to retain existing customers than it does to attract new ones. So do your best to secure existing customer relationships. You may even find satisfied customers evangelizing for your brand on their own. There are few better strategies for securing long-term growth than turning customers into promoters and referring even more likeminded clients to your business.
With your buyer personas, pain points and buyer journeys all mapped out, you’ll be ready to forge ahead with planning your content itself.
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Conducting content audits
Step one is to conduct a content audit. This means running back through as much of your existing content as possible to see if anything can be repurposed for your new inbound marketing goals. Instead of rushing into new content creation, scour over any promotional documents, MoUs, website pages, lengthy emails, or hastily scribbled notes you may have stashed away. Review anything you’ve produced that might be converted into compelling content.
No less than 51% of surveyed marketers report that cannibalizing existing content is one of the most effective tactics they deploy in their campaigns. Systematically analyzing old content brings you several advantages:
- It helps you save time and money on content production
- It helps you flag outdated facts, figures or statistics
- It helps you spot weak or ineffective messaging to avoid
- It helps you discover particularly strong or compelling messages to double down on
While conducting your audit, keep an eye out for content that needs to be edited (or eliminated) to align with your updated goals. Remember that inbound marketing techniques are designed to drive as many eyes as possible to your existing webpages, so do your best to clean things up before you begin distributing new content.
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Researching keywords
Once you’ve identified your target audiences, honed in on their pain points, and double-checked to see if you’ve already produced any content worth repurposing, it’s time to begin researching keywords.
There are two major objectives behind keyword research.
The first is to identify the precise terms and phrases that your target audiences are entering into search engines. Incorporating these keywords into your content will improve your search engine ranking and increase your organic web traffic.
The second goal is to identify which keywords you have a realistic chance of “winning.”
Remember that you’re never producing content in a vacuum. Writing a marvellous blog post about cheesecake won’t necessarily land you a spot on the first page of google search results for the queried term “cheesecake,” especially when sallysbakingaddiction.com, sugarspnrun.com, and The Cheesecake Factory have already been competing over the term for years.
Instead of throwing yourself into a futile digital turf war, you’ll want to approach your SEO a little more tactically.
“Cheesecake” may be a lost cause, but “Asian-fusion matcha cheesecake” may very well be up for grabs. Generally speaking, short-tail keywords (search phrases composed of just one or two popular or generic terms) will be much more competitive than long-tail keywords (longer, and therefore more specific, less popular search phrases).
Don’t be discouraged by this.
Individuals searching for specific long-tail keywords are far more likely to be serious business prospects, especially for B2B. They already know what their problems or pain points are, and are actively seeking solutions.
Your goal is to meet them halfway, nurture them with informative and engaging content, and drive them down your sales funnel towards a purchase.
To sum up, by researching keywords you’ll learn:
- What topics and terms people are searching for
- How many people are searching for them within a given period of time
- How hard is it to rank for those topics and terms on major search engines
- Who is trying to rank for them (your probable competitors)
- What tactics your competitors are deploying to rank for those keywords
- If there are any gaps for you exploit to improve your ranking (e.g. winning long-tail keywords)
There are quite a few strategic and conceptual nuances to be aware of while conducting keyword research.
For example, it will always pay off to carefully consider a prospect’s intent when searching for a particular term. Individuals searching for “Asian-fusion matcha cheesecake”, for example, may be more interested simply learning about unusual cheesecake recipes than actually purchasing anything. Always think about level of intent someone may have when typing a particular query into Google.
Once you’ve identified some keywords worth fighting for, it’s time to pin down your content mix.
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Creating a content mix with pillar pages & topic clusters
A content mix is a grouping of the big-picture themes or topics that you intend to fuel your inbound content marketing ecosystem with.
Ideally these themes or topics will be informed by your prior research on buyer personas, pain points and keywords.
Your content mix will determine proportionately how much of your content will address each of the various themes or topics you’ve settled on.
For example, 20% of your content might cover “Asian-fusion matcha cheesecake” while 30% might address “unusual cheesecake recipes” in general. The relative proportions set by your content mix should reflect the ultimate priorities and goals of your inbound strategy. If your goal is primarily to improve your brand recognition among “Asian-fusion matcha cheesecake” enthusiasts, you would weigh that particular theme or topic more heavily in your mix.
Alternatively, if your keyword research has revealed that “Asian-fusion matcha cheesecake” is either an unwinnable or undesirable long-tail search term, you might opt to focus the majority of your content elsewhere.
When you’ve got your content mix in order you can begin planning out your articles and headlines. To maximize your SEO and seriously boost your results, you should organize your content into pillar pages and topic clusters.
This is a model in which a single comprehensive article, called a pillar page, is interlinked to a number of shorter, more narrowly focused articles called topic clusters.
To explain the rationale behind this model, we first need to touch up on our search engine basics.
To deliver relevant results, search engines store and track search data over time. This allows them to identify patterns and relationships between individual keywords and pages. Related terms are bunched together and associated with broader themes or topics. Someone searching for a particular topic will be served content that includes not only their initial search term but related terms as well.
In other words, search engines now look for thematic and semantic relationships when delivering results. The dense web of interrelated content produced by a pillar page and topic cluster model is great for establishing precisely this kind of semantic relationship. If one page ranks well, it’s likely that it will take the others up with it.
Next, search engines will prioritize serving content from more trusted or “authoritative” pages. Domain authority is informed by a wide variety of factors, including the number of sources linking back to your content from elsewhere on the web.
By tying your pillar pages and topic clusters together with a large number of links (as well as linking to other authoritative pages on the same or related subjects), search engines will come to identify your website as an authoritative source, rewarding your content with an improved search ranking.
Strive to produce pillar pages and topic clusters catering to each major theme in your content mix.
The end result should be a web structure that looks something like this:
Remember to produce content that will cater to potential clients at each step of the buyer journey as well. It’s generally safe to assume that you will need to “interact” with a prospect at least 8 to 10 times before they’ll take action, so aim to produce about 3 pieces of content for each stage of the buyer journey.
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Drafting a production plan
A production plan boils down to a calendar specifying due dates for drafts and edits, as well as who on your team is responsible for what. The goal is to provide a single source of truth to help the team keep track of their progress.
For best results, try to include all of the following in your plan:
- List of content: Clarify the working titles of all your pillar pages and topic clusters. Having listed side by side in a single document will help you ensure you’ve linked them all together later
- Buyer personas, keywords: Include these elements in your production plan to make it easier for your team to avoid mirage content and stay on target
- Person in-charge: We often build up three columns to supervise the activities of three teams: writing, editing and art production. Note who is responsible for each task
- Status & Deadlines: This should be a given. Keep the status and deadlines for each piece of content closely monitored in your calendar. Your team should be able to quickly check up on their cumulative progress
- Publication date: Include publication dates and status for each piece of content. The last thing you want is for your painstakingly produced content to go neglected
For a concrete example of what your production plan should look like, check out a free sample here.
In addition to distributing a production plan, you’ll want to be sure that your content creators are being fully briefed on the requirements and goals for each piece of content (this includes editors and designers as well as writers).
Written briefs may seem a bit formal, but they really are essential for staying organized and keeping everyone accountable. To really go the extra mile, have an editor or content strategist include a simple article outline alongside each brief. This small step can speed up production and improve the quality of your content immensely.
To save time for the whole team, also consider having your writers (or your editor[s]) brief your designers on any visual elements that need to be produced as early as possible. It’s always a good idea to repurpose your content into visual formats like infographics, charts, or mind maps, but begin the process as quickly as possible to avoid bottlenecks.
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Drafting a distribution plan
When it comes to inbound marketing, actually producing your content is only half the battle. Your content might be pure gold, but it will still be a total waste if you can’t deliver it effectively to your prospective clients. That’s where a distribution plan comes into play.
A thorough distribution plan will usually incorporate a mix of channels and leverage both inbound and outbound marketing mechanisms. There are three main distribution channels to consider:
- Owned media: These are channels that are already managed or controlled by your business, such as a website, social media page, blog or email list — invest in this as it’s the only media that truly belongs to you
- Earned media: When third parties promote your content on their owned channels for free, it’s called earned media. Some examples include PR updates, shares, mentions, reviews, or guest posts
- Paid media: This includes all forms of paid advertising (search engine ads; social media ads; web ads; sponsored content partnerships; etc.)
Even with inbound marketing as your core strategy, you can still selectively deploy outbound marketing techniques to fuel and amplify your messaging. For example, you might use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) adverts or targeted, in-feed social ads to make sure your content reaches a wider audience.
You might also pay to have your work featured as recommended or sponsored content to improve your brand positioning and develop credibility with buyers.
Either way, remember that you’re paying to boost your content rather your end product or services themselves.
To determine where to distribute your content you’ll need to carefully review your buyer personas. Ask yourself where your target audiences are most likely to congregate, as well as where they’ll be most receptive to your messaging. This is, once again, where hyper-granular buyer personas will come in handy.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to promote your content without depending on paid media, for example, on-page SEO.
On-page SEO is about optimizing your content to gain a better ranking on search engine results pages. A better ranking means more organic web traffic, and in theory, more leads. Here are just a few tried and true tactics to improve your on-page SEO:
- Title: Include targeted keywords early in your titles. When scanning search results, your prospects are more likely to spot a match for their query
- URL: Keep your URLs short and clear and always incorporate at least one keyword. This isn’t just for SEO, but for a better user experience
- Meta descriptions: a meta description is a 160-character HTML tag used to summarize a page’s content. Always include keywords in your meta descriptions, since most search engines will highlight these terms in bold on the results page
- Alt-text: Alt text is how most search engines identify the content of any images on your web pages. Note that these are not the same as captions (hover your cursor over an image and alt-text will appear). Incorporate keywords into your alt-text whenever possible for better search ranking
- External links: Apart from linking all of your pillar pages and topic clusters to one another, be sure to include a large number of relevant links to other authoritative websites. This improves your domain authority
- Lightweight images: Keep artwork and imagery light as heavy files slow down the site and are bad news for your organic search rankings
Contrary to popular belief, SEO doesn’t actually require keyword stuffing or killing your writing with cruel SEO tactics.
Google (and other search engines) are increasingly refining their algorithms to rank content based on usefulness and user experience. This means that an SEO-friendly article is now a user-friendly article, and vice versa. As long as your content is genuinely valuable for your target audiences, it should perform well for SEO.
Read more: Content Optimization Strategies
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Tracking Results
There’s just one final component for a complete inbound content marketing strategy, and that’s a plan for tracking results.
With so much time spent researching, planning, producing and distributing content, you’ll need some way to demonstrate success. Better yet, you’ll want some way to actually quantify your ROI.
To begin, you’ll want to have some firmly established KPIs based on any number of the following metrics:
User behaviours:
- Pageviews
- Average time on page
- Unique visitors
- Page depth
- Pages per session
- Bounce rate
- Traffic sources
- New & returning users
Engagement:
- Likes
- Mentions
- Shares
- Comments
- Incoming requests
- Republications
SEO outcomes:
- Organic traffic
- Backlink
- Dwell time
- Keywords ranking
Company revenue:
- Existing lead touches
- Conversion rate
- New lead generated
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Cost per acquisition
Which metrics you choose to focus on, and which specific numerical goals you set will both depend on the unique objectives of your campaign.
Nevertheless, you should strive to keep tabs on as many of these factors as possible to monitor and improve your performance for future campaigns.
Here are just a few tools to help you track the metrics above:
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a one-stop-shop for measuring web traffic, web speed, mobile-friendliness, most visited content, unique and/or repeat website visitors and web-driven leads. It will also help you generate reports about web audiences, acquisition, behaviour, and conversions. If a website or owned media channel is your arena of choice, Google Analytics is a sure bet
- Facebook Pixel/LinkedIn Pixel: If you’re running paid ads on social media and want to track the number of leads they’re driving to your webpages, be sure to plug in a Facebook or LinkedIn Pixel. These will track visitors arriving from social media channels across your webpages, allowing all of their activities (signing up, downloading content, purchasing) to be monitored and logged. They will also allow you to specifically target these visitors with follow up messaging back on social media
- HubSpot: We recommend using HubSpot to manage and overview all of your marketing activities across digital channels. Hubspot can connect your data on advertising (Facebook ads, Instagram), email (MailChimp, Front), lead generation (WordPress, SurveyMonkey), social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), video (Youtube, Promo), etc. With this integration, you don’t have to toggle between dozens of different software applications to manage your project. Best of all, Hubspot will help you track conversions and assign dollar signs to individual leads, just the thing for proving ROI.
Read more: 23 Essential Metrics to Measure Your Content Performance.
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Conclusion
That’s it! Craft a written document defining each of the factors above and you’ll have pinned down a bulletproof inbound content marketing strategy for your B2B enterprise.
It’s key to get your inbound strategy written down, and distributed internally. It will need a champion, and someone to keep evolving it, but make sure it’s accessible and easily understood by everyone in the marketing team.
Originally published at https://wecreatecontent.asia on January 27, 2021.
