The appetite for quality content is continuously increasing among marketers, but how do you make your B2B marketing strategy effective? Statistics indicate that 88% of B2B marketers embrace content marketing, but only 30% of them consider their efforts as effective.

The challenge is therefore for brand managers to bridge this gap and make content marketing strategies work. We have put together six-step methodology on how to create a content marketing strategy with measuring capabilities to assist marketers to improve their skills.

Here are the six steps for a B2B content marketing strategy:

Develop your B2B Marketing Strategy

Developing a plan should be your primary focus if you want to succeed in content marketing. List down your goals and make clear distinctions between goals and expectations. Go back to your mission statement and develop your goals from awareness stage to engagement.

During awareness, the metrics will focus on brand recall, site visits, increasing reach, and click on social media networks. As you move to engagement, the focus shifts to sales, cost per lead, loyalty, leads, and return visitors.

Identify your Target Audience

Understand your audience and their expectations to prepare a plan to meet their needs effectively. Do you know your target audience, and if so, what do they expect from your content? How will you interact with them and what determines their buying decisions? Answer these questions and create a buyer persona and personalize your marketing strategy.

Identify Key Topics

Generating a consistent flow of creative content may be quite a challenge, but a closer look at your target audience and analytics will give you more insightful content ideas. Ask yourself what your audience would love to read.

Create Informative Content

It’s now time to create some content. Ensure that the content combines value, visual appeal, relevance, and proper formatting that suits every stage of B2b content marketing strategy. Prepare a good mix of content containing videos, blog posts, eBooks, infographics, white papers, GIFs, visual quotes, podcasts, and much more.

All content should aim to:

• Solve a problem
• Add SEO value
• Trigger a purchase decision
• Offer insight into a popular topic

Advertise your Content

After creating quality content, you need to spread the word about it by embracing different amplification strategies including:

• Social media
• SEO
• Email marketing strategies
• Paid advertising
• Influencer marketing, and much more.

Analyze the Strategy and Optimize

A B2B content marketing strategy should put in place mechanisms that ensure the content improves over time by properly aligning its goals and setting KPIs at every stage. Measure the performance of your strategy and see if it meets the pre-set goals and metrics.


Originally Published:

https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/08/22/six-steps-for-an-effective-b2b-content-marketing-strategy/

Six steps for an effective B2B content marketing strategy | Search Engine Watch