B2B Content Marketing Strategy: A Framework for Planning
"Build your product and they will come."
OR
"Don't worry, we'll figure it out on the way."
One approach risks being completely ignored. The other phrase would raise eyebrows if you heard it from an architect for your house or a rocket designer. For some projects, doing things spontaneously isn't exactly a great idea. For larger projects with larger stakes, you would fare better with a blueprint, process and schedule with milestones.
Similarly, content marketing works better with a well structured, documented content marketing strategy.
What is Content Strategy and How Is It Made?
Content marketing strategy could mean different things to different people, but for the purposes of B2B businesses and SMEs, we'll go with Hubspot's definition:
"Content marketing is a marketing program that centers on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience -- usually online -- the goal of which is to attract new customers.
The most common components of a content marketing program are social media networks, blogs, visual content, and premium content assets -- like tools, ebooks, or webinars. Here are some scenarios to demonstrate the mechanics."
This definition covers the basics of what a content strategy needs, also without locking ourselves into narrow definitions like "Content just means social media and TikTok." This is important as the channels and content themes that your business needs to produce is based on your target audience and what they will respond to, which brings us to the 'how' of content strategy.
How Should We Make a Content Strategy?
Some businesses work in very mature markets, where physical interactions are king, and their target audiences don't use social media. Others could be targeting social media-savvy entrepreneurs who themselves have strong presences on LinkedIn. Building a content strategy starts with understanding both your own industry, your target audience, and your company's goals.
First, it's important to define what meaningful business results you want to drive with content marketing. For early stage companies or SMEs, this includes creating demand and generating leads to drive sales growth. Other goals include increasing brand visibility and shaping positive perception. More often than not, content seeks to achieve several of these goals all at once. This matters because this will be how you track if your campaigns moved the needle.
Once your content strategy goals are defined, you can follow a few universal frameworks to tailor your content strategy to your business's needs. At Nila Studios, our approach to content strategy planning comprises 3 components:
- Customer Analysis - Understanding who your target audience and landscape
- Target persona studies - painting a clear picture of who your target audience is, what makes them tick, what they care about, how they go about their day to day work and where you might meet them
- Target persona studies - painting a clear picture of who your target audience is, what makes them tick, what they care about, how they go about their day to day work and where you might meet them
- Internal Company Analysis - Knowing what to say to your target audience, and what's been working and not working for you so far
- Content audit - what content you’ve done till date, what's working or not working, where the gaps are
- Value proposition review - what makes your company unique and how you can communicate your value to your target audience
- Market Analysis and Identifying the best way to reach them
- Ecosystem review - who else is out there who may be relevant to your target audience and to your business, what are they saying, how are they saying it, and what you should take note of
- Search landscape review - good ol’ keyword studies, identifying what search terms are relevant to both your company and your target audience
By the end of all this analysis, you will have a clear idea of what your target audience looks like, what core themes that matter to them that you should build, the channels and content formats that work best for them as well as how to position your solution in the context of the broader market.
Now that we've got an overview, we can dig a bit deeper as to how your team or agency can handle these different steps.
Customer Analysis
1. Target Persona Study
This is where we answer the ‘who’ question of content marketing strategy.
You’ll want to build an accurate picture of your ideal buyer, what pain points they have, and what opportunities you’ll have to reach out to them across different channels. You can find these by diving into existing customer records, such as by looking into CRM and sales data for a start.
Key information to look at includes: inquiry form data, product utilisation data, and recurring discussion points in sales conversations. From here, we can build content themes and narratives that resonate with the audience.
Next, looking at publicly accessible information such as profiles on LinkedIn or websites can help with identifying channels or media that may be relevant to them. You'll be able to find more hints as to who they are such as what they post about, their previous job experiences, education, and possibly their decision making hierarchy in their companies.
The persona study helps to map out the target customer’s buying journey, the touch points across the journey and the preferred channel to view and interact with content.
2. Internal Company Analysis
This segment focuses on how you can help your customers in your own unique way, (aka your unique selling point). Here, there are two areas of focus:
- Identifying what is currently working or not working (in marketing terms, a content audit)
- Reviewing sales materials and the actual product or service
The audit itself is straightforward as it covers content that your team has already published, especially their traffic and engagement. Once you know what is working or not working and why, you will know what to double down on or discontinue.
The audit also identifies if there has been overemphasis in certain areas of marketing, such as over indexing on bottom of funnel content or conversely, if there are areas of weakness that need to be buffed up.
Beyond reviewing existing published information on your digital platforms, a detailed study of material from different departments can help with developing a comprehensive view of what makes your offering truly valuable. These include:
- Pitch decks from the sales team
- Product documents from the product or engineering team
- FAQ information from customer service
But wait. Isn’t this supposed to be about content marketing? Why the need to look at all these sales and product materials and other stuff?!
We’re glad you asked. As part of Nila Studios effort in crafting a truly compelling and unique narrative for your company, we will look at how your product or service really works, through reviewing all this material and, quite likely, by way of trying your product for ourselves.
We’ll also speak with various stakeholders on your team to find out how the company as a whole generates value for your clients. These conversations help us to understand how value should be best communicated. Content marketing should ultimately represent your company and solution well to the market. And that’s what we seek to do.
Market Analysis
The focus of the market analysis is to identify external opportunities and best practices that are relevant to your content marketing strategy. This is to give us a better idea of where we stand relative to other industry players and competitors.
1. Ecosystem Review
The ecosystem review involves understanding how your competitors are performing relative to your company. This includes looking at the content they are publishing and whether or not they are performing. This will reveal new content ideas to consider as well as practices in creating or publishing content that may be worth adopting.
Beyond competitors, it is useful to look at other relevant industry players such as upstream or downstream firms, or even organisations in adjacent spaces who are also publishing good content. Apart from being a source of inspiration, these may serve as valuable sources of data that could, when analysed from your own perspective, become new insights that the whole industry could benefit from.
Additionally, looking at where these content is being distributed and how they are performing helps with evaluating which channels could work for you.
Finally, an interesting point to note is that it may be possible to collaborate with some of these ecosystem players later on.
Where two non-competing companies in the same industry are generating useful insights for the rest of the market, there’s an opportunity to co-create content that is even more valuable and that can then be cross-distributed to both companies' audiences.
2. Search Landscape Review
As the name suggests, this is where we look at search trends, identifying relevant keywords that your audience may be searching for, weighing the volume against the degree of competition for those keywords and developing detailed topic ideas that would be optimised for search later on.
There are many powerful tools out there, and many free but sufficiently robust tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Search Console that can get the job done. A simple Google search on your identified keywords will also reveal to you who else is ranking for those terms.
Follow this up with analysing the content that is ranking on the first page and you now have a clear picture of what questions your audience is asking and the current best ways in which they are being answered.
3. Putting All These To Use
Now that you have a clear picture of your customer, your company’s strengths and what's going on in the market, you can start generating content ideas that are more likely to succeed.
How we like to approach content ideation is to see content as ‘answers’ to questions your audience may have at various stages of the buying journey.
With the themes identified around customer pain points and opportunities, we develop these further into more specific topics. These topics then become the basis for the content you develop, regardless of format.
Psst, in addition to videos and podcasts, Nila Studios focuses on static content (think blog posts, ebooks, infographics, newsletters and landing pages). If you’re looking for other forms of content such as videos, printed materials or website development, we’ve curated a list of agencies we’ve worked with before at this link)
As for how to produce content, there are many ways to go about it. You could do it in-house or work with external parties such as agencies or freelancers to produce the content for you after the planning work is done, or you could engage an end-to-end content marketing agency that can cover all the bases for you.
If you choose to work with us, we can cover the entire content marketing process from planning to production, or just focus on whichever area you need us to help with.
Regardless of how you proceed, we hope you found this article to be useful. Do leave a comment if you did, or let us know how we can improve this further!
