At the start of every new year or new quarter, goal setting can get complicated for content marketers. B2B content marketing strategy can be tricky because you have a million choices for what to improve or how achieve better results: Track better KPIs and prove ROI. Deepen customer relationships with content that goes beyond quick lead gen. Expand your audience insights with new research. Become a better consultative partner to other business units.
For conscientious content marketers, all these options boil down to being more strategic. Seeing the bigger picture. Being proactive, not reactive. Focused, not flying blind.
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But where to begin with that lofty vision? Right here. We’ve outlined 10 concrete, strategic projects that will help you transform your B2B content marketing strategy and lay the foundation for smarter, more impactful marketing in 2022. By undertaking these projects, you’ll also master some of the most important B2B content marketing best practices. Learn how to:
The top-dog marketers always prioritize strategy. Sixty-two percent of the most successful B2B content marketers have a documented content strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, while only 11 percent of the least successful have a documented strategy.
Most content teams aren’t fully satisfied with their efforts: Only 29% of CMI survey respondents said their organizations “were extremely or very successful with content marketing in the last 12 months.”
Content marketers who want to focus on foundational or longer-term strategic initiatives often get derailed in one of two ways: 1) They don’t have time or 2) They don’t know where to start.
The scarcity of time can be maddening. Busy marketers vow to carve out time for strategy, but quickly get swept away in a riptide of urgent requests, product launches, and rushed campaigns to generate leads ASAP. They’re barely able to keep their heads above water all year.
“Marketing teams will never have time to focus on strategy at the expense of immediate tasks and deliverables, so they have to do both streams of work simultaneously,” says Kim Celestre, VP of Content Marketing at Tendo. “You have to build the plane while you’re flying it, and very often, the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Her advice: Just get started and be diligent about project management to keep things moving forward.
If time is simply not available, then you’ll need to outsource your project. Other marketers may have enough time or budget to improve their strategic focus, but they might not know where to start or which process to follow. That’s where our list of actions can be most helpful. Your team may not have bandwidth to do all 10 of these, but any one of them can help you refine your B2B content marketing strategy in 2022.
Before you jump into 2022 goal planning, pause for a minute and reflect on 2021. Analyze each KPI you tracked: Did it provide meaningful insights on performance? Did it help you improve your efforts over time? Or was it just a vanity metric? Toss it out if it doesn’t pass the test.
In particular, examine if and how well you’re tracking ROI and attribution. What are the metrics that can help you justify your team’s existence and budget allocation?
Next, review your 2021 goals, whether quarterly, annual, or campaign-based. Where did you fall short, and why? Was it a lack of resources or a goal that was always too ambitious? When you knocked it out of the park, what was the driving force? Did your marketing goals clearly ladder up to business goals?
This exercise is time well spent: Reflecting on past goals will reveal your team’s strengths and weaknesses and help you incorporate lessons learned into 2022 goals.
Understanding your target audience is foundational to content marketing strategy. If you define your audience as “IT professionals” or “enterprise software users” (i.e., too broadly) then you’ve got a lot of work to do. But even if you’ve already collected information about key audiences, 2022 brings a new opportunity to go deeper and discover new insights. This will help you craft content that speaks to your audience’s evolving pain points and needs.
Let’s assume you’ve already got a few audience definitions that cover demographics and other basics. Here are some questions to help you gain deeper insights, setting the stage to create rich buyer personas:
Target audiences and buyer personas are not the same things. Personas build on the demographic and behavioral information you’ve collected to create a detailed representation of your target customer. Ideally, a robust persona gives you insights into the buyer’s strategic careabouts, buying dynamics (objections, triggering events), and steps in the buyer’s journey.
“You want to build content-actionable personas that help content creators understand what content to develop, and how to match it to your audience’s informational needs,” says Celestre. “A persona can help you shift your thinking from ‘what we need to tell our audience’ to ‘what they want to hear and know.’”
A content audit might be the most underrated project on this list. Too few marketers understand its value, and others confuse it with a content inventory, which is merely a list of asset names or types. A true content audit is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of all your digital content, evaluated on criteria such as accuracy, relevance to your target audience, engagement, findability, and conversion.
An audit provides much-needed visibility into what content is working well and which assets or pages are underperforming. It takes time, as you methodically work your way through everything from product pages and blog posts to white papers and videos.
Prepare yourself for a few surprises, too: Marketers often discover duplicate content created by siloed teams, or ancient content that long ago needed to be retired. In other cases, they find a poor diversity of content types, or a lack of connection and flow between web pages or assets along the customer journey.
When is the right time to conduct an audit? It depends on the number of assets you have and how much you publish in a given year. But if you haven’t done even a limited audit in the past 24 months—or if your target audience has shifted—consider putting it on your 2020 to-do list.
Once you’ve assessed the content you have, a logical next step is to identify the content you don’t have. Make time for a content gap analysis. With this project, you’ll investigate content gaps or shortcomings. For example:
A gap analysis will identify the best new B2B content marketing opportunities to add to your editorial plan.
With the growing focus on customer experience, customer journey mapping has become a standard practice in many B2B organizations. This visualization allows you to walk a mile in the shoes of a given persona. The map (or infographic) highlights the key stages of the customer journey. It also identifies their motivations, barriers, questions, and sentiments at each step as they progress toward a goal or a purchase.
Content marketers can build on an existing journey map (or create their own in collaboration with a customer experience team) by listing the content that is needed to support each stage of the journey. Determine which content assets are missing to answer their questions at a given stage, or to compel them to move forward toward a purchase decision. Pro tip: Remember that the customer journey doesn’t end with a purchase. Your journey map should detail the ongoing customer relationship and specify post-purchase content to deepen their engagement.
A “competitive review” is a misnomer for content marketers. You’re not interested in comparing your products and services to your competitors’. Rather, it’s their approach to B2B content marketing. A better label might be an “industry content marketing review” that assesses the content marketing best practices in your space.
This project can be highly rewarding and doesn’t take a ton of time. In your review, look at which channels and content types your competitors are employing to engage their audiences. What are the hot topics and thought leadership themes? Is your organization part of that conversation? Or, if everybody is talking about the same things, what are your opportunities for differentiation?
Bonus: Look at the B2B content marketing tactics and approaches of other companies that target the same audiences, even if they’re not in your industry. How are they engaging decision-makers like CIOs and other executives?
Your organization might not maintain a standalone content marketing plan, and that’s OK. But if B2B content marketing strategy is an important and ongoing part of your larger marketing efforts, pause to consider how well it is represented in these marketing plans and campaign plans. Is there a section that defines content goals, audiences, key messages, and strategies, and how they complement other marketing strategies (demand gen, SEM, etc.)? If you’ve gone to the trouble of developing personas, are they actively referenced in your plans or just collecting proverbial dust?
If you wish to distill your B2B content marketing strategy in its own plan, then consider creating a content marketing framework, which can help you develop the best content programs to meet your goals. Think of it as a more comprehensive content marketing strategy document, which analyzes where you’re at (current state) and maps out where you’re going (goals and strategy) and how to get there (implementation and tactics). This is a major resource that can include many of the other projects in this list, including a content audit, competitive review, KPI development, and editorial calendar.
Bottom line, there is no one-size-fits-all way to lay out your B2B content marketing strategy in a plan. Just make sure it’s included wherever it makes the most sense. Remember that to gain buy-in for content marketing you must articulate a compelling strategy; executives should have a clear sense of the strategic importance of your work.
If you’ve defined your audiences and developed a strategy, it’s time to get tactical. An editorial plan is where the rubber meets the road. Based on your strategy and findings, you can now develop specific ideas for content programs that will help you achieve your goals. Think of an editorial plan as your operating manual—for specific campaigns and launches or for the next quarter—that lays out what content you’ll produce, as well as how and when.
An editorial plan template is yours to shape, based on your organizational needs. For each asset or content program to be created, you can define:
An editorial plan and an editorial calendar go hand in hand, and both can be included within a larger content marketing framework document. Both an editorial plan and calendar should be visible to other involved teams, so that they can see your priorities and flag any duplicative efforts in advance.
At some point, every marketing team must codify its internal processes and workflows. This task is imperative at larger organizations with siloed teams. Too often these teams end up duplicating efforts or implementing strategies with the same goals. Or, the content they produce is not consistent in its quality or alignment with brand standards.
If you’ve created an editorial plan, for example, you’ll need to establish workflow processes to bring that content to life in an orderly fashion. While your editorial plan itself may outline some of these processes, you’ll want to establish governance beyond a single plan or campaign.
Create a framework document that establishes a consistent process for content creation, reviews and approvals, publishing, distribution, and related tools and resources. Make sure team roles and responsibilities are clear, and then get buy-in for your process across all teams that generate or touch content (content marketing, product marketing, PR, UX, content strategy, etc.). Don’t expect to get it right the first time: Schedule follow-up meetings to gather feedback and optimize your processes.
Remember that the discipline of B2B content strategy focuses not just on content creation, but on content governance and process. Your ultimate objective is to ensure that content is more deliberate—planned and created in the service of a greater goal.
Content is still king, but the landscape of content marketing is getting more competitive and more saturated. To meet your goals in 2022, take a step back from your day-to-day agenda and allocate time to sharpen your strategy and your B2B content marketing tactics.
Whether you choose to undertake one or more of these 10 strategic projects, consider tapping the support of an agency like Tendo Communications. We’ve helped pioneer many of these B2B content marketing best practices. And we’ve implemented all of these projects for world-class B2B brands. We’ll bring our experience and a fresh perspective to your situation.
Contact us to have a conversation about the challenges you’re facing and how we can help.
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