How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is essential for building relationships with your customers, reducing your customer acquisition costs, and increasing life-time value. However, knowing how to create one isn’t always as straightforward as we would like it to be. To help you create a good strategy, we have listed five steps you can follow, regardless of experience.

1. Establish SMART Goals

Before you invest in marketing, you need to know what your goal is. Some questions to keep in mind are:

• Do I want to improve brand awareness?
• Is generating leads my main goal with marketing?
• Do I want to increase traffic to my website?
• Am I looking to build a community?

After answering them, you can start building your SMART goals. This acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

When setting your goals, make sure they are not vague or general. These are usually hard to understand and do not provide beneficial results. Instead, here is an example you can refer to when creating your list of goals:

Don’t say: Increase website traffic this year

Do say: Increase website traffic from 500 monthly visits to 1,000 visits by the end of Q3 2020

2. Define a Marketing Budget

Although you might increase or decrease your budget depending on the strategies you’ll be using, make sure you know your range so you don’t waste resources in planning things you can’t execute. Now, the tricky question is how much you should invest in marketing. The answer? It depends on what stage you are at, what you are trying to accomplish, and through which channels. However, as a rule of thumb, you could allocate anywhere from 5% to 8% of your total revenue.

3. Choose What Channels to Focus On

Now that you have your goals and budget, it’s time to decide which platforms to use. You don’t need to commit to just one, but it’s always good to start small and grow from there.

If you want to increase brand awareness, here are three channels to get you started:

1. LinkedIn:
   This platform revolves around mostly professionals and business owners. Creating content around your brand and product directly on this site can help you connect and educate your potential clients.
2. Your Website Blog:
   Creating content on your website is crucial for SEO and building a brand outside of social media.
3. YouTube:
   Creating video content is a fun way to approach your customers and keep them engaged. Youtube is a top online video-sharing platform that can help reach potential customers around the world.

4. Align Your Marketing Activities with Your Sales Efforts

Marketing and sales must complement each other to bring out the best results. Think about the activities your sales team does daily, what questions they answer the most, and the type of customers they are targeting.

With that information, you can have your marketing:

• Generate qualified leads: decrease sales cycles and friction.
• Answer FAQs
• Talk about your product or service
  
  

Every marketing campaign/activity should help the sales process.

5. Streamline a 3 Month Plan

This plan will be based on the four previous steps and should be as detailed as possible. You will need to assign who is responsible for each activity, what the activities are, and when they will be due.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. Having the big picture on paper will make sure that everyone knows what they are doing, be aware of the deadlines, and be able to track the progress of the campaigns.
2. They can help you find gaps in the campaign.
3. Keeping it three months long will allow you to pivot your strategy if something is underperforming or in case of unexpected events.

Sweet Tip from Ally:

The tips above can help you create an effective content marketing strategy for all businesses, whether new or experienced. When creating your marketing plan, make sure to be as detailed as possible, and set goals with clear yet attainable results.