Content marketing strategy: a hands-on guide for B2B
Strategy formation is always a growth process. It is best to start with a relatively quick run through all the steps, and then refine your choices in several additional rounds.
Your final choices ideally meet the following characteristics:
1. Your choices are sharp and relevant.
2. They match reality.
3. They set you apart from your competitors.
4. They are well aligned.
Useful visuals
In the steps below, we reach for a visual work tool each time. The tools are excellent tools for structuring your ideas. They also enable group brainstorming and choice making.
B2B differs from B2C
We focus on content strategy for B2B companies in this article. Because the buying process in B2B is more complex and takes longer than in B2C companies, you also need to approach content marketing differently.
We go over the following steps:
Let's get on with it!
01
Your value position
As the first step in your content marketing strategy, create a value proposition.
What do you want to sell? When formulating your value proposition, it comes down to seeing the added value of your product through the eyes of your target audience.
We find the canvas below useful for this exercise.
Value proposition canvas
Here's how to work with it
In the Offer section on the left, you'll see how your product answers the customer's goals and needs.
- Product benefits. Here you list product benefits and product features.
- More value. How does your product create or increase certain outcomes and benefits that your customers expect, desire or may surprise your customers?
- Less misery. How does your product reduce your customer's existing frustrations, risks and other pain points?
In the Customer Area on the right, you look at your product category with your customer's eyes.
- Customer Goals. What does your target customer want to do with your product category? These can be functional goals (getting from a to b), social goals (getting attention from friends or colleagues), emotional goals (not experiencing stress anymore).
- More value. What successes does the customer experience when the goal is achieved? These may be concrete results, or benefits, or a step toward a distant aspiration the customer is pursuing.
- Less misery. What negative things do your customers want to avoid in achieving those goals? Think of frustrations, problems or risks with the way they do the task today.
Ordering
Finished your brainstorming? Now organize the elements you have and check that you haven't forgotten any areas. The well-known 4 Cs from marketing theory can be useful here:
- Customer value. What is the value of your offering to the customer? Does it make something easier, more secure, faster, more fun, more valuable? Does it gain the customer social appreciation, higher sales, greater customer satisfaction?
- Cost. What is the price to the customer? This is the purchase price, but also the price over entire life cycle. Not only in money, but also in time and stress and uncertainty at purchase, or during installation, maintenance and upgrades, etc.
- Convenience. How easy or approachable is the product to purchase, i.e., how easy is the purchase process itself?
- Communication. How pleasant and clear are all interactions during the purchase and life cycle of the product? How much confidence can customers have that if they have questions or problems or ambiguities or wishes, they will quickly receive a clear and emotionally appropriate answer? This is not just about promotion, but communication throughout the purchase and use cycle.
Choosing and honing
After the collection phase, we start selecting. Which selling points are the most important? Sharpen your value proposition in relation to the spearheads of your main competitors, so that you differ enough from them.
If you manage to put one advantage at the center, you have a good starting position to get in with your customer. In B2B, though, it is often the case that underlying benefits are also important: so order those as well.
Checkpoint. Do you have a sharp value proposition? Then you should be able to formulate it in this form:
For [the target audience] that has [this pain point or goal], [my company or product] is a [product from this market category] that offers [this core benefit] .
For [e-shops] that [want to run their payments reliably], [our product] is a [financial technology platform] that [processes billions of dollars of payments annually through secure and scalable payment solutions].
[Businesses] looking to [streamline their sales, marketing and customer service] will find a [customer platform] at [Hubspot] that [offers an all-in-one solution, is approachable, delivers ROI quickly and turns customer satisfaction into your competitive advantage].
02
Your target audience
Who do you want to sell to? You have provided an initial description of your target audience in your value proposition and are now delving further into a buyer persona.
There are hundreds of templates for personas. For B2B, we have developed this model:
B2B buyer persona
- Management
- My staff members
- Our product managers
- Linkedin: I follow colleagues - relations - influencers - some groups, I also see prof info on facebook
- Email newsletters from trade federations and inspiring companies in marketing
- Google + AI search when I specifically search for something
- Formats. Webinars, video explainers, web papers.
- Offline continues to play an important role: fellow marketers in other companies, trade shows, a conference
01
What I want to achieve
- Professional. Building out our content marketing.
- Team. Provide support to our product managers and sales teams.
- Chief. Clear reporting to my CEO.
02
What my pain points are
- Content marketing is a lot of work and uncertain in terms of results
- Afraid it's expensive
- Afraid it will be a mess
- Afraid I'm going to find little content, and little support from potential sources, who don't have time.
03
So what I need
- An experienced content marketing partner
- who are hands-on and in a clear trajectory
- Strengthened our company's content marketing
- with all the content formats needed.
04
Which solution I am using now
- Own in-house team. No professional writers but my engineers and technicians. Also own designer on staff.
- Freelancers for editorial, design, photo, video, translation
- My web agency that created website
- My general advertising agency
- Another content marketing agency
"I am a B2B marketing manager in an industry with complex subject matter. I feel the need to build out our content marketing but am afraid it is a lot of work and uncertain in terms of results.I would be well served by an experienced partner who reinforces our content marketing hands-on and in a clear path with all the content formats needed."
How do you describe your B2B persona?
In the top part, you look at your customer as a person. Because we are in a B2B context, you think in a more professional framework than with B2C personas. Male or female, family situation, psychological characteristics? Doesn't usually matter much in a B2B buying process.
What does matter are the characterization of the company, the buying team and the media the person uses professionally. Those help you afterwards to use the right targeting in ads, structure your sales process on decision makers and influencers, and choose the media channels to reach those individuals.
In the middle section, you have four blocks that are elaborations of elements that were covered in the value proposition: what do I want to achieve as a buyer persona (goal), what scares me and makes me happy (pain and gain points), so what do I need (product category and core benefits), what solutions am I using now.
Summary. In this we bring together the key elements from the other blocks once again. Listen carefully to that wording. Do you indeed hear your buyer really say that? Do your sales people also believe it is believable? Yes? Okido!
03
Your goals and kpi's
The sales process is typically structured in the marketing funnel. Although buyers are much less likely than in the past to go through all the phases neatly in a row, the funnel is still a useful tool. The phases also provide the best vehicle for structuring your content marketing goals.
Which kpi's do you use for which phase in the marketing funnel? The visual diagram below helps bring structure to your KPIs.
KPIs for each stage in the marketing funnel
Some tips
In practice, companies often want to increase sales (through conversion and consideration) as a primary goal and brand awareness (awareness) as a secondary goal.
When building out from scratch, it makes sense to start at the bottom of the funnel (bofu - conversion), then move to the middle of the funnel (mofu - consideration) and then work at the top of the funnel (tofu - awareness).
When building out an existing content marketing, it's best to do an audit first to determine strengths and weaknesses and then pick the low-hanging fruit first.
04
Your channels and content formats
Even if you put top content on your website, it is still crucial to promote it. You need to put at least as much energy into the distribution and promotion of your content as into its creation.
Which channels do you use for this and which content formats are suitable? That depends on the stage in which you want to use the content in the marketing funnel. We distinguish between content for the Top-of-Funnel, Middle-of-Funnel and Bottom-of-Funnel.
With the diagram below you link the right content formats to the different phases in the marketing funnel.
Content formats at every stage of the marketing funnel
ToFu Content
Your Top-of-Funnel content creates awareness with as many people in your target audience as possible. Here are some content options:
Strong website content. Provide in-depth and consistent content on the right topics on your website: informative blog posts, articles, industry reports, visual stories, short video, ungated tofu webinars, ungated tofu white papers, tofu podcasts.
Strong SEO. Get good search engine optimization (seo) on your website, technically and content-wise. SEO is important for search engines but also for source AI tools (such as the increasingly used Perplexity).
Organic posts on social media. Do social media marketing, both on the company page and on personal pages, in B2B especially on Linkedin, but other social media can also be interesting.
Paid ads on search engines. Do search engine advertising (sea) on the most appropriate keywords, linking to relevant web content.
Paid posts on social media. Can be for B2B on LinkedIn, but in some cases also on Facebook or Instagram.
Retargeting. You deliver follow-up content to people who have viewed your content on other channels, e.g., in the form of ads on social media.
MoFu Content
Middle-of-Funnel content supports the consideration phase, guiding leads further along their customer journey with in-depth content. For example, in the following formats.
Email routes. Email remains one of the best scoring channels for B2B. To be used if you have opt-in from your leads and thus may send them emails.
Social Media. In addition to posts on your company account, personal Linkedin accounts are especially important in B2B. Choose a thought leader on your team and, as a team, create content for that person.
Webinars are gaining popularity very quickly in B2B, and are a great way to humanize info.
Content experiences. All major brands are now working extensively with interaction and motion design on web pages. These are engaging content experiences for the customer, who is drawn deeper into the content and stays longer on the page.
Whitepapers or variations of them in playbooks, inspiration guides, explainers, walkthroughs, longer video, product tours. Mofu whitepapers are often, but not always, behind an email wall.
Testimonials. For example, in video or in a combination of text and video. Are also a good way to make info human.
Use cases. Can be combined with testimonial videos.
BoFu Content
Bottom-of-Funnel content most closely aligns with the concrete product benefits within the value proposition. Suitable content formats here are:
Detailed product pages, often in the form of landing pages with relevant calls-to-action.
Bofu webinars or bofu playbooks. Sometimes gated, often ungated.
Live demos. Personalized product demonstrations for potential customers.
And all sorts of other capabilities, such as free trials, price listings, reviews, competitive comparisons, calculators and interactive product builders, which may be linked to a request for proposal, chatbots, conversational customer experiences, temporary promotions
Loyalty Content
It costs five times less to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Interesting loyalty content:
Customer onboarding. Ensures that the customer gets maximum value from the purchase. Can include Help content and email routes.
Account development. For example, in the form of content around cross-selling and upselling programs
Loyalty programs. For example, in B2B with content around volume discounts or subscription models, exclusive knowledge programs, exclusive networking opportunities, etc.
05
Your content creation and workflow
Too much content is often created. To come up with the right topics, it is best to start from your value proposition. You combine this with the touch points at which you have contact with your target group in the various funnel phases. From there, you build the appropriate content in a structured way.
The visual diagram below is a handy help to determine your topics. Think of the diagram as an inverted tree structure:
At the top, choose which central keyword you want to answer (here: B2B marketing)
Below that, choose three additional keywords, each highlighting a different aspect (here: strategy, agency, best practices)
Below that follows your topic delineation of the various keyword combinations (here strategy pieces, all about organization and approach, and all about creativity and techniques).
The right topics for your content marketing
How do you determine the topics of your content?
In the Top-of-Funnel, the most obvious touchpoints are the search engines like Google. So we definitely work on SEO content here.
Keywords. Find out what keywords your target audience uses to find your product category. Do that in Google Search Console, for example, and base your product category on your value proposition.
Choosing is important. Focus on at most a few keywords and combine them with typical top-of-funnel keywords (e.g. trends, 2025, best practices, buy, company, best, top-10, what's, template, name of your biggest competitor, etc.).
Top items. For the two to five most important keywords each, create a top item with great educational value for your target audience in the exploration phase. Think: "The ultimate guide to ...," "In 7 steps to," "25 templates for ...
Deepening items. Then, under each top item, create five to 20 in-depth content items on subtopics of your top item. Connect all items with cross-links to each other so that your site makes a consistent and deep impression on search robots, thus ranking higher in search results.
Content pillars
If you organize the content that way, you end up with some nicely underpinned content pillars. The top content is good for seo in the tofu phase, the in-depth content you can use well as mofu and bofu content in further lead nurturing. A few more tips:
Use derivatives of all content to create organic posts on social media.
Use the best scoring items to link sea and paid social posts to.
Build everything up to the Olympic minimum and then begin to structurally update your best scoring items, and replace your worst scoring items.
Clear workflow saves a lot of money
Developing a strategy is one thing, implementing them is quite another. In content marketing, many companies get stuck on this.
Provide solid and simple workflows that result in constant and targeted creation, publishing, measurement and optimization of your content.
In practice, we see that the cost of approval processes sometimes amounts to half of the total cost in content marketing. The main causes are an unclear strategy and poor workflows. To put it simply, if you want to rake in money somewhere, do it here.
At JaJa, we have thirty years of experience creating professional content for businesses. We'd love to see if we can do something for each other.
