Don’t just create, spread! - a 5 step guide for nailing your B2B content marketing
We all know that content is the obvious candidate for cost-effective marketing. It can generate quality traffic, nurture leads, and drive your brand without having to spend obscene amounts of money on ads.
But quality content alone doesn’t cut it.
Content marketing is a whole raft of efforts. Of which, quality content is just a small part. Optimisation, market fit, and distribution are all equally fundamental pillars.
And if there is someone who knows a thing or two about content marketing it’s Ross Simmonds.
Ross Simmonds, CEO and founder of Foundation, recently joined Dreamdata’s CMO, Steffen Hedebrandt, for a talk about all things B2B content marketing.
And in this post, I'll be covering the five steps you need to nail your content marketing.
Step 1: Know your content-market fit
Step 2: Know the channels your audience is on
Step 3: Decide what content to create
Step 4: How should you distribute your content?
Step 5: Optimise your content
Watch the full conversation here
Step 1: Know your content-market fit
To avoid wasting time on content your audience doesn’t need or want, you need to do your due dilligence. First and foremost this means knowing the types of content and stories your audience actually cares about.
By tailoring your content strategy to reflect your ICP’s informational needs (their pain points and aspirations) you’re not only captivating them, but you’re also providing them with valuable insights, solutions, and information.
These insights ultimately establish you as a trusted source for your audience.
OK, great. But how exactly do we find content-market fit?
Before even thinking about content production, Ross does a flyover. He scans the market.
And luckily - following Ross’ steps - it’s quite easy to do!
What you essentially need is to gather a few key insights into which types of content or stories your audience truly cares about when it comes down to the actual decision-making.
Ross suggests using either: a third-party option, or reviewing sales transcripts, gong recordings, and G2 reviews.
But it depends on where your audience is likely to be. So, for example, if you’re targeting developers you could go into a channel like Hacker News and then sort for top posts based on a keyword that is essential to them.
Once you do that you can then identify certain pain points or other challenges in your segment, and voila! You now have a content-market fit.
You now have an understanding of the content your audience read, their channel and of course:
The type of content they digest.
Step 2: Know the channels your audience is on
As every content marketer knows, nailing your content means nothing unless you understand what channels your audience is actually spending their time on.
Channels even dictate what your content will look like.
So taking your time and understanding where your audience is hanging out, and what content works best for them is of utmost importance if you want to reach your ICPs.
As a B2B this isn’t too hard, given that your ICPs are more than likely to be hanging around the usual channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, and email newsletters.
But as Ross reminds us, we shouldn’t forget that there are other less conventional channels out there where your persona might be.
This will depend enormously on who your persona is.
For instance, if you were to approach developers you might want to explore Hacker News and sort for the top posts to get a sense of what your audience is talking about. Likewise, you could try out Reddit, and check out what’s trending in there.
Another great example is YouTube. It’s great for repurposing old content, uploading podcasts, or even producing snippets around webinars.
But caution with new channels you don’t (yet) intimately know.
For example on Reddit, as Ross highlights, every subreddit is different and covers a different topic inside that subject’s specific niche, so you’ll need to understand how the readers want their content within these.
Once you’ve done that you can move on to creating your content.
Step 3: Decide what content to create
You know what your content-market fit is. You know who your audience is. And you know the channels they’re on.
Now you need to decide, what kind of content you want to produce.
Whether you want to focus more on text-heavy pieces like blog posts, white papers and e-books, or focus on audio-visual based ones such as podcasts and webinars will all depend on your ICPs preferred content.
But what all of these types of content have in common is that it needs to be good to captivate your audience. After all, there’s a looooot of content out there, so standing out of the crowd needs extra spice. (You might be interested in this conversation with Andrew Davies for some tips on standing out)
“If you’re not creating content that falls into these categories, then it’s probably not a piece of content you should be creating” - Ross Simmonds.
According to Ross, good content falls into four distinct categories - and they’re even easy to remember!
Educating content:
Just because it’s educating people doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s academic content - by informing about both old and new trends you’re ultimately enlightening your audience.
Engaging content:
When it comes to engaging your audience you’re looking for ways to activate them (getting them content!) - What you’re looking for is feedback; you’re looking for suggestions. This right here is guaranteed engagement-driven content!
Empowering content:
Now when you want to empower your audience, you want them to get a sense of urgency. Try it by linking to articles concerning different niches that are relevant to your audience. This is also the ego-driver for brands, so don’t hesitate to go this way!
Entertaining content:
The last one is entertainment, and that is arguably the most difficult one to achieve. According to Ross, people often view the B2B setting as a highly professional place. Hence, no fun… But the content you put out doesn’t necessarily have to cause a direct laughing hysteria. Instead, you could spice things up with a meme or poke fun at general problems in the industry.
And let’s hold onto the notion of the meme.
Imagine that you create a meme and that meme starts getting a lot of traction, then this meme (given that the content is relevant to your market), might reflect the target audience's interest in that given subject.
You’re now standing with the opportunity to turn this meme into blog posts, into webinars, into podcasts. The limits are nearly endless.
So instead of saying: “We hit the jackpot, it went viral. Now, let’s move on”, Ross says “don’t let it die - double down on it and produce around the theme and the stories it resonates on!”
Also, check out this blog post on how to build a revenue-focused content strategy.
Step 4: How should you distribute your content?
Okay, okay, okay. Now what?
Well now you have analyzed your market, you have created your content, your e-books, your podcast, and your webinars, the next step is distributing it across the relevant channels!
So, for the sake of argument, let's say that you have now made a live webinar. You now need to have a plan for how you’re gonna share this content.
Ross first suggests to make a blog post. Inside of that, you put a CTA that sends the person who clicks it to the webinar link if they submit their email. Meaning, those now can now be qualified for your sales funnel.
When you’ve done this you also share the post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other places to spread the word.
Now, remember the four types of content? Those are important now. Based on those you find a few key insights that either educates, engages, empowers or entertains your audience.
Once you’ve done that you then snip these moments up, create shorts that fit your audience’s favorite channels, distribute those and, of course, insert a link leading them back to the webinar.
This probably seems like a lot, but earlier on you’d already planted the seeds of effort, now you’re just a few steps away from harvesting your success, so hang on tight!
Add value to communities
So, according to Ross you now need to add value into the communities where your audience resides.
You DON’T wanna do this in a ‘spammy’ way. Instead, you wanna provide them with context.
Perhaps by sharing personal insights. Perhaps offering them a brief overview of the table of contents from the blog post with a link referring to the original webinar.
Giving context is paramount when adding value.
Also, try to encourage engagement from both sales as well as channels making these promote the blog post in their outreach as well, thus promoting continued interaction with the content.
So by utilizing multiple platforms and activating the vast workforce, the content has now reached a multitude of audience members and absolutely increased your content's reach and impact.
Now all that’s left is to pop champagne and celebrate!
Step 5: Optimise your content
Once you have promoted your content you might think that you’re finally off the hook.
Well, that is definitely not the case, and let me tell you why.
Let’s go back to our hypothetical blog post on that Webinar from the previous step. What happens once nine or twelve months go by? Is it still relevant? What about ranking on Google?
Well, needless to say, things change.
What was the initial idea for the blog post wasn’t actually what created the traction that we’re now witnessing. There might be a ton of backlinks referencing that article with a certain keyword, and you need to seize that opportunity. Carpe opportunitas!
So instead of just calling it a day you need to go and optimize that post, repackage it, and update it.
You essentially want your blog post to reflect this keyword, so whenever one follows the back links they are getting to a post concerning just that keyword thus getting real value.
Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Because, if you’ve made a Youtube video on the subject as well for example, you then take that video and embed that in the article that is already ranking in the SERP and then BOOM!
You’ve unlocked a ‘traffic cheat code’
You’re capitalizing on the value that the original blog post is generating and you’re converting that to the Youtube video, thus creating even more traffic.
By doing so you’re now changing the ways you work from “just creating”, to thinking long term instead.
And as Ross puts it:
The optimization process happens long term after the distribution process. When you do that, you shift your mindset of just “create, create, create!” to a mindset around “creating ones, distributing, and optimizing forever”.
I’ve covered everything from analyzing your market and your audience’s preferred channels to creating content and ultimately distributing and optimizing it again.
By now you should be up-to-date when it comes to nailing your B2B marketing content, but before you’re completely off the hook, Ross encourages you to remember this:
Hold your horses! Don’t just go out on a whim and change your entire tactics just because some guy on a podcast told you to. Instead, you should assess your current situation.
Ask yourselves, what are our fundamentals, what are our resources and what can we actually do today?
Once you know that, you’re good to go and by then this 5-step guide to creating kick-ass content is a great place to start!
