Best Practices for B2B Content Marketing Part 1
Whether B2B or B2C, most consumers research their options and brands online before reaching out (whether it’s buying directly or contacting sales). For almost all businesses, digital content can be an incredibly effective way to reach new audiences, answer their questions, and increase sales. But content marketing done wrong tends to go nowhere and convinces businesses it’s a wasted investment. So, what are the best practices marketers can use to ensure a solid content strategy and effective campaigns?
Comprehensive Audience Research
There will always be a certain amount of subjectivity and instinct in terms of content, but research into objective data is a vital part of high-quality content. Audience research and data synthesis lets you understand your audience better and achieve better results from your marketing campaigns.
Analytics – Turn to digital analytics for some of the most dependable information. Look at what content is currently performing, dig in to find audience demographics and behaviors, turn to Google Search Console and keyword research tools to understand audience language, pain points, and focuses.
Primary research – If possible, collect information directly from your audience. This can be in the form of interviews, surveys, user testing, or focus groups. If there are big barriers to primary research, the next best thing is to interview your sales team and SMEs. Sales and customer service/support teams are usually your organization’s team members that talk most often to your prospects and customers. They might be the fastest and most cost-effective way to understand your audience’s preferences, opinions, challenges, and motivations.
Industry organizations and events – In addition to analytics and primary research, look into industry organizations or events related to your audience. Read through forums, articles, presentation topics… you can gain a lot of information about what current important topics are—quickly.
Competitor – Not strictly audience research, competitor research is still an important aspect of content marketing discovery. You should have a good handle on what your competitors are doing, what everyone is talking about (so you should to), what no one is talking about (and maybe you can fill a gap), and overall differentiators (so you’re standing out in the field).
Content Audit and Governance
This is an easy one to either overlook or deprioritize because it can be time-consuming. Yet, your content strategy is incomplete without it and not having it makes content marketing harder in the long-term. Know what content you have and keep track of it.
Audit – Completing a content audit (and then keeping up with it) means you understand what content topics you’ve covered and how often. This helps you plan for upcoming content, match content calendars to business needs, and create new content focuses quickly. Keep a living document that keeps your content digestible in an easy-to-access format with filtering capabilities that cover topics, audience, content type, location, funnel step, industry/market, date updated, and business owner. If you keep up with it regularly, this saves enormous amounts of time on-going.
Performance checks – Include performance analysis of your content in your dashboards. Keep a running list of your best performing and worst performing content. These are good dashboards to review regularly. Additionally, keep dashboards that specifically show KPIs for your current campaigns. These two reports can help you understand what content to refresh, what to reproduce, and how to adjust campaigns.
Governance – This is another best practice that content marketers are guilty of not keeping up with. Yet, it can be a big pain point. When you create any piece of content you should have a governance plan that includes who is responsible for upkeeping the content and how long that content should last. How often should it be updated? Should it be retired? If so, when? How often are you checking for out-of-date information? These questions shouldn’t be an after-thought, they should be built into your content strategy and production workflow from the very beginning.
In part 2 of content marketing best practices, learn about best practices for producing well-balanced content and how to ensure you’re producing an established, documented strategy that takes your content marketing from ad hoc, short-sighed, and siloed to flushed out, long-term, and organization wide.
Have any questions, reach out to Cimarron Winter
Content marketing when backed with a thoughtful strategy and smart processes can truly be one of your most cost-effective marketing processes. If you need support developing a cohesive content strategy, tackling audience research, or managing content marketing from top to bottom, Cimarron Winter can help. We have content marketing experts with years of experience that can help your meet your content and business goals.