Content marketing is a channel that offers B2B sellers exceptional ROI in the long term. Content creates a steady flow of leads that continue past the end date of a campaign, thereby reducing reliance on shorter-term paid marketing campaigns that eat into profitability when overrelied upon.
In this guide, we will cover the content marketing process in 4 parts:
- Defining and researching your target audience
- Organizing your content around keywords and topical pillars
- Optimizing content for conversion
- Tracking KPIs and adjusting accordingly
We’ll dive into each of these steps in detail and cover exactly what businesses need to do to create compelling content that answers search intent and generates a steady flow of new leads.
Define and Research Your Target Audience
Before creating a plan or developing any content, the target audience for both needs to be identified. Your target audience will dictate everything about your campaign, including the tone of the content, the targeted keywords, and the types of pages prioritized. The best way to do this is by creating customer personas.
Building a persona begins with answering the following questions about your ideal customer:
- What are their job title and responsibilities?
- Which KPIs do leadership use to evaluate them?
- What makes them feel successful at work?
- What problems stand between them and their goals?
We find it useful to make every persona a story, complete with an image. Below is an example of a customer persona:
 | Jim is the CIO at a mid-level insurance company. His responsibility is to handle all IT operations and assets across every department. He is evaluated based on the number of support tickets required due to tech issues, support ticket response time, and the changes in productivity directly following network changes. Jim feels successful when he maintains a healthy IT network and responds to support tickets quickly and efficiently. He is at his best when he researches, implements, and maintains new IT solutions that improve the company’s overall productivity. This makes him feel like a unique asset to his company that can provide value for which his higher-ups will recognize him. The only problem standing between Jim and his goal of adopting new IT solutions is high upfront costs (both resources and time) and potential spikes in support tickets creating an amplified sense of risk, leaving him worried about wasting company resources on a solution that may not provide sufficient return. |
Since the job title of decision-makers in the market for your project may vary depending on the firm, with some firms possibly having multiple potential buyers for your product or service, you’ll likely create a few of these profiles to get a clear idea of the target audience for your content. Once you have these personas mapped out, you can begin building a content strategy based on topics that are relevant to them.
Organizing Content Around Keywords and Topical PIllars
Content marketing utilizes multiple distribution channels, but the most effective is SEO. This is one of two reasons that we recommend beginning a content marketing campaign with keyword research, the other being that content created with SEO in mind can be easily repurposed for other channels, but not vice versa. This begins with keyword research.
Identify Valuable Keywords
The beginning of planning a content marketing strategy is identifying keywords that meet the following criteria:
| High Volume | A high volume of searchers, social media readers, or video viewers translates to a high volume of potential leads for that keyword. |
| Transactionality | Transactional keywords are those that are more likely to be searched by those looking to make a purchase, rather than those simply doing research on a topica. |
| Low Competition | Keywords that haven’t been targeted by larger firms or websites with high domain authority make it easier to rank highly in search or social/video feeds, which is more important than simply targeting the highest volume keyword but landing on later pages that don’t get many clicks. |
This is true whether you’re filling an SEO blog, a social media account, or a video content library. Let’s break down what each of these criteria mean in detail, and how to determine how a keyword scores for each.
Search Volume
Volume is a simple concept: Higher volume means more searchers, readers, or viewers are looking up this keyword. Tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner are the easiest way to determine the exact volume of a keyword, but a way to quickly determine whether a keyword is even worth pulling up on one of these sites is to begin to type it in the Google search bar and see if Google’s autofill function finishes it among the top 10 suggestions in the drop-down list.
It is important to do this in an Incognito tab or another form of private browsing tab, as this will ensure Google doesn’t provide personalized suggestions based on your historical search behavior. This ensures you’re getting the same suggestions as the majority of searchers typing into Google.
For social media and video ad content, this quick trick may not apply as directly, but it can still give you a general idea of what the market is looking for within your industry. To be safe, though, use the analytical tools mentioned above to get a more accurate idea of what works on your target marketing channel.
Transactionality
Transactional keywords are those that suggest that the searcher has intent to buy. They’re the most likely to provide conversions, so they get the highest priority when building out a content plan. There will generally be several transactional keyword options, so we found it helpful to categorize them as “A” and “B” keywords. “A” keywords are the most valuable because they suggest an immediate need and “B” keywords are slightly less so because they simply suggest some interest in purchasing.
Keyword Competitiveness
Transactional keywords with high search volume aren’t always viable targets, because many of them will already be targeted by larger firms or websites with high domain authority. High domain authority means a website has a large library of content that Google sees as high quality. Google rates this with an internal “trust score” that is not visible to the public, but Ahrefs has a “Domain Rating (DR)” score that seems to be the best this-party emulation of Google’s own internal system.
To give you a sense of what a good DR is, here are some well-known brands and their domain ratings. As a rule of thumb, in many industries, a DR of 40 is good enough to rank for the majority of desirable keywords; in the most competitive industries (e.g. consumer finance, fashion, personal injury), a DR of 70 will get you there.
| Company | Website Domain Rating | Company | Website Domain Rating |
| 100 | First Page Sage | 76 | |
| Microsoft | 96 | Hollister | 73 |
| NY Times | 94 | Apollo Funds | 71 |
| Salesforce | 92 | Kleenex | 61 |
| Logitech | 87 | Snuggie Blanket | 57 |
| Kleiner Perkins | 80 | We Buy Ugly Houses | 46 |
When choosing keywords for your strategy, use Ahrefs’ DR to determine whether the top results for a given keyword are within reach for your company. If the difference between your firm and the top result isn’t significant (within 5-10 points), it may still be worth targeting, but your best bet is to prioritize keywords that don’t force you to directly compete with websites that have a better DR.
Competition is less relevant for paid video ad content, social media ad content, or any other paid placement advertising. If you’re looking for organic growth on either of these channels, though, it is a good idea to check out the competition for any keywords, even if domain rating specifically doesn’t play into search results or media feeds.
Organize Around Topical Pillars
After identifying valuable keywords for your content strategy, the next step is to organize them around broader topic categories. For example, a healthcare CRM company would likely organize keywords like “healthcare crm tools,” “healthcare crm software,” and “healthcare platforms” around a broader “healthcare software” pillar. They would then organize each pillar into a discrete project, as shown below:
By creating and organizing content around core pillars that are valuable to your business, you ensure that you are able to gain comprehensive coverage of the topics of interest that are most relevant to your target audience. By grouping each of these pillars into its own discrete project, you can ensure that an entire conversion funnel is built out for any prospects interested in that topic and convert them into leads. Doing so also allows for greater efficiency in content production, as your team won’t be jumping back and forth between unrelated subjects.
Leverage a Modular Content Strategy
Modular content refers to content with transferrable sections, graphics, and tables that can be reused throughout multiple content pieces across different channels. This is one of the other major benefits of organizing content around pillars, as content within the same pillar will often provide ample opportunities for content repurposing.
Entire pieces of content can also be repurposed, but this should be done strategically to avoid getting flagged by Google for repeat content. For example, a blog article can be repurposed as a long-form social media post or newsletter, but should never be repurposed identically for another blog post covering a different keyword. While tables and graphics can be repurposed across your blog with less scrutiny, two nearly identical blog articles can harm both Google trust and perceived expertise among your audience.
Optimize Content for Conversion
Once content is planned, the writing process begins. While the tone and information delivered in the content will vary based on your industry, product, and your business’s voice, all content needs to follow basic conversion optimization principles to be effective from a marketing standpoint. This does not mean watering down the expertise that your team brings to the table, but rather framing it within a readable structure that delivers the most important information as easily as possible, and incentivizes readers to click through to your site.
Conversion-optimized content follows the following principles:
- Answers search intent clearly and quickly
- Provides tables and graphics to organize information for readability
- Includes a strong CTA and internal links
- Uses terminology relevant to your target audience, not industry lingo for your peers
Additionally, it is vital that your company website is conversion-optimized. While this process is more complicated than the content optimization process due to its reliance on industry-specific customer behavior, doing deep dives into page performance or leveraging third-party heatmap tools to figure out where your readers are clicking the most can help you figure out where to place your conversion opportunities (contact pages, demo request buttons, shop pages, etc.) to maximize their traffic.
To determine whether or not your current content meets the mark, check out our breakdown of B2B content marketing conversion rates by industry.
Track KPIs and Adjust Accordingly
As you build out your planned content library, it is important to continuously audit your campaign to ensure it is operating as planned. Keep an eye on the following KPIs to determine the health of your campaign:
| Search Engine Ranking Position (SERPs) | For SEO specifically, search engine rankings are the most important initial KPI to evaluate your campaign with. Your initial goal is first page rankings, but as the campaign goes on, sights should ultimately be set on the top three positions. |
| Organic Traffic | Organic traffic to your webpages, videos, or social media accounts is a proxy for success in most cases, as a higher number of people naturally finding their way to your site without paid ads will ultimately lift all other KPIs. |
| Site Visits | Visits to your website should increase with a successful content marketing campaign. This is usually your first sign that your content is well-optimized for conversion, at least in terms of internal links. |
| Time Spent on Page/Watch Time | More time spent on page, or watch time in the video content space, means that your content is compelling enough to keep your audience engaged. This allows your CTAs to be more effective, and your leads more qualified, as their level of education and interest will be higher on average. |
| Social Media Engagement | Social media engagement is a parallel KPI to time on page and watch time, but specific to social media. It represents the number of users that are liking, commenting, or sharing your content. The added bonus is that social media engagement also spreads your content more and improves its placement on social media feeds. |
Tracking and monitoring the right KPIs allows you to determine the ROI of a successful content marketing campaign, and know how to refocus a lagging one. Hitting the appropriate content marketing benchmarks will be a challenging endeavor, but it’s not impossible with a dedicated team that understands SEO and your business.
Working with a Content Marketing Agency
Successful B2B content marketing campaigns have many moving parts and can be difficult to execute effectively. For this reason, many businesses choose to work with a dedicated agency.
We have over 12 years of experience providing content marketing services to B2B companies, particularly those in technical industries such as B2B SaaS, medtech, and manufacturing. If you’d like to learn more about our approach, reach out to us here.
