The following article details the steps involved in creating, implementing, and maintaining a B2B content marketing strategy in 2025. In it, we discuss:
- The Role of Content Marketing in Your Overall B2B Marketing Strategy
- Conducting Audience Research
- Structuring a Content Marketing Strategy
- Content Marketing KPIs and Metrics
- Implementing Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
The Role of Content Marketing in Your Overall B2B Marketing Strategy
Content marketing fulfills four identifiable roles in the overall marketing structure.
- Establishing industry authority, building brand awareness, and nurturing leads (e.g., thought leadership)
- Building links and help build domain rating in SEO campaigns (e.g., metrics pieces, reports)
- Providing a foundation for other marketing approaches (see Structuring a Content Marketing Strategy)
Although a good content marketing strategy often encompasses all three or at least two of the three listed above, companies seeking to chisel out their space within their industry often benefit from thought leadership content. There’s often some discussion about what this entails, but the easiest way to narrow it down is this:
| Thought leadership is content which leads industry conversations by either introducing a new idea or by discussing an existing idea through a new lens. |
Although thought leadership is not for everyone, well-written thought leadership establishes the company as an authority figure in the mind of the reader, making them more likely to a)trust their opinions in the future and b)use their products or services themselves once they are ready to commit to a sale.
Parallel to thought leadership is search-oriented content, which seeks to answer an existing query better than anyone else has done it before or to provide hard-to-find information in an easy format. Examples of this might include metrics pieces that detail KPIs and benchmarks which are not readily available anywhere else or comparison tables that evaluate related services, products, or companies, such as in the below table (taken from our report on EBITDA Multiples by Industry):
This content is by no means introducing new concepts or reframing industry-wide discussions within mergers and acquisitions, however it does provide readers with a comprehensive but digestible overview of the best M&A advisory firms using proprietary metrics that are not found anywhere else. Taking this approach similarly establishes companies as experts, making audiences more likely to trust them.
In addition, there are Incidental benefits of content marketing. Quality content can help companies build customer loyalty, establish a popular familiarity with your products or services, or even help recruit future employees.
Conducting Audience Research
Regardless of the choice in marketing channel, content marketing strategies are designed to speak directly to a specific target audience. Every target audience has specific needs they need to have met before they are willing to make a purchase. The purpose of audience research is to identify those questions and determine how their company answers them better than their competitors.
When starting audience research, we recommend working to identify patterns within your existing client pool. Once these central trends are identified, it can be helpful for teams to begin assembling a fabricated persona based on them. This is known as a customer persona, which details the life, goals, and needs of an imaginary individual representing the target audience. These personas typically look like this:
| Jordan Lawson |  |
| Junior Financial Analyst | |
| Jordan is fresh out of college with a degree in finance and has just started an entry-level position with a prominent fintech company. He is eager to prove himself, which leads to many long hours and minimal free time. His work performance is heavily scrutinized by middle management, which leads him to seek out solutions that make his job as an analyst easier. He does not have purchasing power within his company, which means securing a B2B sale through him requires the input of several additional decision makers. |
Teams can include additional information here on the subject’s home life, relationships, or other professional concerns as they deem appropriate. Once they feel confident in the customer persona they have created, they can begin structuring their content marketing strategy.
Structuring a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Implementing your content marketing strategy is going to look significantly different depending on your choice in content distribution channels, but there are certain qualities that all good content shares. High-quality content:
- Is written with the right tone and complexity for its target audience
- Provides valuable information upfront, establishing trust with the reader
- Includes images and formatting that keep the readers engaged
- Provides the audience with actionable next steps and CTAs
An important aspect of your content marketing strategy is the concept of content repurposing. Let’s take for example, our article discussing SEO campaign strategy:
While it’s a good idea for a marketing agency to create additional brand new content focusing on their specialization within healthcare, the information in this list can be re-used:
- Social Media: Publish a series of short-form posts with insights from the article, encouraging followers to share if they find the information useful
- Email: Sending out an email to the company’s mailing list sharing the article, potentially reactivating cold leads
- Video/Podcasting: Dedicating an episode to breaking down the information within the article, perhaps interviewing an SEO expert who can provide additional insights into campaign strategy
In this way, content marketing teams can create a content marketing strategy that allows them to expand on existing content rather than repeating it. This not only provides longevity to the campaign, but it also draws readers further in by addressing questions or affirming a hypothesis they may have had.
How content is structured plays a large role in the overall health of your B2B content marketing strategy, as well. Often, the patterns found within a target audience reflect similar patterns in content, with multiple related topics being centered around a single “pillar,” or central parent-topic. Here’s an example using “B2B email marketing”:
Digital marketers (especially those doing SEO) should note how not all of the tertiary topics don’t necessarily need to include the keyword—rather, they simply need to be a shared topic that the target audience is likely to use.
Identify as many of these topics as possible and spend some time determining what type of content each is likely going to work best for. For example, “B2B email marketing agency” is best-suited for a landing page, while “best tone for B2B email marketing” is probably going to be a blog post. Pay attention to how transactional each topic is—the more transactional, the further down in your marketing funnel they are likely to be, as shown in the table below:
Sample Funnels by Marketing Channel
| Channel | Sample Funnel |
| SEO | Blog Post > White Paper > Landing Page > Product Page > Contact Page |
| PPC | Super Landing Page > Contact Form |
| Social Media | Post > Profile Page > Link to Website > Product Page > Contact Page |
| TV | Commercial > 1-800 Number > Email Follow Up > Conversion |
| Webinars | Webinar > Sign up for monthly newsletter > Services Page > Contact Page |
Note that some of these paths necessitate an omnichannel marketing strategy; the social media page links to the website, the TV commercial results in an email follow up, etc. There are very few self-contained marketing channels capable of handling every stage of the customer experience.
Content Marketing KPIs and Metrics
As you create and iterate elements of your B2B content marketing strategy, it’s important to know what signals a healthy or unhealthy campaign. The table below provides just a few of the most important content marketing KPIs
| KPI | Description | Funnel Stage | Channel | Benchmark |
| SERPs | The percentage of top 3 results earned for valuable keywords | Top | SEO, PPC, Social Media | Top 3 for the 5 top transactional keywords |
| Organic Traffic | The number of unique visitors that have reached your unpaid content | Top | SEO, Social Media | Increase 10% MoM30% new users70% organic |
| Inbound Links to Content Marketing | The number of authoritative companies that link to your existing content | Middle | SEO, PPC, ABM | 40% of total links+2 new links per month |
| Qualified Lead Conversion Rate | The percentage of visitors that end up being leads | Middle | SEO, ABM, Traditional | 3.5%Cost per acquisition should be 10% under industry average |
| Number of Return Visitors | The percentage of total visitors who make a secondary visit to your content, indicating an intention to buy | Middle, Bottom | SEO, PPC, Social Media | ≤5% MoM16% of traffic should be conversion-oriented |
| Engagement | The percentage of total customers who like, comment, or share content | Middle, Bottom | Social Media | ≥3%5+ shares per week3+ relevant, positive comments per post |
If your content is not performing up to expectations, a simple A/B test is likely the best way to improve performance. A/B testing is a very simple process:
- Identify what you believe to be a weak element of your content that is contributing to its poor performance
- Change ONLY that element and republish the content
- Observe any changes in the content’s performance and repeat as necessary until performance improves
For example, let’s say the team believes the “Contact Us” button on a webpage may be sending too strong a message. They might change that button to “Learn More” and republish the page, waiting about a month to see if there has been a significant change in the page’s performance. As the example suggests, this process can be time-consuming, however, the results can improve the performance of the whole campaign, since it can be applied to all existing and future pages.
Implementing Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
As the article might suggest, the reality of executing a B2B content marketing strategy is significantly more challenging than the theory discussed here. Even experienced marketers end up unsure of where to go because of the unique challenges posed by marketing channels, benchmarks, and how to actually write content.
Often, it requires a fully staffed team to successfully implement content marketing, which is why companies typically turn to a specialist who can handle the heavy lifting for them. Our agency specializes in B2B content marketing for SEO and digital marketing, creating high quality thought leadership and SEO content that establishes their position within the industry and generates organic leads. If you’d like to learn more, reach out here.
