Content Marketing Strategy: Three Questions for Success

By Cara Sloman, Chief Executive Officer 

Research from HubSpot has found that in 2020, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing: white papers, webpages, infographics, videos, articles, blog posts and more. Content marketing can help you effectively meet customers at their point of need, gain credibility and save costs in the long run. In fact, marketers who blog consistently are 13x more likely to see ROI. 

Today’s buyers want content they can trust and that addresses their pain points. This is the type of content that you need to be producing – meeting needs while generating demand and nurturing leads. Quality content enables marketers to connect with customers and prospects in a meaningful way. It needs to be informative, exciting and shareable.  

To successfully meet these requirements, there are three important questions to ask as you put together your content marketing strategy:  

1. What are your business goals? An effective content marketing strategy is one that aligns with your business goals. The appropriate marketing objectives arise from an understanding of what goal you want to achieve. Perhaps you want to reduce churn and increase customer loyalty. Or you want to overcome objections or attract new prospects. Only when you have clarity about your goals can you begin to create your content marketing campaign.  
2. Who are your buyer personas? You must go a step further than just developing buyer personas and find champions who possess the enthusiasm and clout to help grow your company. First, find out who your most loyal customers are. Then locate the people who made the decision to hire or buy from you. They likely have close relationships with members of your sales or service teams. Work with those employees to create personas based on sales data like demographics, common objections, goals/motivations, challenges and background. 
3. What does your sales funnel look like? Prospects research vendors online, and the valuable content you are putting out on your website, email and social channels is what will move the prospect down the pipeline. You need to understand how your content maps to the various stages of your sales funnel in order to drive success with B2B content marketing.  

Understand that your organization’s funnel may not look like the standard model due to factors like pricing structure, target market, sector, solution and business model. Forrester points out, for example, that those on the B2B buyer journey may have gone 60% to 90% of the way through the funnel before contacting a vendor. Discuss the specifics of your organization’s sales funnel with your sales team. Use that information to develop a content marketing strategy that serves the entire funnel. 

Customers and prospects will trust your brand if you can consistently create content that adds value to their lives and eases their burdens. Answer the three questions noted above to start or improve your content marketing strategy. 

Need help getting started – or maintaining consistency? Connect with us to find out how we can help!