B2B Content Marketing Strategy that Wins

Priscilla McKinney:

Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird with you as always. And today I'm pretty pumped about this topic. We're going to talk about B2B content marketing strategy. It's kind of my thing, but it's also one of those areas where companies are kind of committing random acts of marketing and I see it all over the place.

So if you're feeling already like, yep, you're talking to me, please don't feel like you're alone. But I see companies creating content without any real strategy. They're posting sporadically when inspiration strikes or when someone gets a blog post done and then we want to promote it. But there's really no connection between their content and their actual business goals.

Of course, this is important for business regardless of whether it's B2B or B2C, but B2B content requires, in my opinion, completely different thinking than B2C. First of all, you have got longer sales cycles and that is important. Secondly, you've got multiple decision makers involved. That is a big deal. And typically there are higher stakes with the purchases.

I don't even know how to sell a $20 lipstick online. My clients are selling $50,000 projects, $250,000 engagements, and buyers who buy those kinds of things online tend to be more research-driven. All of these things together mean that you need thought leadership and you need trust building happening throughout the entire journey.

So today I'm going to walk through a framework that takes you from strategic foundation all the way through execution. And if you stick with me, you're going to understand exactly why your current approach maybe isn't working and more importantly, what you can do to fix it.

So let's start with the foundation because you absolutely cannot build content strategy without this. And that foundation is buyer personas. Now, before you roll your eyes and say, God, Priscilla, we have heard you talk about this a million times, I'm thinking, right, but have you gone and created your personas? Do you know where they are? If you did them, did you just put them in a drawer?

Does your entire team know your ideal client personas? Do we know what is keeping them up at night? Do we know what is getting them up on a Monday morning? Do we know the challenges they're facing and can we speak to it in a very intelligent and compelling way?

Buyer personas are not optional for B2B success. They are your North Star. These semi-fictional characters represent your ideal customers and they need to be based on what you know about your actual best customers. Ideal client personas are a mix of art and science, but they reveal key facts about clients that help you understand where they are sitting right now, what emotional context they're in, in order to help bring them along on their own journey toward buying from you.

And here is where a few people screw this up. The first mistake is that they create only dream clients instead of actual best clients. You might want to work with Fortune 500 companies, but if that's not who you really work with the best, if that's not who you are really good at alleviating pain for, then that's not your ideal audience.

The second mistake is that people think they did them, but they put them in a drawer. Sometimes they do a really big exercise and they create these beautiful documents and then they never look at it again. And that's really a complete waste of everyone's time. The third mistake I see is that they don't update personas based on market changes because your buyers evolve. The market shifts and your personas need to evolve with them. You should be updating these maybe once a year or after major industry shifts.

I mean, guess what? AI counts as a major industry shift. Everybody has thought differently about their role, about the challenges they're facing. And I'm telling you, if you have personas in a drawer, get them out and redo them.

So here's how personas should actually guide every content decision that you make. First of all, you need to know what social platforms your persona is using. People are like, yeah, Facebook's really good. It's big. Well, what about your particular persona? Are they on Facebook? And not only are they on Facebook, but when they are on Facebook, are they in the right mindset to be evaluating what you sell?

Listen, if and when I'm ever out on Facebook, I'm talking to my mom. I'm posting something for one of my kids to see. I am not out there about ready to buy a quarter of a million dollar research project. So that would not be a good place if that's not in alignment with your goals.

When they are out on their preferred platform, what type of content gets their attention? And most importantly, what would be genuinely helpful to them from where they are sitting in their current challenge? And if you can't answer those questions clearly, then you don't know your persona. And that means your content is just shooting in the dark.

Well, people say they have personas, but when I ask them, okay, what are your persona's biggest frustrations right now, they're struggling. They don't know and they can't tell me and that's a problem. So here's an easy test. Your most ideal client stands in front of you and they say, literally, what comes out of their mouth next? That is what is keeping them up on Sunday night. What is tapping them on the shoulder throughout the workday? What's a newly emerging problem they're having? What's a struggle they just can't seem to fix?

Granted, this is only one aspect and maybe a more negative approach to personas, but it is very effective. You could also work conversely and ask what gets them up on Monday morning. What keeps them motivated for excellence in their job? What would help them get things done quicker or better? There are answers in those questions as well that really help you write better content for this ideal client persona. But starting with their pains and challenges is really a lot easier to get a handle on your ideal client buyer.

Now let's talk about their journey because this is where content strategy can really move. The buyer's journey often gets overlooked, but it is important to understand. There are three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. And before that sounds really linear, people are ping ponging all over the place. That's where a lot of people misunderstand the journey.

In the awareness stage, the buyer is just realizing they have a problem. A lot of people misunderstand this part of the journey. They think that it's the client that doesn't have awareness of your brand or products. No, no, no, no. You're not even in the picture yet. It's an awareness stage and that's when the product or the brand doesn't matter at all. It's when the prospect is coming into an awareness that they have an actual problem that needs to be solved.

Sometimes it sounds like this: are we falling behind our competitors? Or could these numbers be the best our company can produce? There's just a sinking feeling they're getting. It's like they're getting a little stomach ache and they're thinking, ooh, maybe something's wrong. And your content at this stage should help them get curious about the symptoms and start naming them.

They don't know how they fit together. They've got a little twinge of a pain in their elbow and then their stomach hurts and they're like, hmm, what is this? And they're naming what seems to be unrelated pains and you want to relate to them. That's the energy you need for awareness stage content. They're not even ready to consider what is causing the pain or even entertain product specific solutions yet.

So please don't jump the gun here. I see so many companies trying to sell in the awareness stage and it just turns people off. That's like proposing on a first date. Totally inappropriate.

In the consideration stage, the buyer has defined their problem and now they're researching options. They're asking more specific questions like, should I hire someone new or should I outsource this work? Basically, they're considering what the chief causes of their problems are, and therefore, they're getting ready to align a solution to that root cause.

But don't get ahead of yourself in this part of the content either. Like a good doctor, you don't jump to a diagnosis right away, you probe. Does this hurt? Does this hurt on a scale of one to 10? This is where you can establish thought leadership and a lot of credibility. You're sharing your war stories and you're proving that you understand their world.

You're establishing camaraderie by commiserating with the pain in a way that shows you're not just reading from a script, but you've been there before. You have experience and you're simply trying to be helpful. This positioning as the expert who understands the landscape allows you to see the problem from a lot of different angles to the point that the audience feels that no matter what their unique situation is, you have a firm grasp on the bigger picture and you could provide serious help.

And then at the decision stage, this is where the buyer makes their final purchase decision. Their questions are very specific and often include vendor names at this point. Now, if you wrote a lot of good content in awareness and consideration, you're probably one of those vendor names. But this is where you can actually address implementation, ROI, success factors, and all that good stuff. This is where you trot out your case studies, your testimonials, and proof points. You want to become the obvious choice to help them get to their desired outcome.

The average buyer consumes at least 12 pieces of content before buying, and much of that is in the awareness and consideration stages before they even contact you. So if you want to insert yourself earlier in the buyer decision, you need to be writing those awareness and consideration stage pieces without going for the jugular of the work with us.

That's why I say that your content must serve buyers at each stage appropriately. Now, this is where a really solid CRM integration becomes absolutely critical. You need to track content consumption throughout the entire sales cycle. And if you're using a system like HubSpot, or Salesforce or Pardot, you can see exactly which pieces of content lead to more engagement.

You want to go look at a dashboard that tells you which blog posts they read right before they filled out a form. Which case study did they download right before they requested a demo? This visibility from first contact through conversion is what separates strategic content from random acts of marketing. You need to track them from subscriber to MQL to SQL to an opportunity to in proposal all the way to a decision.

And here's the beautiful part. No manual tracking is required if you set it up right. Your CRM and your content management system should be talking to each other. Otherwise you are really flying blind.

We're a Platinum HubSpot shop. We would love to talk with you about it, whether it's good for you, whether that's the right pick. I don't bleed orange. I really work to help clients understand what is right for them. But you can also visit us on our website and check out our HubSpot onboarding. The easiest way is probably just to go to our footer and find our HubSpot onboarding services. If you're thinking, I want to go there, but I don't know how to, and I don't have the internal bandwidth to do that, we can get you there.

All right, let me give you some tactics. I'm going to give you what I call the rule of 15. This is my golden ratio. I totally made it up for social cadence and it works. I have done this for over a decade and I wrote about this in my book Collaboration is the New Competition because it touches on an inherent truth. Nobody wants to hang around with someone who's trying to sell them stuff all the time.

So here's the little thing you can crib from me today. Take this and apply it to how you post social media or how you strategize your blogs, your podcast topics, whatever it is. For every 10 things that you write, those need to be interesting. These are just posts that build visibility. They could look like team spotlights, company culture, industry trends, being at a conference, behind the scenes content. Maybe even holiday and seasonal content if it's differentiated enough, but it needs to have some industry relevance.

Then you need four overtly helpful topics. This is thought leadership that wins the day. It demonstrates your expertise. These are educational content pieces and how-to guides and great listicles and things that are practical. Honestly, this particular podcast episode is one of my helpful topics. I am giving away something to you that is expertise that is hard won from me.

These posts or those blogs or those topics, they need to prove that you actually know your stuff and that you are willing to share that knowledge freely. And then you have those 10 and then you have the four and guess what? One. You earned your right for that one direct call to action for business. This is what I do. Let me know if I can help you.

You noticed earlier I talked about how we were a platinum HubSpot shop. But you know, I want to actually share something that's very helpful. It is important that we do ask for the business. Sometimes people do the 10 and the four and never ask for the business. If you earn it, then you need to be clear at some point and say what you do, whether it's a product or a service.

Some people get so shy about saying what they do in business, but I don't know why. We are in the business of business. Please don't be afraid to ask for the sale. You just can't ask for the sale every single time you open your mouth. So when you've used the rule of 15, it won't sound like a sale. It will just sound like an invitation.

This ratio builds trust. You're establishing your business as primarily helpful and actually considerate. You're building social capital before you ask for the business. And all social media channel algorithms reward this kind of engagement that comes from valuable content and not just from sales pitches. So trust compounds over time into these business relationships.

If you think about it like this, would you rather hang out with the guy who talks about himself constantly or the guy who makes interesting suggestions and insights about your interests and asks you a few questions by the by? The answer is obvious. Social media and your topics and your content should be metered out with that obvious answer in mind. It keeps your work from becoming random, but it does help you understand how your posts and your content ladder up to your overall goals.

To be even more practical, I'm going to break this down just about social media. To really do this, you need good content calendar planning. You cannot live a life where you come into the office on Monday and say, hmm, what should we post on social media? You need to schedule your content in advance using whatever CMS you're working with. Don't wing it. Plan it out. This isn't something you should be keeping in your head.

Platform diversity matters. You need to customize your content for LinkedIn, for Facebook, for X, for Instagram, wherever you are. Don't copy and paste the same content everywhere. Each platform has its own culture and best practices. You need to know how to tailor it appropriately.

When you do need to talk about the same subject or the same event or product over and over again, I suggest that you create multiple versions to avoid sounding repetitive. How about creating six sets of copy plus six sets of graphics, which gives you 36 unique combinations? You can even use AI to generate variations while maintaining your brand voice. Just make sure you're training it properly with your tone of voice, your unique value proposition, and examples of past high-performing posts.

Write one or two posts that accomplish your goal and then feed them to ChatGPT or Claude or wherever it is you like to work and ask for six different variations. Then double check it for quality and brand voice and then add some visuals and give some diversity. Use still graphics, videos, GIFs, carousel posts, whatever it is. Keep it visually interesting so people don't just scroll right past you.

Another aspect of solid content strategy people often miss is striking the right balance between evergreen and timely content. I recommend 90% of your content be evergreen and only 10% be timely. Over in the blog world, 90% evergreen content means no dates, no timestamps on your blogs. And of course, on a social media platform, it's putting a date for you, but it should be good to look at forever.

Things like how-to guides, educational content, industry best practices and frameworks you created or case studies and success stories, these things have a long shelf life. Blending these in means you're not constantly scrambling to create new content from scratch. If the content was worth writing once, it's typically worth sharing multiple times.

There's a new feature on HubSpot called Remix, and it takes a post that you have and breaks it down all kinds of ways. To achieve the 10% timely posts, you need to react to current events and seasonal relevance. My funniest memory lately is when a great friend and colleague, Adam Jolly, posted a mock rebrand of the company he was working for that looked exactly like the new Cracker Barrel logo. And then of course that logo got rolled back, but it just cracked me up in the moment and it was a scroll stopper.

But you don't have to do that every day. And it's hard to have space for creativity like that. Posting at conferences is a part of this timely post. You might also want to cover some industry news or even posts about a particular holiday if it is relevant to your industry. Just know there's a lot of pitfalls around religious and global holidays. You may work at your US headquarters, but not everybody is celebrating the 4th of July.

The point here is that if you have 90% of your social content well in hand, you're not constantly panicking about what to post tomorrow morning, and you have some brain space for something timely. Now, I know what you're thinking. Priscilla, this sounds great, but I don't have time to create all of this content, and I hear you. That's why you need to multiply the value of what you're already doing.

Take a look at your thought leadership content. One article can generate six plus social posts. One amazing ebook can create 12 unique social posts. Webinars and podcasts provide you with months of content when you pull quotes and reflections or great moments. You need to repurpose content and post across multiple platforms with variations so you're not creating things from scratch every time.

The work of creating that long form content has already been done. And I call that the Thanksgiving turkey concept. You know how long it takes to actually do all of the turkey and the trimmings from scratch. You want to do that once a year. And the next day, we're having turkey sandwiches. We're having turkey a la king. We're having turkey casserole. We're using the bones to make broth.

The work of creating that long form content needs to be done, but the content has more value in your industry by breaking it up in bite sized pieces for people. So it extends the conversation and helps you highlight your expertise to a bigger audience. And even employee highlights are posts that can be done in advance. They typically get great traction because people do business with people.

Of course, if this is part of your normal workflow, you'll need to add an item on your offboarding checklist. And that should say, check for social media posts highlighting this employee. You don't want to post about an employee that's no longer there. But I'd rather do that small thing and get the opportunity to highlight the peeps at Little Bird Marketing.

Other engaging content can include industry statistics or trend commentary or educational content in little bite-sized formats. And this stuff doesn't have to be overly produced. It just has to be real, interesting, and relevant to your audience.

Don't post cute cat videos if you're a B2B software company. I mean, you could get a ton of likes obviously, but when you share your helpful blog post about your actual services those cat lovers are going to have no idea what is happening. So that's a disconnect and I think you get that, but people seem to kind of forget it when they sit down to do their marketing. You're striving for authentic, engaging, relevant content. Not just getting marketing done.

But you can do something a little funny and bizarre and out of sorts. Another favorite example of mine was Panda Play. They told me that nine out of 10 dentists prefer their platform and that just cracked me up so much. It was so much more engaging, but you can see that plays just as well on a Thursday in May as it does on a Monday in November. So you see how it is actually evergreen, even when it's crazy creative and it can be planned ahead.

This podcast is about having real content strategy, a plan that goes far beyond random acts of marketing. And that means we need a plan to win. Unfortunately, I see a lot of companies look at their employees and the opportunity for them to help promote the company content and they only think of one thing. They just say, hey, you have to like and comment and share these posts.

I not only feel this is disingenuous, but in my humble opinion, real advocacy means encouraging employees to create their own content. And the company feed acts as a library of all sorts of great ideas, links and resources. And if the content is great and the employee sees it, they'll understand the value it brings. They will want to naturally share it with their audience. But in order for this to matter, they need to actually have an audience of their own.

And this means the first step is providing training on personal brand development. You need to support the employees first before you ask them to help you. Do you think that's not a good investment? Here's a stat for you. Posts get 561% greater reach from employee accounts than when they are posted on company feeds. That is not a typo. 561%.

Employee advocacy matters and it requires a concerted effort and not randomly sending a Slack message to the whole team to interact with the company post. But here's how you do it right. We call it employee activation, not employee advocacy. You need skills-based training and private coaching. You need internal mentorship programs. You need regular one-on-ones for professional development. You need to feature employee accomplishments on your company channels.

Employee activation means giving them the skills so they can advocate for the company but not through a forced compliance methodology. Nobody wants to be told that they have to share the company post and then they do this half-hearted like with no comment. But if you're genuinely investing in their personal brand and helping them become better professionals and thought leaders, they will want to share it because it benefits them too. And that's when you get real advocacy. It's only through employee activation that you get employee advocacy.

So before I wrap things up here, let's talk metrics because vanity metrics are absolutely killing content strategy. You need to focus on meaningful metrics that matter to your business. For example, I would always take an engagement rate over raw impressions. Think about it like this. Who cares if 10,000 people saw your post if zero of them engaged with it?

I also like to look at comment quality over comment quantity. Are people having real conversations or are they just dropping fire emojis? I'm always looking to measure conversions and lead generation over likes. Luckily for me, HubSpot lets me see when that organic social post turned into a meeting, then a proposal, then a closed deal.

While the volume of website traffic is interesting, I like to pay closer attention to time on page. I want to know when people read my content, do they stay and linger? Do they go from this blog to that blog? Do they stay on my website because they keep finding things? I want to know how long a web session is from someone who came from a social media post to my website. These are the things that tell you if your content is actually working or if you're just creating noise.

What I'm looking for is a content strategy that is fully integrated with the sales process. When work is not random, but carefully planned, content becomes real lead generation, not just marketing activity. And I want to track which content generates qualified leads. I want to know which blog posts people are reading that triggers them asking for a meeting. I want to measure content consumption throughout the sales cycle.

If you start tracking the right things, you can then use your CRM data to optimize your content strategy. At Little Bird Marketing, we do that every year when we start over with our new topics. Maybe you notice that everyone who reads a particular case study converts at a higher rate. That tells you something valuable. When you connect content performance to revenue outcomes, you're making a content strategy a part of your sales pipeline building. That is revenue generation.

My point here is that content strategy is not completing a series of random marketing actions when you feel inspired or when you panic because you haven't written something in a week. Instead, use a framework that takes you from marketing chaos to sustainable measurable results. Go look, we'll put a link in the description to my framework called SOAR. If you've listened to this podcast before you've heard it a million times, but go take a look and crib my framework to make things work for you.

So what can you do today? Audit your current content against your buyer personas and the sales cycle. Look for gaps in your content where you're missing helpful content specifically designed for a key part of the decision process. Look at your last 15 posts. How many were interesting? How many were helpful? How many were direct sales posts that were very clear and gave someone a call to action? Be honest with yourself because that is the only way you're going to fix it.

And remember, buyer personas are not something you create once and forget about. They are living documents that should inform every single piece of content you create. When you sit down to write a post, you should be thinking, who is my audience? What is the stage of the journey they are in? What would actually be helpful to them right now? And am I keeping it balanced? Go check that rule of 15.

Please stop committing random acts of marketing. I want you to have a B2B content marketing strategy that wins. From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.