In a world saturated with content, ensuring yours is delivered in the right place, at the right time, and with the right messages is instrumental in drawing in the right audiences to grow your brand identity and generate awareness and leads. 

Particularly for B2B businesses, developing strong, valuable, content that communicates your brand’s key attributes is crucial to staying ahead in the face of high market competition. This is where your content strategy comes in. 

Content strategies (theoretically) outline, refine, and inform every piece of content you create as a brand. They can support businesses when it comes to brand positioning or brand repositioning, and serve as an actionable next step following the creation of a branding strategy or communication framework. Posting without a plan or content strategy can mean you risk delivering content of low or no value to your audience, or in some cases, missing your audience altogether. 

 

Content Strategies Drive Success

Those using content strategies have been proven to have greater success in their content marketing than those operating without a clear plan. Planning and strategising your content makes you three times more likely to achieve your content marketing goals. 

Content strategies and communications frameworks give your content structure. Whether it’s an EDM, a social post, a blog, or a press release, by implementing an overarching strategy informed by specific content pillars that deeply connect with your brand voice, mission and values, you create a stronger brand identity that builds higher levels of trust and engagement with your target market. 

A large part of any successful content strategy is the development of strong, unique content pillars that build upon your brand voice and convey your brand values and USPs. Data- and brand-driven content pillars can assist in the development of valuable,  impactful content for your audience.

The most crucial part of the strategy development process is the initial research stage. By looking at your audience, where they are, what they’re interested in, and what other brands they are connecting with, you can begin to identify where and what content should be posted to align with your overall business goals. Your audience, however, is not the only target market you should be investigating. Competitor research is nothing new to marketing, and for good reason. Of course, testing is always part in parcel when it comes to marketing, and business in general. However, identifying what is working or not working for your competitors can help you develop a content strategy that skips ahead of crucial trial and error periods. 

Your Four Pillars 

When it comes to the development of your content marketing framework, there are four key pillars that are important to address: Audience; Content creation; Distribution and promotion; and Measurement and analysis.

Audience

As mentioned above, your audience is the key to everything. Particularly for B2B businesses, understanding your target audience is fundamental. You must know every detail of where they are, what they’re interested in, what they need, what their common behaviours are, and most importantly: their pain points. These will form the basis of your buyer personas. Regardless of your products or services, everything you do in your content strategy should be informed by your buyer personas. They are, after all, your potential customers. 
 

Content creation

Content creation is perhaps the most obvious part of developing a content strategy. This means planning and producing relevant, high-value, high-quality content. Your content should span various formats and types. Whether it be blogs, videos, infographics, or podcasts, it should all align with your prior audience research, and the kinds of content they are most interested in viewing. 

Distribution and promotion

Creating world-class content is one thing, but ensuring you are getting it in front of your audience is another. Choosing appropriate channels and platforms to speak directly to your audience is arguably the most important part of your content strategy. If you’re not on TikTok, but it turns out that the age demographic of your buyer persona spends a fair amount of time on TikTok, it may be time to give the platform a second look. 

Measurement and analysis

All four of these pillars will feed back into each other, but your measurements and analysis will allow you to further refine the types of content you are putting out, where it appears, what time, and how often you should be posting. Tracking and analysing your performance is key to understanding the effectiveness of your content strategy. Making tweaks and improvements should be a consistent part of your content development process. 

Developing Your Content Strategy

There are many ways to go about developing your content strategy, but just to make it easy for you, we’ll break it down into steps. 

Set clear goals

Using the SMART method (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Based), develop goals to set the foundation of your content strategy. Look at the overall aims of your business, what kind of content you want to produce, and why. Look at this from both a high-level point of view, and a low-level point of view, and ensure that your goals are supported by independent research to avoid confirmation bias, and ensure long-term viability. 

Perform audience research

Again, arguably the most important part of your strategy, defining your target audience, that is those who are interested in your products and services, is a crucial step. Conduct audience research through surveys and interviews. Analyse the data you uncover, and refine or develop detailed buyer personas that tell you where they are, what they want, and what challenges they face as a group. Don’t be afraid to tweak or change these as you go along to better suit your audience.
 

Perform a content audit

As a business, there is little chance you have never created a single piece of content for your business. Take a look at your previous content and evaluate its performance. Did it flop? Did it go viral? Identify where you might have gaps, for instance, if you haven’t explored video content in the past, assess whether this will be of value to your audience (spoiler alert, it almost always will). Assess the quality and relevance of your content and identify where you can repurpose or improve content. Look at your processes, your workflows, and see where there’s room for growth or greater efficiencies, and use all of this to inform new goals for your content marketing.

Differentiate your business

Standing out in a crowded content landscape can be difficult, so it’s important to identify where your business differs from your competitors. Pinpoint your strengths, your weaknesses, and where you provide value for your customers. Most importantly, use your unique traits to guide your content and branding. What makes your products or services unique?

Topics and formats

Deciding where and what you will spend your time on is a critical aspect of your content marketing strategy. Choose one or two overarching topics that will serve as the foundation of your strategy. These should be informed by your brand strengths and your audience preferences. Then, consider how you want your content to look. Look at what you have the resources to create, and what your audience consumes most. If it’s single image posts? That should be a focus for your content team. 
 

Publish and manage

One of the best ways to get a handle on your content, particularly if you are posting across multiple platforms in different ways at different times, is to develop a content calendar. Whether it’s through an online platform or in a curated spreadsheet, it will support you to post diverse content efficiently. Having a separate social media calendar can also be incredibly useful. While you might build a lot of content in advance, don’t forget to leave room for spontaneity. Include holidays, events, updates, and news that resonate with your audience. Ensure you’re optimising for reach and tracking what works and doesn’t work for your business. 
 

Promotion

There are two questions you should ask yourself when it comes to promoting your content: What channels are most relevant for your audience? And how will you execute your promotion plan? Choose the platforms and channels that align with your audience preferences, and make sure your plan for promotion is straightforward. For example, if you post a case study with a video on your website, turn it into a reel with a short caption that redirects to your site. 

Measure your results

Measurement, as mentioned above, is your key to success. This is how you understand what works and what’s not worth spending more time on. Identify your goals, establish KPIs, and implement accurate tracking tools for each channel you are using. Create a process for frequent reporting, so that you can be sure you are keeping up to date with monitoring and any subsequent adjustments to your strategy. 

Whether you’re new to content marketing, or just looking for some tips, our full-suite creative agency can support your business with best-practice industry strategies for branding, design, development, and digital growth. 

Don’t wait for better content, get in touch.