B2B content marketing: A complete guide

As a marketer, nailing your B2B content strategy has become increasingly challenging. With an ever-growing competitive landscape, from the Google SERP and YouTube to LinkedIn feeds and crowded email inboxes, your content needs to do more than just attract attention; it must engage decision-makers and build lasting relationships. This guide is your go-to resource for creating and sharing content that drives real results, whether you’re focused on boosting brand awareness, generating leads, or nurturing customer loyalty.

What’s B2B content marketing?

B2B content marketing is the creation, distribution and promotion of content. The goal is to influence your best-fit prospects during their journey to becoming your customers.

B2B content supports lead generation, demand generation, and ABM by attracting and retaining long-term customers. It’s important because it drives targeted, organic traffic to blogs, social accounts, podcasts, webinars and commercial web pages.

As a type of demand generation marketing, B2B content marketing should equip people with helpful free knowledge and expertise, leaving them to choose whether you’re the brand they want to explore.

Content strategy vs content marketing

Business goals direct a content strategy, but you need to make sure your content gets found by marketing it to a targeted audience.

Content isn’t a ‘set and forget’ task – you’ll need to update and optimize pieces to stay seen and keep results coming in. Content analytics help prioritize and plan inbound content marketing to meet audience preferences – which is critical for building an efficient B2B content marketing strategy. Why? Because the right content lifts revenue.

If B2B is characterized by relationship building, long sales cycles, and multiple buyers – your content is going to need a smart level of organization. A content creation process with clear expectations ensures a steady flow of content is published.

Using any non-targeted marketing approach is a huge waste of company time and resources. You’re after better leads and faster conversions – there’s little point in filling a pipeline with leads that waste your sales team’s time.

Here’s how to ace performance marketing with a solid B2B content marketing framework. First off, you need to set goals, so you know what to make.

Content marketing goals:

• Sales and revenue – try interactive brochures
• Brand awareness – collaborative reports, digital magazines, webinars
• Industry authority – interactive thought leadership and white papers
• Loyalty and advocacy – newsletters and case studies
• Audience engagement – interactive content ups engagement x10, personalized content ups engagement to 84%

B2B content marketing for lead gen

B2B businesses understand the ROI inbound lead generation brings, but content marketers are still designing long nurture streams and manually segmenting complicated cohorts for lead management. It’s all quite inefficient.

Typically, a lead magnet brings in a list of leads who’ve downloaded your guide or white paper. Next leads are added to lead nurturing journeys to further their trust and interest, while your team uses lead scoring models to gauge when leads are ready to speak to sales. It can take weeks or even months to distinguish people one stage away from being MQLs from those who’ve barely warmed to your brand.

Turtl Analytics surfaces your warmest leads as soon as they interact with your content – alongside ‘quite warm’, ‘lukewarm,’ and ‘cooler’ leads. This way, sales-ready leads can be passed to sales reps and segmented straight from your list – saving hours of time and effort.

High-performing lead magnets:

• Digital white papers
  
• Interactive thought leadership 
• Interactive ebooks
• Online reports
• Interactive guides
• Digital brochures
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Polls and surveys
• Discounts, offers and free trials
• Templates, checklists, and cheatsheets

Our webinar shows you which content metrics to use to make better content decisions.

B2B content marketing for demand gen

Content supports demand activity by generating leads, capturing demand, and accelerating pipeline. The best B2B marketing campaigns get their content marketing and demand gen campaigns so right, they create monumental demand.

First-party intent data gives B2B content marketers the intel to make better content, who to make it for, and when to send it. When capturing demand, you remove any friction to buy for your highest-intent leads. As we’ve said, if you know which leads are super-hot, you can provide content tailored for conversion.

Personalized and automated B2B content marketing

First-party behavioral data shows how to make better content, who to send it to, and when. Advanced B2B content marketers use engagement data and integrated tech to do otherwise impractical tasks. Here are a few to think about:

• Assemble and scale deeply personalized content
• Automate ABM or create ABM campaigns for unlimited accounts
• Automate pre-designed content journeys
• Build reader-led workflows

How will you know what kind of content will stick for today’s audiences? How will you plan a B2B content marketing strategy that stacks up? And how on earth do you know if it’s all working?

Armed with the right martech, you can pull together a B2B content marketing strategy for data-led demand generation, inbound lead generation, or well-honed ABM strategies. But first, here are a few good-to-knows.

B2B content marketing is getting more B2C

B2C content targets as many individual consumers as possible – a very wide audience. B2C customers come and go, but the best brands conjure affinity that lasts a lifetime – think Nike, Coca-Cola, or Apple.

B2B content marketing promotes your brand to other businesses’ decision makers – usually a small group of people. You’re trying to kickstart a relationship with people partial to white papers, webinars, and case studies.  

Whichever you work in, there’s no getting away from the importance of understanding your audience, market fit, and having a good few ideas up your sleeve. 

Good brand creative has always influenced buying decisions, for every type of marketing. B2B content marketing has recently adopted many B2C concepts, seeing the potential they hold for building and maintaining affinity and relationships. Things like:

• Sounding more human and authentic
• Sharing company values and ethics 
• Embracing digital media (including social channels)

Educational content marketing

If educational content makes consumers 131% more likely to buy, here’s a great example of B2B content marketing from B2B SaaS firm Wynter’s YouTube account. Copywriter John Harrison shares a similar audience to Wynter’s users, so it was always a good idea to invite Joel to share advice about writing great landing pages. It’s educational, free advice featuring a well-known current influencer. What’s not to love? 

B2B is getting more human, captivating and entertaining in its promotional space. The most impressive brand and demand campaigns hit the mark so squarely because they’re formed from an audience-first perspective.

Take Obaid Durrani, HockeyStack’s Head of Content, who fervently tracks behavioral data to fuel ideas – and they’re good. Have you seen The Worst Marketer in the World?

Today, we have martech that not only lifts dull, time-consuming tasks from calendars by automating the previously near-impossible but also surfaces behavior – directly from the source. But who is today’s audience anyway? 

B2B content marketing for millennials and Gen Z

The first generations of digital natives need digital-first marketing, but what else do they want? 

1. Self-discovery matters. Today’s buyers research and express everything online. Make it easy for people to find and share content.
2. Personalize your content – it’s kind of expected.
3. Aim for high-quality, engaging content over content quantity.
4. Today’s audience leans on analytics and data to make decisions.
5. Create self-serve content so people can explore, learn and buy online.
6. Omnichannel experiences are the way to go. Your content should have the same look and feel across campaigns. All your marketing collateral should be part of a cohesive journey between online and offline touchpoints.
7. Talk openly about your ESG and CSR targets and plans. Millennials and Gen Z inherited climate change and want to buy from responsible vendors.
8. Use social proof and video case studies, and encourage UGC. Can you send your product to people to try or promote a user gallery on your website?
9. Thought leadership is hot right now.
10. Buyers want a transparent B2B experience, so be upfront about what your brand can and can’t do.
11. Creative brand and demand are never going away and are easier to share than ever before.

For different audiences at different awareness stages, you’ll need content for top, middle and bottom funnel stages. You’ll likely have different stakeholders to please at senior, middle and junior levels as well. 

When planning topics and briefing content, use a system to mark up which funnel stage each piece covers and who it’s aimed at. This makes it quick to spot gaps and overlaps. 

Here’s what content for different funnel stages looks like.

Content marketing for B2B flywheels

We regularly survey our customers as part of a customer feedback strategy to help improve our product and customer service to reduce churn. We want to support them so they use our tool to its full potential. Here’s an overview of our flywheel content.

Organic acquisition

To attract new customers, we might invite them to collaborate on content with us, use influential industry leaders we know they follow, and create content that answers questions we know they’re asking. Blogs, thought leadership, guides and webinars are perfect starting points.

Onboarding content

Supporting customer onboarding might mean creating product explainers showing people how to use our product or advance at work with our software. Templates, guides and customer examples all support newcomers.

Retention content

If we think people are losing interest in our tool, we share inspirational customer stories and content that reminds them how our product helps them succeed. Surveys, guides, case studies, and events help encourage retention.

Advocacy content

It’s super important to champion customers who are getting the most from your product or service. We’ve successfully gamefied customer-generated content at Turtl. We ask our users to submit their best-looking Turtl Doc in a quarterly competition, where our poll feature allows other customers to vote for the best entry. 

Content for audience funnel stages

How do we add relevance and value at every stage of the customer journey? To fully wrap our heads around our customers, it’s a good idea to share findings across sales, marketing and customer success teams. What’s stopping people from buying, what’s influencing buying, what’s making people happy or frustrated – and how are they discovering you? 

Add engagement markers to ICPs/personas

Ideal customer personas (ICPs) are a good way to share audience insights across teams. These ‘perfect customer’ snapshots could use solid facts about your best customers to work well, so use engagement insights alongside other data. 

Use these templates to start building your ICPs.

ICP template Google Sheets
ICP template PowerPoint

Find out how ABM teams use ABM data to refine their ICPs.

Map content to audience segments with behavioral data

Engagement data makes it easy to map out which content suits which ICP –  whatever stage of the funnel they’re in. Simply group, or segment different people according to their content engagement. Send different groups content designed for different stages. We’ve got a guide that shows you how to do this.

Click to read No gaps content mapping: How to enable an irresistible buyer journey | Turtl

Interactive content for immersive funnels

People prefer to interact with content, and each interactivity acts as a data point to help you understand what’s driving engagement – making it fun for readers and more insightful for you. 

Interactive white papers, digital guides, and interactive ebooks reveal the behavioral data you need to inform exceptional full-funnel content. 

Content analytics for slick content journeys

For web pages and blogs, Google Analytics 4 shows what is popular on your site, what the bounce rate looks like, and where traffic continues or drops off. 

Turtl Analytics gets more personal. You can identify known readers and see exactly who is doing what inside your content. Our standard dashboard shows how many times a video is played, how many times content was shared, the read times, bounce rate and, if you integrate with your CRM, you’ll see something you can’t in GA4 or a PDF – known reader activity. This helps teams manage and score leads with precision and trigger pre-designed content workflows from CRMs. Whatever you want to track or fire from a Turtl Doc is possible with custom content analytics.

How we use Turtl for better content journeys

Learnings from content engagement data help us visualize customer journeys in Miro to identify the content we need for different audience and funnel segments. We then write up new, or optimize existing content, design the workflow in Hubspot, set custom triggers in Turtl, and automate the entire journey (this system works with all CRMs). Next, we measure the success of funnel conversions to define and refine what is and isn’t working. 

Personalized content for automated funnels

You’ll provide a richer experience for readers if you use content personalization. We use personalized content at Turtl for a lot of different scenarios. From a single master document, we know we can switch out any image, video, text, or audio for unlimited sends from our CRM. 

Personalized reader-led nurture

Our nurture stream performance radically improved by giving readers the choice of what they’re served.  We show a reader-led form asking what the reader wants to explore and the personalized Turtl Doc auto-adjusts to show the chosen content.  

There are more ways than socials and newsletters to ace distribution.

Create modular content to repurpose easily

Content that can be used by itself or form part of a whole is an ideal way to build content for repurposing across channels.

A modular content plan perfectly equips you to build personalized content for different audiences and deliver standalone short-form content for head-turning attention marketing. It works equally well for video too.

Help people find your content online

Your competitors are optimizing content for search engines, so you’ll need an understanding of SEO to beat them in search engine results pages (SERPs).

A search engine’s goal is to help users find the content they need as quickly as possible and Google predicts search intent around semantic keywords. You don’t need to use exact keyword matches – but you do need to understand search intent. Think of your user first and check keyword volumes for the queries and topics that match up.

Keyword research for content marketing

List potential keywords associated with your business offer. Next, find out how hard your keywords are to rank for.

Don’t be daunted by harder keyword terms, but you’ll need to make exceptionally good content to rank. It’s a great idea to go after long-tail keywords. These can be easier to rank for and while it means you’re chasing lower traffic volumes, the results can be dramatic and quick.

Keyword research helps you pull ideas for content and define an article’s framework. You don’t even need fancy tools or software either. Head to Google and type in the keywords to see what Google generates as alternative suggestions – use an incognito window to get results less driven by your previous behavior. Look at the People Also Ask boxes and see what the featured snippet looks like as well. These simple, free things are enough to form an outline for your next blog. 

Events

If you’re building your brand, want to create more value, and extend the reach of your content, then events are ideal.

Roundtables, workshops, panel discussions, webinars and podcasts all provide an opportunity to invite inspiring industry leaders and create lead magnets to build up your database.

You can identify speaking opportunities for internal experts at upcoming industry events, and attend to capture material for reels, blogs, emails, and socials.

Digital PR and content partnerships

Build a list of industry publications and organizations and reach out when you’re making interesting content. The goal is to gain media coverage with your content, so contact journalists working in your industry. Journalists love spinning stories from data, new trends and opinions, while many leading organizations appreciate guest editorial.

Collaborations pool knowledge and amplify reach. Partner with people and businesses that share the same audience, and build business relationships by asking people from your target ABM, cross-sell or upsell accounts to make content with you.

We did exactly that for our recent Future Trends report with fantastic results.

Click to read Future Trends in Content Marketing 2024 (inline version)