Every content marketing strategy (and any, really) needs a plan to boost the chances of obtaining the desired outcomes. As good as your idea may be, things usually won’t work properly without an action plan.
Defining the objectives, actions, and approaches is a critical step to ensure results and to justify the investments made. Only then you’ll understand exactly what needs to be done to ensure that your content generates positive returns for your company.
Continue reading to understand more about creating a B2B content marketing plan. Learn the benefits of planning the right way, and how to know exactly what should be put into action to create a strategy that works.
What is a Content Marketing plan?
As in any business, planning is a fundamental part of ensuring that action results in positive results. It will do no good just replicating it to fit your business model since many variables are at stake.
A B2B Content Marketing plan is, therefore, a strategic planning of everything that will be done by your company to ensure that the implementation is, in fact, effective. That is, structuring all the actions that you will put into practice to increase the chances of success of your initial idea. In this case, it represents the content you want to produce, for whom, how, and where.
The function of a B2B Content Marketing plan is to guide marketing professionals to make the best decisions for the success of the strategy. You need to adapt this concept to your business model, considering the profile of your audience, the resources available, and your objectives.
Ask yourself: which channels will be used to communicate with your audience? What are the types of content that can most impact the lead? How will you control and organize your publishing calendar?
What are the benefits of having a Content Marketing Plan?
But in practice, what are the benefits of creating a B2B Content Marketing Plan? The first is to be able to evaluate the feasibility of your actions, i.e., to define whether you have, for example, the necessary resources to ensure that your efforts are productive. After all, what is the point of producing a surplus of content, when in reality, only cold leads are being generated?
Besides defining whether you’ll bet on interactive content or static format, do you also need to know how you’ll disseminate this material? What is the goal behind it? To increase brand awareness? To generate more qualified leads? All these questions will give you the right direction so that your strategy will indeed have a positive impact on your organization.
When planning is done correctly, it is possible to reap all the benefits of Content Marketing, generating improvements not only in its primary focus but also in other secondary areas for your company. When structuring the plan, you will know if you have enough resources to, for example, invest in sponsored links to promote your content.
If you don’t, you need to structure and invest in SEO techniques, ensuring that organic traffic is generated with more ease. The creation of a plan is fundamental to understanding that behind any landing page, there is a whole strategy involved. In Content Marketing, nothing is done by chance and only this planning will ensure the efficiency of your actions.
How to build a B2B Content Marketing plan?
Now, what should you put into practice to create an efficient B2B content marketing plan? We detailed the main points you should consider to ensure that your strategy will positively impact your audience and strengthen your brand’s digital presence. Check it out!
Establish a goal
The first step is to define its primary objective with the application of a Content Marketing strategy. After all, to achieve results, you need to have goals. It can be to increase the brand awareness of your brand, better nourish the customer journey or even generate more qualified leads. The important thing, however, is to establish the scenarios you want to put your company.
Learn more about your audience
Then it’s time to define another key point for the success of your strategy: what is the profile of your audience? Therefore, you must create a buyer persona to know what your audience is looking for: their problems, their pain, goals, difficulties, and even their work routine. From this information, you can direct content production to the right path.
After all, the materials you produce will only be efficient if they are of interest to your audience. According to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), between 60% and 70% of the content produced is not used because it is irrelevant to the audience. This means wasting time and resources, something that can be avoided by creating a buyer persona.
Figure out what problem you’re trying to solve
By understanding who your buyer persona is and what the problems are, it’s much easier to identify the right content to attract your audience. You’ll be able to direct your entire content production and nutrition flow to meet that demand, increasing your chances of getting real returns with your communication actions.
Make your content unique
The internet is full of content and several of its competitors are vying for the attention of their targets. That’s why it’s critical that you offer rich and unique materials to your audience, differentiating yourself from your competition. According to our Senior Director of Content Strategy Stephanie Mansueto, 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.
In other words, you don’t want to enter a page and always find the same thing. One way to solve this problem is by investing in interactivity. With the help of tools such as ion Interactive, you can create interactive content — such as calculators, infographics, interactive ebooks, and quizzes — with greater ease, offering something different to lead.
When you add this feature to your materials, you’re creating a real competitive edge to stand out from other companies. By offering a calculator that provides essential data about the efficiency of the visitor’s website SEO strategy, your page becomes a query tool, creating a unique experience.
Find the right keywords
Also, you need to know how to choose the right terms so that your audience more easily finds your content. Just as it is essential to innovate regarding the material you offer, it is also important to find out which terms and keywords are most used during a search so that your pages appear first.
Since you are competing for space on the internet, you need to use the right words so that the exact audience you want is impacted. With precise keyword work, you ensure that the lead, when looking for solutions on the internet, finds your content among the first places.
Promote your content on the right channels
As important as keywords are, you also need to promote your content in the right channels, i.e., those where your audience is present. Social networks, for example, are vital to ensuring that more people are impacted by your publications and also to strengthening the digital presence of your brand.
But the channels you use must be the same as your audience. After all, what’s the point of publishing content with the right keyword and exclusive interactive material if, in practice, the user you want to impact won’t have access to the content? That’s why it’s so important to understand your buyer persona and what channels are best suited to communicate with it.
Set metrics to follow your performance
Did you set a goal, study your audience, create relevant and exclusive materials, make the right publicity, and your work is over? Negative. Even after all these steps, it is still necessary to follow up and monitor the performance of your actions. After all, how do you know if your investments are generating the expected return or not?
By establishing and monitoring metrics, you can assess whether your B2B Content Marketing plan is, in fact, improving lead qualification work or reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC), for example. These indicators will guide, throughout the application of your strategy, what is working and what needs to be improved.
Within your B2B Content Marketing plan, therefore, it is necessary to put into analysis everything that directly implies in the approaches to the consumer. Besides, it is vital to keep an eye on the main trends to know how to make better use of your resources and achieve an increasing impact on the user, especially with more attractive and efficient content.
Now that you know everything you need to do to create a B2B Content Marketing plan that delivers the results expected for your company, how about staying on top of how some formats can generate even better results for your business? Then check out our article and learn how to generate revenue with your interactive content!
