SOS! 3 Forgotten Things that Can Make or Break Your B2B Content Marketing

You and your marketing team have probably dabbled in blogging or creating videos, but the problem is very few B2B businesses do content marketing well – in a way that increases and improves their business. 

But this has nothing to do with the skills and experience of the marketing team. We’ve worked with a lot of organisations, and there are two problems that we commonly see that result in B2B content marketing efforts flopping instead of flourishing. 

The first is hiring a marketing person and expecting them to be able to juggle everything from social media to content marketing. They do this badly due to a lack of time and resources. 

The flip side is having very distinct marketing silos, with marketing specialists that work independently of each other and struggle to implement a cohesive strategy across the different marketing departments. 

Both of these have the same result…

Content marketing is not prioritised, and the three things required to engineer a successful B2B marketing strategy are not implemented.

And as a result, it lacks, well…results. 

When this happens businesses will put out an SOS for help to Jammy Digital. And luckily the clue to the solution is in the name…S.O.S.

Related content: The Best B2B Content Marketing Agencies in the UK

What are the three things B2B needs to make content marketing a success? 

We’ve spoken to so many business owners who have given up their content marketing efforts prematurely because they are not actually making a difference.

And that’s no good! 

Anything that you are spending time and money on in business should be bringing in a return. But in order for that to happen you have to understand the fundamentals that make your content marketing tick, which are: 

1. Strategy 
2. Operations 
3. Scalability 

Otherwise known as SOS!

Without a clear plan for each of these, you won’t see the full impact of your content marketing efforts, and you’ll most likely give up – and tell people that content marketing doesn’t work. 

Which just isn’t true! 

We’ve seen well-implemented B2B content marketing literally transform businesses (including ours), and we want to share the how-to so that you can reap the rewards as well. 

When you do have these three things in place, everything is cohesive, your team will work efficiently, and you’ll get the absolute most out of every piece of content you produce.

Let’s break it down further…

1. What should you include in a B2B content strategy?  

Your content strategy is your starting point – and it’s the building block for everything else that you are going to do. 

First things first, let’s dive into what a content strategy is…

A content marketing strategy is your top-level plan for creating, implementing and distributing content that will allow you to reach your business goals.

When it comes to creating a content strategy there are three key things that we consider as a basis for building out a plan. These are:

• Business goals

• Buyer’s Journey

• Current Thought Leadership

How do business goals apply to your content strategy? 

Business goals are key here – because it’s going to drive the type of content that you create, and content can support a variety of different goals. You might want to grow your email list, build brand awareness or retain more customers. Whatever it is, get crystal clear on what your overarching business goals are and then use your content strategy to build out content that helps you hit these goals. 

Find out more about what content to create for different business goals here. 

How does the buyer’s journey apply to your content strategy?

It’s also important to remember that there are different awareness stages within your buyer’s journey. This is typically known as…

Problem aware – they’re aware of their problem but unaware of solutions to that problem 

Solution aware – they’re aware of their problem and the potential solutions that can fix it 

Product aware – they’re aware of your specific product that could help (and other products too) but don’t know all the ins and outs 

Most aware – they’re aware of what your product does and its benefits, they just haven’t purchased yet

The aim should be to create a plan that encompasses content addressing every stage of the buyer’s journey – that will help people move from problem-aware to loyal customers. 

At this stage, we conduct in-depth keyword research and competitor research, as well as interview your sales teams to find out what questions your potential customers are asking. It’s all about mapping out that journey and helping your prospect every step of the way.  

Find out how to create content for different points of the awareness journey here. 

How does current thought leadership apply to your content strategy?

Your company most likely has a mountain of existing assets in the form of ‘thought leadership’. 

The term ‘thought leadership’ sounds a little pretentious but all it means is original content and ideas that are uniquely yours. Take this article you’re reading right now for example. Sure, people have published content about content strategy before, but they’ve never framed it this particular way (using the SOS framework). This comes from our experience at Jammy Digital and working with clients. It’s uniquely ours. 

And ‘thought leadership’ is the kind of content that helps you stand out amongst your competition. It takes your unique…

• Ideas 
• Methodologies 
• Stories 
• Experiences 
• Frameworks 

And turns them into content. 

So when we look at putting a content strategy together for a client, we’ll look at their current ‘thought leadership’. This could be the books you’ve published, your LinkedIn content, internal frameworks and processes, webinars, podcast interviews etc. 

This is the ‘good stuff’ that allows us to create original content that resonates with your audience, beyond the conventional content that’s regurigtated in your industry! 

Considering business goals, buyer’s journey and thought leadership allows us to build a solid strategy and pull together a content plan complete with titles that you need to write. 

2. B2B content operations, what’s it all about? 

We’re all about rinsing and repeating the right process here at Jammy Digital. And while each of the content pieces that we create will be uniquely individual, we do rely on the same tried and tested process that we know works and helps make your content marketing soar.

Having a plan, and a sustainable way to produce content on an ongoing basis, ensures that you can consistently create content in the way necessary to see results. 

It’s all well and good having a host of content ideas, but it’s no use if you don’t know who is going what and when. 

That’s why you need to create a content workflow that makes everything clear, including the what, when, who and how of it. 

• What content are you going to create?
• When the content is due to be published?
• Who is responsible for each stage (from planning to publishing)?

For a smooth B2B content marketing operation, we recommend that you use a project management system (we use Notion) so everyone involved is clear on what is happening, and so that you can track what stage the content is at. 

An example of a content marketing workflow…

After reading all this you might be thinking: “Well this all sounds great, but can’t just one person tackle content marketing on their own?’ 

Actually, to do content marketing right, you typically need a team of experts. Let’s show you an example of a content marketing workflow using our blogging service.

There are quite a few stages to our content writing service, which might be surprising if you’ve never created content before. It’s not just a case of writing a few words, hitting publish and hoping for the best. A lot of work goes into planning, writing, designing and optimising the content that we create for our clients to ensure it’s top-quality content that actually helps them meet their business goals. 

First things first, we (Martin and Lyndsay) and our content manager Meghan will create a content strategy (see point one) and do extensive audience research, keyword research, competitor research etc. 

Once the content ideas are created, our content manager, Meghan, will start by creating an in-depth brief for the first piece of content. This will include notes on the tone of voice, angles that we’d like to use, case studies, anecdotes, stories, the goal of the piece and keywords and key headings. All in all it’s a pretty in-depth document, and you’ll get a good idea of what the goal and outline of the article are going to be.

The brief will then be sent to our writer to write the article, and our graphic designer will design the featured image and any other imagery that might need to be included. 

Once the article is complete our content manager will check it all over, and make any amendments that might be required. 

The next step is the technical operator, who uploads the article to the website and optimises it for search. 

One final check and then it’s published. 

So, one blog post goes through six people…

1. Content Strategists x2
2. Content Manager 
3. Writer 
4. Graphic Designer 
5. Technical Operator 

Now times that by 2, 3, 4, 8, 20 blog posts a month and that’s a lot of work – and the more you want to do the more people you’ll need. 

Now add in video, social media marketing, podcasting etc and the overlap between team members and you’ve got yourself one giant headache if this process isn’t clearly defined. 

If you are going to nail B2B content, then developing and implementing a content process is something that you are going to have to do. 

Sure, it’s not the most ‘creative’ thing. But having a process like this allows you and your team to be creative. It gets them out of the nitty-gritty stuff and into doing the stuff they love to do. 

Find out more about our content writing service here. 

3. Scaling content, how can you do this?

We always start by creating ‘search-driven content’ i.e. content that is found via search. Such as searching on Google and finding a blog post. Searching on YouTube or TikTok and finding a video (yes, TikTok is a search engine!). Or searching for a podcast.  

But, once this is done, it’s time to amplify that content beyond its initial platform (ie. blog, video, podcast) to other channels, such as your social media channels like Instagram or LinkedIn or email. 

To do this you’ll need to scale your content production, and luckily that doesn’t always mean creating more long-form content, it can mean repurposing the content you’ve already created and sharing it across multiple platforms. 

One thing we do with all the content that we create for clients is transform blog and video posts into social media content. It’s not just a case of taking the blog link and sharing it – we repurpose it so it’s a great piece of engaging content that can be shared across social media platforms. And we repurpose it into individual illustrations, images, worksheets, stories, anecdotes – all with different angles. 

Scaling your content marketing isn’t about creating loads more, but it’s about doing the most with the content that you have already created. Don’t get us wrong, it is time-consuming. It takes a lot of mental work to think up different and engaging ways of the same idea, but it’s so worth it. 

We also use AI to help us with this process, and we have hired a Content Marketing Expert who is experienced in ChatGPT to repurpose the content we create for our clients into various different formats. No, we don’t use AI to create the original content, but we do use it to help us repurpose it! 

Find out how we’re using AI in our content marketing strategy within the Jammy agency.

Need help reaching your business goals in 2024?

Whether you’re DIY-ing your content marketing, or getting the professionals in to help, you need to remember that strategy, operation and scalability form the basis of a successful content marketing journey. 

Without these, you’ll find that your content marketing efforts are sporadic, and likely won’t reap the rewards that you wish for. 

If you’d love to implement a super successful content marketing strategy but still aren’t sure where to start then book a chat with us. 

We’ll take over everything from conception to creation and optimisation – ensuring that you’re taking care of all the elements required to build a strong, scalable content marketing machine that requires minimal effort from you and feeds your business goals.