How to Develop a B2B Content Strategy (+Real Examples)

Random acts of content might check a few boxes and produce a few small wins. But this approach also leads to haphazard efforts and missed opportunities.

When you want to create a reliable system for attracting your ICP, building trust, and converting leads, you need a strategic plan.

Yet too many B2B content strategies rely on the bare minimum: doing some keyword research, plugging it into an editorial calendar, and churning out content that fails to make a real impact.

So, what's a better way? In this article, we'll break down what really goes into a B2B content strategy, including actionable steps and real-life examples from B2B content marketers. By the end, you'll understand how to develop a B2B content strategy that leverages the resources you have and delivers the results you need.

Why it's so important to invest in B2B content strategy

A B2B content strategy is your plan for creating and distributing content that supports your business goals. With a successful strategy, you can produce content that:

• Captures your ideal customer's attention
• Educates and engages potential customers
• Establishes your brand as a trusted partner
• Guides prospects through their customer journey
• Influences leads as they make purchasing decisions

But that's only the beginning. The best strategies take things a step further, transforming content from a commodity into a competitive advantage for your business.

In other words, they build a content moat by leveraging a combination of high production value, unique data points, and relationships with marketing partners.

As Kevin Indig explains, a content moat creates competitive advantages that "compound over time and can ultimately decide who wins or loses a market." Plus, "when used correctly, [content moats] make it harder—maybe impossible—to recreate your content or compete with you."

Think of your content strategy as a plan that details how your B2B brand will win. It considers how your brand can build authority, create value, and ultimately contribute to essential business goals.

If you've ever needed a nudge to get serious about strategy, consider this your call to set aside that haphazard approach and take steps to start developing content that differentiates your B2B brand.

How to develop a B2B content strategy: 9-step framework

Consider the steps below as a guide for developing your own unique content strategy. Keep in mind that the process of developing a strategy looks similar for every B2B business. But the strategy itself doesn't.

Step 1: Define your audience and develop personas

It's tempting to skip over preliminary steps like audience research and jump right into exploring topics and creating content. But it's essential to get to know your ideal customer first. After all, your content won't deliver the results you want if you don't tailor it to the right audience.

So, before you dive into content creation, get clear on the buyer personas you want to reach. Start by analyzing customer and prospect data. The best sources to check depend on the stage of your company and where you engage with your audience.

"I mostly look at CRM and social media data," shares Josh Hines, Founder of Contineofy. "CRM data can tell you who exactly is buying."

"But with social media, especially organic, you might be engaging with entirely different personas. You have to evaluate if they are the right personas for your brand or if you need to change up what you're sharing."

Vivek Shankar, a Content Strategist for Fintech Companies, recommends using data from your "CRM, sales calls, etc. For early-stage companies, it's mostly what the founder and execs want to prioritize."

There are countless data points you could consider. Vivek suggests making note of data points like:

• The customer's role in the buying decision
• What causes them to buy
• What makes them realize they have a problem
• How they define success
• Which alternatives (i.e., competitors) they consider
• Their most common objections

While you can certainly analyze this data manually, it's often faster and easier to use AI to find common themes. For example, Vivek recommends using Claude to analyze customer call transcripts.

Not only does analyzing customer calls allow you to extract the data points above, but it also reveals who your audience is and how your content can help them—in their own words.

For example, suppose you’re marketing CRM software. Your typical customer is the founder, CEO, or CTO of an early-stage startup.

They’re currently using a DIY CRM and looking for a more powerful solution. They’re also considering your two biggest competitors and, ideally, want to pilot your product for 30 days.

When listening to customer calls, you might learn that their biggest pain points are getting their team to update CRM records efficiently and syncing data from other software platforms.

Now you have a sense of the solutions they’re searching for, the most important pain points to solve, and the next steps to suggest in your calls to action.

Once you've analyzed the data, you're ready to organize it into a buyer persona. Whether you prefer to get creative or keep it simple, you can choose from a range of tools.

"I used to get fancy in Miro, but a spreadsheet is fastest," Vivek shares. Alternatively, get a head start by using HubSpot's Make My Persona tool.

Step 2: Clarify your content marketing goals

Next, define what you want your content marketing efforts to achieve. Without clear goals, you're much more likely to commit random acts of content.

But with definitive goals, you'll have an easier time prioritizing the right content assets when you know what you're working toward. You'll also be able to get your content team on board and create content more efficiently.

Here are the most common B2B content marketing goals, according to the Content Marketing Institute:

Brand awareness takes first place, while demand and lead generation are a close second.

Do you have to stick to a single goal? Not necessarily. Content marketing teams often work toward multiple goals simultaneously. Just make sure what you aim to accomplish is realistic (see Achievable below).

To get crystal clear on what's most important, use the SMART goals framework to set KPIs. It works like this:

• Specific: State what exactly you want to achieve and why.
• Measurable: Clarify how you'll quantify your results.
• Achievable: Choose a goal that's realistic given your resources.
• Relevant: Align your goals with marketing and business objectives.
• Time-bound: Commit to a timeline.

Here's an example. Suppose your sales team needs to sign 125 new customers in Q3. They have an average conversion rate of 25% and an average sales cycle of 60 days. So, your goal might be to generate 500 MQLs before the end of Q2 so you can hand them off to sales by the beginning of Q3.

Content marketing goals look different for every business. The most important element is to develop clear goals that align with what matters to your business and that make it easy to measure success.

Step 3: Map content types to the buyer's journey

No matter which goals you prioritize, you shouldn't plan to pump out one-size-fits-all content. Instead, every piece of content you create should connect with B2B decision-makers at specific stages of the buyer journey.

The most common way to think about the buyer's journey is to break it down into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision

For example, buyers at the awareness stage typically respond best to educational content. At the consideration stage, case studies and product comparisons often resonate.

However, Kiran Shahid, B2B Content Writer, suggests a simpler approach. She recommends thinking about the jobs to be done at each step of the buyer's journey.

For example, at the very beginning of their journey, B2B buyers focus on identifying problems. Thought leadership and blog posts covering common challenges and industry pain points are likely to resonate at this stage.

Once buyers begin exploring solutions, they'll be more responsive to how-to guides and tool roundups. When they begin clarifying their requirements, detailed feature comparisons and product-led content will be relevant.

When B2B buyers approach the vendor selection stage of their journey, content like in-depth vendor comparisons, testimonials, and customer success stories will be more likely to influence their decision.

Step 4: Conduct a content audit and a competitive analysis

Before you start generating new content ideas, take stock of what you've already created. Conduct a content audit to create a complete list of the blog content, landing pages, and product pages you already have.

While audits do take some time, Ahrefs' content audit template can speed it up. This template guides you through analyzing content performance, objectives, and priorities.

After the audit, you'll have a better idea of how to approach optimization for existing content. You'll also identify content gaps, which tell you what you're missing—and what to create next.

Don’t have time to audit every page on your website? Focus your efforts on your top performing pages, or the top 25% of pages with the most search traffic, conversions, or backlinks.

It's also worth evaluating what your competitors are doing. With a competitive content analysis, you study other B2B companies in your space to determine what kind of content they're producing and how it performs.

A competitive analysis also reveals what other companies in your space aren’t producing. In other words, it uncovers content gaps that your team can address to help your company establish authority in the space.

Ahrefs has a tool for competitive analysis, too. Use Site Explorer to dive into organic search traffic, backlinks, and other important metrics.

Step 5: Generate content ideas that align with your goals

At this point, you should have a sense of the kind of content your target audience is looking for and the types of content your business is missing. Now, you're ready to start generating new content ideas.

You could focus on keyword research. But unless your main goal is maximizing organic traffic, keyword research should be just one element of your idea generation process.

Many of the content marketers I spoke with also suggest using social listening to develop content ideas based on what your audience is already talking about. It’s also helpful to browse relevant Reddit, Discord, and other forums to identify hot topics for your audience.

Rather than focusing solely on SEO, Belinda Roozemond, Senior B2B SaaS Content Writer and Strategist, recommends taking another customer-driven approach to generating content ideas.

This approach allows her to avoid focusing on content marketing vanity metrics. "I want to focus on outcomes with a great content-to-buyer journey mapping strategy so they actually buy. I want to make it easy for them to buy."

First, Belinda recommends answering the question,

"What do your prospects and customers ask about the most in the context of:

1. your category,

2. your product/offering, and

3. how it all benefits them?"

While your opportunities to listen to your audience may vary, Belinda prioritizes customer calls and internal Slack channels.

"I sit in on sales calls and new customer onboarding sessions," she explains. "This gives me a great overview of why our customers join us and their objections. During the onboarding, new stakeholders who weren't involved in the decision-making process ask questions, too."

"I also use our Slack channels," Belinda shares. "We currently have a #product-user-feedback channel run by our customer success team. This is where they share the feedback with the product team. Every quarter, I copy and paste everything into GPT. I ask GPT to find the top three questions for that timeframe."

This is a great opportunity to incorporate your competitive analysis, too. "I also like to map the questions customers and prospects have to gaps in the content our competitors are putting out," Belinda explains.

Step 6: Decide which topics to prioritize

By now, you should have a list of topics to include in your content strategy. But you can't necessarily act on all of them right away. Instead, you need to decide which to prioritize.

When developing content strategies, Growth Advisor Gaetano DiNardi uses a rubric to align topic relevance with buying intent.

For example, topics where your product is critical to solving the problem are ideal for reaching in-market buyers who are actively seeking solutions. These topics are excellent candidates to prioritize.

In contrast, topics that have a limited opportunity to showcase your product generally align with prospects who have zero buying intent. These top of the funnel topics tend to be lower priorities.

Step 7: Create a content calendar and a publishing workflow

Content strategy doesn't have to involve written content only. In fact, many successful content strategies go beyond blog posts to include video content like webinars and short-form videos, visual content like infographics, audio content like podcasts, and much more.

For example, Vidyard creates original research reports for sales and marketing leaders, like this State of AI in GTM Report.

Positional hosts a weekly podcast, where founder Nate Matherson interviews SEO experts and shares actionable tips.

Navattic has an ongoing Customer Interview Series that features the builders of the platform’s top 1% interactive demos.

And Demandbase has a B2B streaming network with more than a dozen original TV shows.

As you evaluate content formats to include in your strategy, always prioritize those that will differentiate your B2B brand rather than help you blend in. For example, if your top competitors already host successful podcasts, focusing on video or original research may give you a better chance of creating a content moat.

Once you've done your research, generated ideas, prioritized topics, and chosen formats, you're ready to plug everything into a content calendar.

For example, you might aim to publish:

• Two long-form videos per month
• One original research report per month
• One blog post per week
• One social media post per day

As you create your content plan, keep your available resources in mind—including the capacity of your content creation team. If your plans are bigger than what your current team can handle, you may need to sync with your content operations colleagues and consider scaling your team.

Step 8: Choose relevant distribution channels

Even when you publish incredible content, getting eyes on it can be challenging. It isn’t you—it’s the content landscape, which is more competitive than ever.

To increase your reach and get your content in front of your audience, you need a distribution plan. A comprehensive content distribution plan typically includes these three elements:

• Owned distribution: All the channels you control like your website, webinars, white papers, email newsletters, and social media platforms
• Earned distribution: Third-party channels like influencer partnerships, guest blog posts, and media mentions
• Paid distribution: Channels you pay for like advertising, paid partnerships, and sponsored content

So, how do you choose the right distribution channels for your audience? Ateendra Sharma, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Scrollmark, recommends a three-step process.

First, "discover which channels prospects are on," he suggests. "Sometimes search isn't the best channel, especially when it comes to a disruptive solution, new category, and certain demographics. For example, younger millennials and Gen Z are more active on socials and actually perform search on socials more than search engines."

Next, "find out who is already getting success with your kind of prospects on those channels. Look at their content and style and make some assumptions on what might be helping them," Ateendra advises.

"A caveat here is that some brands on search and socials get big due to some totally different kind of content initially and might have later started creating content for your kind of prospects. You have to filter them out because they're now winning with your kind of prospects based on brand strength or brand size."

Finally, put it all together. Ateendra recommends using these insights to inform content formats and channels. "Use your creativity and brand to come up with the theme, platform, angle, positioning, messaging, content substance, and content style."

But don't stop there. "This approach makes sure you use some proven methods to get initial traction. Creativity then helps grow after the lift-off. Then move to the next channel," Ateendra advises.

You don't have to commit to one channel at a time. In many cases, you can distribute content across multiple channels at once. By repurposing content into different formats, you can reach a wider audience and maximize the ROI of your strategy.

For example, you can repurpose a blog post into a snippet for email marketing and a few posts for your social media channels. Or, you can turn a long-form video into a few short-form clips for social media and embed it into a long-form blog post.

Step 9: Measure content marketing outcomes

Distribution isn't the final step. Once you begin publishing and distributing content, monitor the results closely to see how they align with the goals you set.

Tools like Google Analytics can answer questions like which channels drive traffic, which pages get clicks, and which content generates conversions. This data can help you prove your content marketing ROI.

All those insights you glean? Put them to work. Make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your content and improve your strategy.

How to avoid common B2B content strategy mistakes

As you develop your strategy, watch out for these common mistakes. They can derail your efforts and prevent you from meeting your goals.

Over-indexing on best practices

Best practices can point you in the right direction. But following them exclusively can lead to bland content and a strategy that makes your business blend in with the competition.

"Best practice content doesn't cut it anymore. To win, you need an edge—something that's true to your brand and product," explains Tanaaz Khan, B2B SaaS Content Strategist and Writer.

For Tanaaz, that edge is original research. When developing content strategies for B2B SaaS startups, she focuses on audience research, competitor research, internal research, and content audits.

Copying the competition

Competitive research is a key part of any B2B content strategy. But you should never adopt the competition's approach in the hope that it will work for you, too.

Originality is one of the most important elements in developing a successful content strategy. It's also the key to creating high-quality content.

In fact, your "content strategy should be one that you're uniquely suited to win. If somebody else can do it, they probably will," the Omniscient team explains.

Opting out of experimentation

Even the best content strategies aren't set in stone. What works this quarter may not work next quarter, which may cause you to fall short of your KPIs.

Virtually every B2B strategy can benefit from regular experimentation. Leave space on your content calendar to test out new channels and formats. Then, incorporate what works best into your strategy.

Revisit to stay relevant

Developing the best content strategy for your organization isn't a one-time exercise. Instead, it requires ongoing review and optimization to ensure you're reaching the right audience, pursuing the right topics, leveraging the right channels and hitting the right goals.

Aim to revisit your content strategy every six to 12 months. This way, you can continue to create great content even as your audience, business, and industry evolve.