4 questions you need to answer to build a revenue-focused Content Strategy
Content strategies are vital to the success of any content effort. By aligning your content to wider business goals a content strategy makes sure you’re not wasting time producing content that fails to meet business needs.
Why then does revenue almost never feature in the dozens of Content Strategy guides and templates out there?
In all fairness, the tools and data just haven’t been available to B2B marketers. But now that it is, with Content Analytics, we can finally put revenue at the heart of content strategies.
This post shows you how to leverage pipeline and revenue data to set your content strategy up for success.
Answering the right questions
To do so, we’re going to walk you through the 4 questions you need to answer before building a revenue-focused content strategy.
We’ll be covering:
Positioning and ICP: the absolute must-haves
Content strategy guides: what’s missing?
Why pipeline and revenue are so important to content marketing
4 questions you need to answer before building a revenue-focused content strategy
What content generates pipeline and revenue?
Is my content funnel helping move accounts down the pipeline?
What’s my revenue-generating audience?
What content types and channels generate revenue?
Ready to build your revenue-focused B2B content strategy (but watch out for those pitfalls!)
Positioning and Ideal Customer Profile: the absolute must-haves
A well-defined positioning and ICP will help you provide value to your audience consistently and at the right time.
If you’re involved in content marketing and don’t know what your company’s positioning or ICP is, you should stop here. Make sure you clarify both of these before setting off on creating a content strategy.
If you want to dive deeper into these, we recommend April Dunford’s ‘Obviously Awesome’ for positioning and this article by Close.io for ICP.
It’s also worth highlighting that neither your positioning nor your ICP is immutable. The nature of the marketplace (and your product team’s innovation) means these will change over time, so it’s always good to keep them in check.
Ok, enough about that. Now that you’ve refreshed yourself with your positioning and ICP, we can get back to content strategising.
Content strategy guides: what’s missing?
There are many quality content strategy guides and templates freely available to satisfy most content marketers’ needs. These from SEMRush, HubSpot and Ahrefs are personal favourites. Yet, try as they might to encourage business-driven goal setting, revenue goes unmentioned in virtually all cases.
Instead, when it comes to ‘setting your goals’ there’s a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors with statements like “goals should be aligned to business objectives” or “depends upon your broader marketing goals”. Followed by examples like increase in traffic or conversions, boost brand visibility, etc.
But the harsh reality is that content marketing, like all marketing and sales, are about influencing the bottom line. And if you’re strategy isn’t moving you towards that objective, you’re setting it up for failure.
Blame it on the tools
We’re not playing a blame game here. In fact, there’s a reason behind this conspicuous omission.
Tying content to pipeline and revenue data is notoriously difficult to do - especially in the B2B setting.
The tools available to B2B content marketers are limited in their tracking. Tools such as Google Analytics only measure conversions that take place in the same session as the content view. Which leaves tracking content influence on conversion and pipeline events later in the typical B2B customer journey unaccounted for.
But what if you could see how and when content influences pipeline and revenue. Your content strategy would be anchored on the very metrics that keep your business moving forward.
Why are pipeline and revenue so important to content marketing?
Ok, so why are we banging on about pipeline and revenue?
Is it because Dreamdata cracked the nut and has linked content to pipeline and revenue no matter how long and complex the buying journey is? No. Well, I guess a bit.
As we’ve already mentioned, the reality is that any serious B2B content marketer needs pipeline and revenue as the bedrock of their content efforts. Whether thought-leadership or brand-awareness, product or sales enablement, video or article, the ultimate goal (no matter how far out in the future) is to drive pipeline and revenue.
Besides, it means being able to measure and prove the value of content in meeting business objectives. It also levels the playing field with the rest of go-to-market activities by being benchmarked against the same metrics.
The bottom line is that a content strategy is good. A content strategy grounded on pipeline and revenue is better.
Here’s what you need to have a revenue-focused content strategy.
4 questions you need to answer before building a revenue-focused content strategy
The objective of these 4 questions is not to re-write the playbook of what a content strategy should be, or indeed to propose a new one - keep using the great ones we listed above!
Instead, it’s the 4 questions that when answered will make sure that your content strategy is aligned to what matters most: revenue.
So let’s roll up our sleeves and inject some revenue into our content strategy, shall we?
1: What content influences pipeline and revenue?
Your first step is to assess whether the content you’ve already produced is actually influencing pipeline and revenue.
This will give you a taster of what’s been working up till now and so what should form part of the strategy.
The last thing you want is to base your content strategy on content that simply does not feature in your customer journeys.
You want to be fishing out any patterns in the content that’s performing best, think, topic, length, tone, format, etc. (we’ll get into more criteria of success below)
But more importantly, you want to be doing this for your worst-performers. Are there any common themes in the content that just hasn’t clicked with your audience? Take note, and make sure it doesn’t feature in your strategy in any shape or form.
You can find your top and worst performers in the Content Performance dashboard.
Here you can compare content on absolute revenue (and leads/opportunities/deals) influenced, but also compare content performance based on ‘conversions’ by pipeline stage event for every content session (a metric we’ve labelled Influenced Leads per Session).
2: Is my content funnel helping move accounts down the pipeline?
When you are developing a solid content strategy, you want to create content that catches your audience wherever they are in the funnel. From creating top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content to bottom-of-the-funnel content (BOFU) and Sales Enablement, certain types of content will create potential customers that you can lead through the funnel and pipeline beyond.
The question you need to ask yourself before putting pen to paper is: does your content perform when you expect it to?
Are thought-leadership TOFU posts capturing leads/ generating demand as expected, or are they actually performing better BOFU? Are your product videos being watch further up funnel?
Testing these assumptions and learning from the answers means you’ll be able to plan what content really works at different stages much more accurately.
Here again, the Content Performance dashboard offers insights into whether your content is performing at the stages you expect it to.
Once you’ve set your date range and selected the content categories you’re focusing on, you’ll simply have to switch between stages and observe the changes in the table.
3: What’s my revenue-generating audience?
Knowing your target audience is vital to the success of your content efforts. After all, writing content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience is the surest way to die a slow and painful content death.
Up until now your ICP’s main persona should have been the north star of all the content you produce - and that’s good.
But, as we know full well, the B2B customer journey involves multiple personas at different stages in the buying journey.
So the question is: are you targeting the right audience, with the right content, at the right time? And by right we mean revenue-generating audience.
Here we need to analyse the content funnel (Number 2 above) from an audience perspective. That is, you need to get a clear idea of who has been consuming what content at what stage in the pipeline.
Head back to the Content Performance dashboard and download the Influenced Contacts report. This will show you every contact (individual user) that interacted with the content.
Set your stage to whichever stage your target should be, scroll right and bob’s your uncle - email, job title, etc. for each URL.
Change your stage and look at the changing results. You can also run this report at Company level.
Oh, and when doing this analysis, keep your eyes peeled on how closely this data matches your ICP. If there’s a big discrepancy you might want to start thinking about whether or not your ICP needs updating.
4. What content types and channels generate revenue?
When creating your strategy you’ll come to the point where you need to consider the primary content types you’ll be focusing on: blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, etc.
But this begs the question, what content does your audience (or more accurately do your audiences) prefer to consume?
Here you just have to replicate the analysis we did in Question 1 above, but keeping an eye out for the type of content behind each URL.
You can making scanning your data for content types easier by categorising your content by type (with the help of Dreamdata’s support team)
An obvious follow-on question is how are they arriving at the content in the first place? Which brings us to the channels you’re using for distributing your content.
Channels
The question here is simple: what channels are bringing the best traffic to your content.
In other words, how is my (revenue-generating) audience coming across the content. For instance, does the traffic coming from google ads to my top URL influence as many leads as the traffic coming from organic to the same URL
From this you’ll be able to properly plan for what channels you’ll use to promote and distribute said content. After all, there’s no point in nailing all the other points and creating truly valuable content if your audience won’t see it.
For this analysis, all we need to do is select Session Channel in the Secondary Group By filter. This will split each URL by the channel of the session where the content was viewed.
Ready to build your revenue-focused B2B content strategy
So there we have it, the recipe for answering the 4 questions that’ll set up your content strategy for revenue-success.
By knowing what content influences pipeline and revenue you unlock the potential of all the great content strategy guides and templates out there. And draft a content strategy primed for success.
But one more thing before you start (three actually). Please be weary of these pitfalls:
Overcomplication. Don’t overcomplicate your strategy. Your strategy shouldn’t be all things to all people. It needs to be crisp and to the point, focused exclusively on tying business goals (revenue) to content. Matters of planning, such as distribution, specific content topics, etc. need to be left for monthly/quarterly content plans and not your strategy.
Frequency. Content strategies are not content plans. You don’t need to draft a strategy every month. Instead it’s there as an anchor for your efforts, making sure that you’re producing content that’s completely aligned with your business goals. But that doesn’t mean your strategy should be cast in stone. We recommend updating your content strategy on annual basis.
Measurement and KPIs. This features in pretty every content strategy guide out there. But, after banging on about pipeline and revenue, it should go without saying that when choosing the KPIs you’re going to track in the strategy, revenue KPIs need to be your north star. But to achieve that you need to have the tools in place to handle those metrics.
Maybe Dreamdata’s Content Analytics is a good place to start
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