Content as a B2B revenue driver
Building content is tough. There's masses of content out there available on dozens of channels. Which makes competing for customer attention during their buying process especially challenging.
Added to that, the B2B space is typically filled with long and non-linear customer journeys which means creating content is not just a straightforward process.
So is it possible to have content as a revenue driver against this backdrop?
Yes!
That’s why we’ve put together this guide to creating content that covers all the bases for driving revenue: build brand awareness, influence buying decisions, and set you apart from the competition.
In this post you’ll read about:
Boosting revenue with content
Content for different stages in the customer journey
When to use gated and ungated content
The process of creating content
How to determine whether your content has been a success
Let’s dive right in!
Video: Content as a B2B revenue driver? - LinkedIn Live recording.
Adding Value with Content
There is a positive side to long, complex B2B customer journeys. As a content marketer you get ample opportunity to interact with the customers at every stage in their journey.
A good content strategy can work to generate interest, educate, move pricing discussions forward, and demonstrate the value that you offer above the competition.
As well as being a natural promotion of your business, you can create a wealth of resources for your viewers (including existing customers) to better understand and use your product.
For any content you produce to be successful, you need to ensure it is concise, precise, and adds value to the viewers.
In B2B’s it’s often not the one with the credit card that will be using your product or engaging with your content so making your content available in easy to digest bites that can be easily passed on to other members of the team is important.
Ultimately, the goal for all content is most likely to be to drive revenue for your business, and with a few things in place there is a great opportunity for you to achieve it.
Read more about creating a revenue-focused content strategy >
What Type of Content to Create?
Before jumping into it, you first need to get an understanding of the audience you’re creating content for.
Ask yourself who would benefit from your content. What are their challenges, needs, and motivations before they move towards purchasing? Should there be a blogpost about X that would show how your product benefits sales? Or a how-to guide showing how to implement your service?
There’s an abundance of content out there so you need to create something that will set yourself apart from the rest.
A great place to start when considering what content to produce is listening to what sales and customer success are being asked when speaking to potential clients.
Find out what pain points they mention, and consider creating content that helps deal with some of those issues.
You will also need to determine what your audience needs at each stage of the buyer's journey and create content accordingly.
Content for the first part of the journey usually falls under the category of ‘awareness’.
People are usually not looking for anything specific at this stage, so content here should provide helpful and informative information (packaged in easily digested bites) that educates your audience on what you do.
Explain why they should buy the product that you are selling, how they can benefit from it, and why you are the best of the options out there.
Content at this stage could include:
Social media
Blog posts
How-to-videos
Tutorials
Towards the middle and later stages of the customer journey you will need the content to be more detailed and thoughtful while moving potential customers down the funnel.
The middle stage can be classed as the ‘consideration stage’.
You are here moving away from general education towards establishing the value of your product.
It’s here that you have piqued the interest of your audience, they have a problem but don’t know how to solve the problem, are comparing options, and they are considering whether to buy your product.
Content at this stage could include:
Ebooks
White papers
Webinars
Product videos
Product information
Email newsletters
Then comes the final stage - the decision stage.
They are ready to buy and know what kind of product they are after. Those who remain in your funnel need convincing that you are the best option.
Watching demos that detail the deployment stage can be useful here, as could technical specifications, costing options, and comparison tables.
Content at this stage could include:
Customer reviews
Case studies
Sales demos
Gated or ungated content?
Another aspect to take into consideration when creating content is whether you want it to be gated, or ungated.
Gated is when you have to pay for the content in some way, such as through entering your email or telephone number to see it.
Ungated is when you can freely access content without barriers.
There are some good reasons for gating some content, but you need to make sure you do it in the right places.
Ideally, you should keep it ungated as much as possible, as it’s all about giving the right information to the right people, at the right time.
One of the main downsides to gated content is that when the person enters their email address, the typical thing to happen is that it gets placed into Hubspot and scored and then passed onto a salesperson who will call them. Often it’s too early in the process though and they have no intention of buying.
Downloading content is not by itself an indicator that people want to buy - if someone wants to buy then they will book a demo!
With that said, marketers need to feed sales with leads that they can work on, and gating content and getting contact information in this way is a good way to go about this.
One strategy could be to provide ungated, well written blog posts on the website, and then on LinkedIn repackage it into gated content.
For example, ask if they want to share the content or want it in a pdf format - and if so, they can enter their email address to have it mailed to them.
The Content Creation Process
Once you’ve answered the questions about who you’ll be targeting, and which content you want to utilize, the next step will be to actually start creating!
Marketing teams need to set up a publishing schedule, so that content is published consistently and planned strategically ahead of time - but with enough flexibility for changes to be made.
When producing content for B2B’s you have to account for the sales journey to be a long process - at least a 6 month journey from start to finish. So you need to plan ahead - and think through what your customers need at each stage in the journey.
Identify any trends and gaps across your content. If you lack information for the conversion stage, for example, then it might be time to start producing content for that stage in order to create a higher converting funnel.
You also need to determine the amount of time and resources you will allocate to creating content.
There’s a fine balance to be made between creating quality content and spending too much time on it if it’ll only lead to minimal revenue gain.
For example, writing LinkedIn posts - is it worth it to spend several hours creating a post that won’t have a much significantly greater impact than one you spend 15 minutes writing?
And with all that you create, check that the messaging in your content is aligning with your brand, setting you apart from the competition, and that it’s adding value to the company.
Distribution likewise needs to be built into the content creation strategy - you can create the best content in the world but if no-one is seeing it then it’ll all be for nothing.
Every piece of content you produce can be distributed to other channels - including the likes of Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, and Slack.
One thing you can do to promote your content is build up your social media presence - it’ll go a long way in getting more views for your content.
Blog posts and podcasts, for example, can be created and then repurposed for LinkedIn, with employees cherry picking sections and promoting it further.
Just keep in mind that it has to be ‘native’ to the site you are posting on - i.e. make sure it’s valuable and suited to the site.
Determining your content’s success
So, after taking into consideration all of the above, you’ve created some content and put it out there - but how do you judge whether that content has been successful?
Again, the answer to this depends which stage you are in.
In the beginning when you’re optimizing for SEO - it’s all about impressions. Although this may be a vanity metric, it is still a leading indicator that you’re going after.
When you are starting your content strategy from scratch then the most important thing is to produce content consistently and look at how many words are going live.
1000 words or more is generally what to aim for to suit the google algorithm and receive more social shares, but you can play around with word count to see what length your audience reacts best to.
Output as a KPI doesn’t say anything about the quality of the content, but it’s a good starting point.
From here you can look here at the time your prospects spent on each page, and the amount of social shares your content received.
Conversion rate and revenue generated are two other very important KPIs.
Ultimately you want to produce content that is leading to conversions and revenue.
You might be interested in this article > https://dreamdata.io/blog/time-to-revenue-b2b
To accurately measure the success of your content strategy you need to do first-party tracking and save that information in a warehouse so you can later connect it to deals that are won.
Track and report on content performance, to see what your top-performing content is (and what’s not doing so well). With this knowledge, you will gain the confidence to scale what’s working and scrap what’s not.