Content marketing strategy
There are multitude of different content formats to choose from, and a plethora of channel to distribute them over. Plus there are different types of buyers and the different stages of the buying process to which you content needs to be aligned.
With so many choices to make, it only makes sense that you need to have a strategy in place in order to succeed.
You content marketing strategy needn't be complex, though. All it needs to do are determine the type and volume of work you will do and the areas you want that work to impact. Drops in the ocean (small levels of sustained effort) don’t often work in content marketing, so your strategy is as much about choosing what you will not do (for the planning duration) as what you will do.
Key elements of a good content strategy include:
- Personas - the people you will create content for
- Content plan - the topics you will cover as well as the format and frequency
- Keywords - the search terms that your content will be optimised to improve your position on
- Channels - the channels you will use to distribute and promote your content
Personas
Personas are definitions of the people you want your content to reach and influence.

The number one reason for having personas is to get you to think about what content will truly be of interest to your potential customers, not to the person sat next to you in the office. They are about turning 180 degrees to look outward from your organisation to the content needs of your buyer, rather than looking internally for what will appeal to colleagues or superiors.
Why do business blogs fail?
Many business blogs fail to generate the desired results because the content talks about topics that only really matter or appeal internally - things like new hires, funding wins or partnerships. As a result, these posts fail to align with the language that buyers use to describe their problems and, as a result, don't get discovered.
Once you are looking the right way, you can refine your personas to target your buyers more accurately, addressing their challenges and using their language - but you can take persona refinement too far. Refine your personas too far and you go beyond the point of them being useful and reduce your ability to sustainable create content for them. In B2B marketing, a somewhat broad definition of a persona is a good thing; unlike in B2C marketing.
Fewer personas is also better than more. Increasing the number of personas your try to target doesn’t have the same effect on the amount of content you can reasonably produce, meaning the content you do produce has to be spread more thinly and its impact on traffic and leads will be diluted.
How many personas should you target? Ideally, one. Most SMEs can achieve more than adequate growth if they are effective at marketing to their most attractive persona.
Don't confuse the number of personas that you market to with the number of options in your forms or marketing automation systems - these can and should be different. It's a good thing to segment leads into multiple personas so that you know which ones to prioritise and which ones to not. Your forms can have many more options for persona than are identified in your marketing strategy.
Need help getting started? Download our B2B Persona Workbook today.
Topics
Inbound marketing is a marathon of content topic idea generation, not a sprint, so the aim of your content strategy should be to set off in the right direction, not planning every post, pillar page and conversion offer in advance.
Whenever possible, your content topics need to align to challenges and questions your buyers face as they navigate the research and buying processes the typically lead to a purchase of what you offer. You can, and should, target a mixture of specific problems, broad topics, stories of success and anything that really should be of interest to your buyer or your existing customers - let's not forget to delight them too.
For the purposes of your content strategy it can be helpful to call out some example blog post and conversion offer titles, indicating how they relate to the persona's challenges and the various stages of the buying process.
There are, of course, plenty of tools, both free and paid, that can help you create your initial content strategy and create new content topics going forward. BuzzSumo is incredibly popular for research topic popularity and CoSchedule's headline analyzer can help you optimise titles.
Keywords
Keywords go hand-in-hand with topics really and there will be a lot of overlap between them.
Understanding SEO and defining your keyword strategy, ideally before commencing your content marketing, is an essential step for success.
This is because a large proportion of the overall results that content marketing can produce come down to ranking more highly for attractive keywords in search engines like Google and being found by your ideal buyer as they search for information.
Conscious use of relevant and attractive keywords in topic creation, titles of content and internal hyperlinking ensure that every piece of content you publish is contributing to your overall results, regardless of how popular or successful any individual piece turns out to be.
Keyword research can be performed using spreadsheets and your brain alone but is vastly improved with a good SEO software tool - such a tool can enhance your research with competition and volume data as well as helping you report on positions later on.
Read our step-by-step guide to B2B SEO here and master search engine optimisation for your business today.
