Eight Pillars of Strategic B2B Content Marketing

You expect a lot from your marketing team, and rightly so. Effective content teams drive business growth by boosting customer loyalty, nurturing leads, and cementing brand perception through thought leadership. 

But for time-strapped B2B marketers, turning out impactful content is easier said than done. Tight budgets, isolated systems, and misaligned stakeholders and processes create very real friction.

High expectations need to go hand in hand with supportive leadership. A little transparency and open conversation can surface the issues that are stymieing your marketing strategy.

Of course, managers who take time to understand their teams’ challenges are rarely able to wave a magic wand. We might like to fix everything in an instant but competing executive priorities, headcount freezes, organisational reluctance to change, and more can all throw up roadblocks. But being aware is the only way to begin the job of breaking down barriers to excellence.

It’s only with a clear understanding of problems you need to address that you can set strategic priorities. Making it your mission to reduce frustrations and unblock creativity is the only sure fire way to unleash content’s full business impact.

Where are the gaps in your marketing strategy? 

The only way to know for certain what causes your team the biggest headache is to ask them directly. However, the conversation will be more productive — and the answers less likely to catch you off-guard — if you go into it with open eyes. 

There is plenty of industry research that can help you to prepare. For example, the Content Marketing Institute's annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarking Survey highlights a number of concerns that B2B marketers are facing.

In our review of the results, we've identified eight key dimensions that can help you and your team decide on what your specific priorities should be. Some of these issues might be easy wins, but others may require high-level conversations with cross-departmental peers. They could also turn into long-term discussions about problems like strategy and budget allocation.

It's equally important to consider what you'll do if you have challenges across most or all of these areas. A "big bang" overhaul is often not possible, and interdependencies may mean the question of where to begin might not have a straightforward answer.

True transformation often requires more gradual, orchestrated reform, such as with these overlaps: 

• Performance management capabilities (point 3) and access to accurate return-on-investment (ROI) data are crucial to securing business impact and executive buy-in (point 1). As a result, focusing on those measurements first could facilitate stakeholder support for wider initiatives. 

• Implementing updated audience insights (point 8) relies on the resources, skills, and workflow processes addressed in resourcing (point 5) and operations (point 6). 

These examples demonstrate why you may need to deal with certain foundations upfront before you can effectively tackle interrelated areas. As a marketing leader, it's vital to think holistically about optimal timing and interactions between priority initiatives as they shape your strategies and plans.

How can you start to close the gaps? 

Optimising your marketing strategies is an appealing prospect, but you have to walk before you can run. Begin by identifying and prioritising projects and planning your initial steps so that you're ready to take action.

1. Business Impact

Business impact is the process of quantifying your content's value to secure executive investment. To accomplish that goal, you'll need to tie your content efforts to growth in your pipeline, lead generation, and revenue. This is essential to strengthening executive buy-in and funding and proving that it's an essential business function. 

However, to advance your content from a nice-to-have element to an essential business function, you'll also need to showcase its multifaceted value to other business objectives.

The overarching goal is to prove content's value to multiple stakeholders, including sales, customer service, and product development. Your internal content marketing strategy isn't just a tool for generating leads or brand awareness, but also an asset that supports various facets of your business.

If you're facing an uphill climb in this area, focus on cementing your content's status as a business function that leads to lasting value creation. When it's done well, content marketing can build brand equity, nurture investor relationships, help talent recruitment efforts, and build valuable partner ecosystems. These aspects of your business are all critical to sustainable business growth and go beyond more immediate and obvious performance metrics.

Another way to drive increased prioritisation and resourcing for your content marketing is by integrating it more deeply into your strategic planning. This might involve increasing cross-departmental collaboration, or leveraging content for key strategic initiatives, such as entering new markets or launching new products.

Finally, it's important to emphasise that your content marketing plays a role in risk management and business adaptability. Agile content strategies help prepare your team to respond quickly to market changes. They also enable your organisation to manage risks associated with brand reputation, customer engagement, and market positioning.

Potential priorities might include:

• Get executive sign-off to improve data infrastructure. Argue for improving analytics tools and unifying data to connect content engagement to downstream conversions.

• Launch quarterly reviews spotlighting content wins and specific business impact. Standardise processes to capture content success stories and quantify value across customer journeys.

• Create an enterprise content strategy expanding beyond marketing to areas like product, services and HR. Quantify efficiencies gained from content-powered projects (e.g. a customer self-service portal to reduce support calls and improve customer experience).

• Work cross-functionally to create content that gets directly tied to revenue. For example, conduct an audit of sales enablement content and identify gaps where better assets are needed to aid the buyer journey and deals. Earmark funding for high-value content types proven to influence deals. Identify gaps in metrics quantifying content's pipeline and revenue impact. 

2. Strategic Alignment

Getting teams to align on content strategy and messaging is tricky for most organisations. In the Content Marketing Institute's survey, 45% of respondents said that aligning content efforts across sales and marketing was a challenge.

Similarly, communicating and aligning across silos is an issue for 40% of marketers. These silos impede transparency in content efforts across departments, teams, and regions. They remain problematic despite consistent calls for greater collaboration.

Achieving strategic alignment ensures your content maps to your corporate priorities and works cross-functionally. To make that happen, you'll need to foster collaboration between your sales and marketing teams, as well as other internal stakeholders. Your focus should be driving continuous coordination through data sharing, governance, and leadership support, ensuring your content fully aligns with the priorities that shape your strategic demand.

If lack of alignment is plaguing your business, concentrate on fostering cross-functional cooperation, driving continuous strategic coordination between teams on content decisions, planning and measurement.
Potential priorities might include:

• Create a cross-functional content council with executives from across the business to govern decisions and strategy. Facilitate quarterly workshops to align on narratives, campaigns and asset needs by persona and customer journey stage.

• Conduct regular account planning sessions bringing together sales and marketing teams by key segment to shape messaging and campaigns tailored to each.

• Build missing assets together. Map the buyer journey through joint workgroups to uncover content friction points and gaps undermining sales conversations. 

• Implement integrated workflows and systems for content review, approval, distribution, and measurement ensuring tight collaboration on outbound content like emails, sales collateral etc. Develop playbooks and guidelines around effective content and campaign hand-offs between teams. 

3. Performance Management

Demonstrating your content's business impact requires the measurement capabilities that come with performance management. Defining your success measures and implementing integrated data analytics allows you to quantify your content's impact and inform your entire strategy. 

For 84% of the respondents in the Content Marketing Institute's survey, the most significant challenge in measuring content performance is integrating data across multiple platforms. Bringing together those insights to demonstrate the ROI is extremely common, yet it continues to be a top headache for marketing teams.

The prime way to move past this issue is to provide the tools, training, and governance required to rigorously benchmark your content's ability to hit key business success metrics and clearly communicate performance to stakeholders.

Potential priorities might include:

• Invest in skills development. Expand analytics, data visualisation and storytelling, and performance modelling skills across the team to improve quantification capabilities and adoption of insights.

• Tie analytics to planning. Ensure performance discoveries directly feed into quarterly planning and budgets through insights-led content development rather than relying purely on intuition or qualitative input.

• Create reports and dashboards that make it easy to check content performance versus targets. Make these accessible to cross-functional teams..

• Set up automated reporting workflows. Automate dashboards, reports and analysis distribution using rule-based triggers. Alleviate analytics workload while increasing visibility.

4. Technology 

Technology solutions can facilitate efficient content operations, free up resources, and help you keep pace with innovation. For that to happen, however, you'll need to identify and leverage the right tools.

A reported 34% of marketers are struggling to implement emerging technology like artificial intelligence (AI). Maximising the benefits and using these types of technology in a strategic way takes time, and your team might be hesitant to take on new technology on top of their other digital marketing tasks.

Developing technology roadmaps and securing resources for new capabilities can help clarify your plans and explain why these technologies are necessary. You can also put frameworks into place to vet, integrate, and scale innovations, with the goal of optimising your efficiency and impact. 

Potential priorities might include:

• Audit your martech stack against needs and identify gaps, redundancies or opportunities to consolidate around best-of-breed solutions. Develop integration roadmaps.

• Implement governance processes managing technology cycles from selection through adoption, tied to capability roadmaps. Ensure integration, measure value.

• Create innovation sandbox environments to safely evaluate emerging capabilities like AI without disrupting mainstream operations. Use these to vet your options and build skills.

• Earmark funding for marketing automation and research top solution providers to build business cases for additions and upgrades based on efficiency gains, innovation advantages etc. Quantify potential time/cost savings for different use cases – e.g. content production, campaign distribution, reporting etc. 

5. Resourcing and Skills 

Your content marketing efforts depend on securing the necessary budget, staffing, and subject matter expertise to have an impact. Content skills from writing to visual design, data research to multimedia are vital to meeting your business's content demands.

The Content Marketing Institute's survey emphasised a range of issues in this area. According to 58% of marketers, the top challenge unrelated to content creation is accessing adequate staffing and financial resources to produce content at the desired scale. In addition, around a third of marketers find it difficult to keep up with both internal and external content demand. 

Constantly trying to meet rising expectations for more content creates a strain for the entire team.

Just under 40% of respondents said that they find it difficult to access subject matter experts. Relying on busy experts to develop authoritative content can introduce lengthy delays that interfere with the organisation's marketing plans and content schedule. Likewise, getting help from skilled professionals to produce specialised content, such as videos, is a problem for 30% of respondents.

If you discover that these issues are also present in your organisation, focus on auditing and accurately predicting content resourcing needs to alleviate the strain on your team. Furthermore, pursue internal advocacy, funding, and bridge solutions to close resource gaps that are impeding your content strategy execution.

Potential priorities might include:

• Audit your content team’s strengths and weaknesses across creative, technical and analytical competencies based on your current strategy. Identify skills gaps, critical hiring needs, and budget requirements.

• Develop comprehensive learning pathways and subsidies for priority skills like video, data analysis etc to address audit findings.

• Create contingent “borrowed talent” pools allowing teams temporary access to cross-functional subject matter experts for advisory sessions during asset development.

• Explore outsourced and on-demand talent partnerships to address short term budget/staffing limitations related to new initiatives while conveying long term resourcing needs.

6. Operations and Governance

Your business operations manage consistent production via scalable processes, workflows, tools, and guidelines. Without them, it's impossible for your organisation to have steady, compliant, and streamlined content production. 

The Content Marketing Institute's survey results revealed widespread challenges in this area, including: 

• Creating content consistently: Despite its importance, consistency in publishing content is a hurdle for 54% of marketers. 

• Scaling content production: Nearly half of respondents indicated that the inability to effectively repurpose content was a barrier to scaling output, likely due to inconsistent quality, formatting, and governance. Making content modular, structured, and standardised is the solution to promoting reuse. 

• Creating quality content: When producing content at scale, 44% of marketers struggle to maintain high standards for quality. 

• Streamlining content workflow and approval: Simplifying and speeding up the content review and sign-off process to maintain efficiency at scale is an obstacle for 41% of marketers.

• Lacking a structured production process: Almost a third of respondents admitted they don't have standardised systems and workflows to support efficient content development at scale. These unreliable processes also hinder governance, the pace of production, and planning. 

• Having no editorial calendar: Just under 30% of marketers find managing a content pipeline across multiple stakeholders more difficult because they don't have access to an always-on view of upcoming projects and publication dates. 

• Complying with privacy regulations: Rules around consumer data privacy require diligence as content campaigns can trigger compliance issues surrounding lead capture, advertising, and personalization, creating a problem for 19% of marketers. 

To overcome one or several of these issues, you'll need to shift your focus on analysis to addressing structural issues, standard and infrastructure implementation, and instituting oversight measures, such as quality assurance, analytics, and policy frameworks. These steps are all geared toward creating content operations that are more like an assembly line instead of a haphazard collection of processes. 

Potential priorities might include:

• Map existing content workflows to identify process bottlenecks and gaps hindering efficiency, repurposing etc. Interview teams and develop transition plans to a streamlined future-state.

• Implement centralised content planning. Develop centralised calendars, tools, and processes for always-on visibility into upcoming projects across teams, markets, and languages. Connect planning directly to budgets and resources.

• Facilitate the creation and adoption of style guides, templates and modular content frameworks to support increased structure, consistency and reuse across outputs. Appoint governance leads.

• Automate and streamline review/approval. Leverage rules-based workflow routing and notifications to accelerate content sign-off, leveraging both human and automated quality checks at key milestones. Connect operational platforms to analytics to enable real-time reporting on pipeline throughput, surface bottlenecks, and allow assessment of volume, pace and resource constraints.

• Continual training around guidelines. Conduct regular training refreshers around governance, metadata, compliance, optimisation best practices and updated policies to maintain discipline across distributed teams involved in content creation, review and distribution.

7. Content Strategy

A content strategy is pivotal to your organisation's ability to align content with your target audience. It also sets your brand apart from competitors. 

A sound strategy revolves around optimised and differentiated content across formats and channels. These marketing campaigns provide value to your customer base while also meeting your business goals. 

Unfortunately, 54% of the respondents in the Content Marketing Institute Survey said that they have trouble differentiating content and finding ways to reach their target market with unique, compelling material. In addition, 45% say that they're always attempting to optimise content for search engines to ensure that it ranks well and delivers traffic. 

When your business faces these difficulties, the solution is to require frameworks for aligning content to strategic brand positioning and audience needs. You'll also need to set success parameters to incentivise constant optimisation. 

Potential priorities might include:

• Develop core value proposition pillars rooted in brand purpose as a framework for content decisions driving differentiation.

• Create detailed buyer personas capturing audience needs, behaviours and content consumption habits across the journey to develop hyper-targeted positioning. Map content types and topics to each stage of the customer journey identifying assumed vs real informational needs for personas to shape roadmaps.

• Set search optimisation targets for priority content types and subjects using opportunity analyses – improve share of voice, conquering specific keywords etc.

• Tie analytics directly into planning through quarterly insights reviews that shape upcoming content investments. Balance the quantitative with the qualitative. Analyse past engagement, conversion findings, and Voice of Customer input to inform what content to produce.

• Build content innovation programs with rewards for experimenting with emerging formats, partnerships and channels attracting high-value audiences.

8. Audience Insights

Your audience insights are the day-to-day guide to creating content that resonates and makes an impact with potential customers. Understanding your target audiences and buyers is central to your ability to create content that aligns with their informational needs, interests, and preferences during their purchase journey.

The Content Marketing Institute describes two primary challenges in this area. First, 57% of marketers struggle to create the right content for their audience, underscoring why researching your audience's needs is so critical to accomplishing your marketing goals. 

Additionally, 48% of the survey's respondents said that they have trouble aligning content to the buyer's journey. Tailoring content to each stage of the complex B2B experience is an obstacle that many marketers continue to see. 

If audience insights are a problem for your organisation, your primary focus should be on continuous, persona-centric inquiry. Use market research, analytics, and testing to precisely target your audience's content needs as they evolve. 

Potential priorities might include:

• Create persona advocacy teams with insights, analytics and writing leads that convene before planning to share latest research shifting their perspectives and content recommendations. Institutionalise biannual buyer persona reviews and updates factoring in customer analytics on demographics, behaviours, media consumption habits etc.

• Implement expanded social listening and voice of customer capture across channels to continually refine content based on persona interest/pain point shifts.

• Build persona-specific success dashboards tracking engagement with recent content releases across channels/formats. Review weekly/monthly to inform targeting adjustments.

Capitalise on Your Content's Potential

As we've explored, many content teams struggle with shared friction points - from metrics and skills gaps to siloed and disjointed operations. But with strategic insight and orchestrated effort, organisations can methodically connect the dots.

By taking small steps - consolidating analytics, collaborating across functions, listening to audiences - teams build momentum. Gradually a flywheel effect can emerge as content quality, velocity and business impact increase.

Envision an integrated content ecosystem aligned to customer needs. Sales-ready leads landing. Campaigns resonating emotionally. Automation saving hours that are ploughed back into creativity. It’s doable when there’s a plan to address your content roadblocks.

The journey starts with a conversation with your team, assessing your gaps, finding initial priority projects, and building support. 

Evolution requires a plan. We can help guide your content strategy and optimisation path while keeping objectives realistic. Book a demo to explore how 1827 Marketing can help you maximise the value of your content for better business performance and growth.