How Content Architecture Drives Engagement and Growth Within Your B2B Content Ecosystem

This is the last post of our five-part series on content architecture. In it, we've explored its role in helping content strategists and marketers to create successful B2B experiences.

In the previous sections, we examined content architecture through three lenses - Topic, Experience, and Organisation - to answer questions such as:

• What systems and structures are necessary to connect your content experience to its actual execution? 

• How can you create engaging content pillars that ensure your brand delivers valuable content to users? 

• Why is a good content experience essential for a successful B2B customer experience? 

• How can you support an effective, cross-functional content strategy by linking content architecture with brand architecture?

Here, we want to take a broader view and consider content architecture in the context of your content ecosystem.

What Do We Mean By Content 'Ecosystem'?

Digital content can be a crucial source of power for your business. It is how you influence potential buyers, educate stakeholders, and retain top talent for your brand at scale. However, building this power base could require a fundamental shift in how your organisation creates and offers content.

This is because the power of content as a marketing strategy doesn't come from the content assets in and of themselves. It comes from the way people interact with it and the network of relationships you can build with it.

It's something that's easy to forget when you're toiling away to create content assets to support an individual project or campaign.

To harness this power, you need to:

1. Understand how and where your content exists in the wider world.

2. Consider how people experience it, and how it interacts with other content producers, consumers, and platforms.

3. Assess your ecosystem of relationships and channels and consider how they can work together to create valuable, interconnected experiences.

This approach helps you design structured content that not only underpins and supports your experience, but creates new connections. You develop an interactive infrastructure where each asset can be linked in numerous ways to facilitate relationships with different audiences.

Why Is a Focus on Ecosystem Important?

B2B is now a digital-first, omnichannel world where content is the primary way people engage with your brand. By thinking through the network of relationship you have - and hope to gain - through content, you can develop a more strategic, relationship-centric content approach.

The connections and relationships you aim to foster influence not only what you should be producing, but who should be involved in creating your content.

Customers, influencers, brand partners, thought leaders - what roles can they play in connecting you to new ideas and new audiences? Can you feature a valued partner in a webinar series to boost both their profile and yours? Would co-authoring research with another brand on a subject of mutual interest be of mutual benefit? Could a high-profile client be a contributor in a way that offer them more value than the usual case study?

And by analysing the broader ecosystem, you can more effectively allocate content resources. Where in your ecosystem can you find and cultivate new connections? And on what channels should those content partnerships play out for maximum impact?

This manner of joined-up thinking helps you design a content experience that goes deeper than how to maintain brand consistency. It invites participation. When each piece of content is a considered part of the whole it creates a network effect that amplifies your impact, reinforces brand recognition, and builds market momentum.

How Architectural Thinking Helps Build a Content Ecosystem

Every content ecosystem will vary based on factors such as a brand’s target audiences, industry solutions, and business goals. Considering the four questions of content architecture can help you map out effective content worlds for your organisation.

Scope

Content architecture plays an important role in establishing the boundaries of your content ecosystem. Tools like taxonomies and content models help you to clear define what is in an out of your content world.

This is critical for better focusing your time and resources when expanding your reach. A strong framework ensures you're not tempted to wander off into related — but less valuable — areas.

Instead, you concentrate on providing content that covers your audiences' interests and strengthens meaningful brand connections.

With this approach, content production stops being about filling your content calendar with assets covering the hot new topic. Instead, you're thinking about how things fit together, so you can employ content strategically throughout your ecosystem. You build an interconnected collection that spans the breadth and depth of what is relevant to your brand, customers, and stakeholders.

It also helps you to consider what topics and content types are appropriate for different channels. A long-form presentation diving into the various use cases of your product might not perform well on all social media channels. However, that long form content could be repurposed to kickstart a social media conversation about individual solutions you offer.

Organisation and Structure 

Another function of content architecture is to create a user experience that aids discovery and exploration. The aim is to create an infrastructure that helps draw users in deeper and promotes engagement with, and participation in, the brand.

By providing structure, content architecture helps you map out your content ecosystem so you can describe the relationships between different audiences, assets, channels, and objectives.

It allows you to identify how to organise content to facilitate the relationships your business needs to thrive. You specify what assets are required for a specific type of engagement. Then you identify how these assets connect to the rest of your ecosystem to drive the desired results.

For instance, an ‘always-on’ content experience is typically supported by five major streams that reflect the different phases of your customer journey:

• Search content (which corresponds to awareness and research phases).

• Foundational content (awareness, research, and consideration).

• Thought-leadership content (awareness, research, consideration, and purchase).

• Service/Product content (research, consideration, and purchase).

• Customer success content (purchase and post-purchase).

Rather than being separated into isolated campaigns, strategically link in content streams using crosslinks, embeds, and CTAs. Doing so creates a seamless customer experience with helpful ‘signposts’ that allow users to explore freely, according to their specific needs.

This framework also underpins marketing automation, as this structure enables content marketing platforms to deliver personalised content that creates deeper relationships, faster.

Navigation, Framing, and Sensemaking 

Well-designed content architecture results in a network of relationships and content types to create unique positioning. By developing an engaging mix of accessible assets for your content streams, you present new ways for people to navigate, frame, and make sense of your brand/products or services.

To determine the right asset mix, you need to consider not only your own content world but that of competitors. What types of content are other brands creating? Are there any gaps in the market that you can fill? Are there ways you can reframe a problem within your industry to help your audience make sense of it in a new way?

However, filling those gaps will only get you so far. You need to consider if there are opportunities to address topics from a fresh perspective to assist your audiences' understanding.

To engage with different audiences, you also need a mix of voices. Collaborating with others to approach topics can enhance the content experience, making your brand more relatable and engaging for more audiences.

Publishing original research with an authoritative industry partner positions you one way for one audience. Partnering with a young professional influencer to create a series of tutorials on Instagram Reels or TikTok offers a completely different framing.

Remember that content is not just a broadcast medium. Publication should be designed to invite interaction and participation.

Audience replies, customer reviews and user-generated content are also part of your broader content ecosystem. They are potential assets in their own right that should be accounted for in your content architecture. For instance:

• What social media management tools do you need to capture and organise user content?

• How can you incorporate user-generated content to help with framing and sensemaking?

• Can it become a component of your modular content to help you reach different audiences?

These types of questions will help you craft a distinct, interactive experience that will help your brand stand out.

Investment

Understanding your ecosystem creates synergies that amplify your impact. When done well, your content ecosystem becomes a source of backlinks, PR, social media shares, referrals, and recommendations.

Each piece of content on a topic steadily adds to your brand authority. But it is also strategically designed to draw more people to your content platform creating a network effect.

When combined with architecture that allows you to operationalise efficiently at scale, you can build bigger wins with fewer resources by:

• Connecting related content to make it more discoverable.

• Repurposing and embedding deliverables to support various functions across your site/app/knowledge library.

• Adapting content for relevance across different channels and audiences.

However, to enjoy those efficiencies you need to know who, where, and what has the greatest impact.

Ecosystem combined with architecture shows you which connections, on which channels, and with what formats and subjects are most effective. It expands the measure of content value beyond individual performance metrics. Instead, it encourages multi-touch attribution to account for all the different experiences an asset helps reinforce across your entire content strategy. 

Knowing that information helps you to determine who, where, and what to invest your resources in. It helps you develop a unified content plan that uses efficient and scalable workflows to facilitate team based content creation across your organisation. Moreover, it ensures your content meets your company's strategic objectives to maximise ROI.

Bringing It All Together with 1827 Marketing

Although you need to think through your ecosystem as a separate element, it will also inform and be influenced by other areas. Each lens we have explored in this series provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between content, company objectives, and customer experience. And by integrating these different areas, you build a framework for thinking about content strategy that will:

• Effectively connect strategy to content management to better support customer experiences.

• Sustain acquisition activity to keep your lead pipeline filled.

• Accumulate brand authority and improve your search engine rankings.

• Unify content creation across your organisation.

We hope this article has helped you think about your content experience in a new light. If you haven’t already done so, we highly recommend reading the other works in this series. 

Please reach out to learn more about designing an effective B2B content ecosystem for your business.