How do you develop an effective B2B content marketing strategy? You have to look at it from the customer's point of view and determine how to best deliver the most useful, relevant content through the channels that will reach your target audience.

1. How to Create an Effective B2B
Online Content Marketing Strategy
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

2. What is the goal of your B2B content
marketing strategy?
To make your business the leading information
provider for your customers about solutions to their
business challenges.
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

3. What pieces of online content can you
provide to deliver this information?
• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• SlideShares
• Hangouts
• Videos
• Webinars
• White papers
• Infographics
• eBooks
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

4. What will those pieces contain?
• Interviews with industry leaders
• Customer use stories
• Industry statistics and analyst reports, with actionable
advice and insights
• Product tutorials, how-tos
• Guide to measuring ROI on products
• Product roadmap, features, developments
• Anything else your customers tell you they want to learn
from you...but you have to LISTEN.
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

5. How do you discover what content will
be most useful? Ask your customers!
• Surveys
• Advocate marketing programs
• Social media polls
• Online survey tools
• Listening
• Sales team communications
• Comments on social, blogs,
communities
• Any customer conversation
• Research where they
spend time online
• Who do they follow on social
channels?
• What communities and
forums do they belong to and
participate in?
• What do they share with their
social networks?
• What blogs do they read and
comment on?
• Where do they go to waste
time?
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

6. Tactics
What tools are in your content arsenal?
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

7. Audio & Video
Google Hangouts, webinars and interview videos
provide content that can be repurposed in
multiple ways.
• Create short clips for YouTube with annotations linking
to the full version
• Strip audio to create podcasts
(put on iTunes)
• Transcribe to create blog posts
(What about developing a series?)
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

8. Words & Pictures
• Compile blog posts, webinar slides into eBooks
• Ask industry leaders to contribute articles
• Repurpose eBooks for SlideShare
• Create an email newsletter
©2014 Heidi Willbanks

9. Additional layers
Social
• Optimize content for individual channels
• Regularly recycle evergreen content
SEO
• Develop keyword strategy and optimize
all content for organic search
Lead Generation
• Resist the urge to gate all the things
• Add CTA to ungated content (soft ask)
• Use email opt-in landing pages for gated content
©2014 Heidi Willbanks