This article has been contributed by Mahima Bhatia, Founder, Brand To Bytes.
“If marketing is a game of chess, content alone cannot be the king.” While phrases like CTAs, Buyer Journey Mapping, Buying Intent or Brand Credibility might be very critical to B2B companies across industries, ‘Strategy’ and ‘Distribution’ surely add impact in the closing sale.
You’re not alone if you’re struggling to create a content strategy. Learn how to regularly publish content while managing SEO changes and multiple channels.
Trying to push content without a strategy is like throwing darts blindfolded and hoping to hit your target, which takes up a lot of effort that gets wasted. As a leader, there are so many pressing matters that you need to attend to, and the lack of a strategy can hurt you right from when you begin to post.
It’s understandable to put off setting this up, especially because creating a content strategy in today’s time can feel so difficult. In fact, the lack of content strategy has greatly troubled over 25% of businesses across the world. There are AI generators for most formats, and there seems to be a ton of content that is not written by humans for humans and is instead written to rank higher on search.
Which channel is right for you? And how can you use that channel well? All these questions and concerns complicate and add frustration to your content marketing efforts, especially if you’ve just launched a new brand and are setting up everything from scratch.
But it doesn’t have to be this confusing. Creating good tech content today depends on a number of platforms and formats, but these are just the tools you need to reach and add value to your audience. When you take this analogy further, remember that the best tools need to have some level of calibration. In this article, we’ll go through how to calibrate your marketing efforts and create a high-impact content strategy.
Are You Updated With The Latest SEO Across Different Channels?
To create an informed strategy, let’s first understand what’s changed recently with how content marketing and SEO have functioned.
To combat the hundreds of thousands of posts written only to get higher SERP rankings, Google launched an update in August 2024.
John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, mentioned this as the exact reason for releasing the update. In the post announcing the update, Mueller said:
- Google wants to focus on pushing content that people genuinely find useful.
- The team took time to understand feedback from users and creators alike.
- They want to showcase content from a variety of sources, and not just keep it to whoever has the higher domain authority or the most number of keywords.
In late 2023, they released the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, where they further emphasized the need for content to have a high level of ‘Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.’ Google has placed importance on this right since 2014. But the involvement of new software and how SERP functioned itself, made matters quite complicated. Now, with the new update, businesses are left questioning: what does this mean for us? What should be done next?
Checking On Marketing Budget Trends
According to the latest LinkedIn Benchmark Report, over 70% of B2B organizations upped their lead generation budget, and nearly 44% of B2B marketers are set on increasing their budget for SEO.
While we must focus on the side of creativity and new ideas, SEO is still a key factor in reaching audiences regardless of any new additions or updates. This opinion was echoed by most marketers responding to a survey by Neil Patel as well.
However, there is a marked change in how content strategies will be set moving forward.
Subham Kumar
Using Agility, Personalization And A Well Thought out GTM Strategy for Content Creation
Having excellent writing skills and a creative bent of mind are highly valuable, regardless of the amount of marketers depending on genAI to write content end to end. And given the new search update, the latter style of content cannot be the end-all-be-all for any brand’s content strategy.
Focusing entirely on ads is also not the way to go. Nearly 70% of customers prefer learning about a company’s offerings through an article rather than an ad, according to a report by the Content Marketing Institute.
A high-impact content strategy needs to be built on the foundation of good writing, great ideas, but also on the technical aspects of SEO and lead-gen experimentation.
Over the past two or so years, businesses have heavily prioritized only agility. However, successful content combines technology with creativity to create pieces that resonate with audiences and add to your reputation as a brand.
A Clear Value Proposition For Positioning
As a leader, you would have already painstakingly mapped out your customer journey, defined and understood your ICP, and interacted with a lot of users from your target audience.
To create a content piece that is valuable to them, you’ll have to go through a list of questions such as:
- Are there subject matter experts you can reach out to for a comment?
- Is the research behind this something you would have to develop from scratch?
- What channels would be fit for the piece?
- Do you need to spend on this?
- When is the best time to push this out?
- Is this the right time in the market to be pursuing the topic?
- Which part of the funnel will this piece fit into?
Topical posts and articles are excellent top-of-the-funnel content to generate brand awareness, while bottom-of-the-funnel content would involve useful product pages and case studies.
Repurposing With An Intention
If you look at one of the oldest principles of marketing, The Rule of Seven, it simply states that your potential customers will need to hear your message an estimated seven times before making a purchase.
If you had to create a new article every time for this, then your content calendar would have gaps worth weeks and make you lose out on any customers you could have gained in that time.
Repurposing content is something that is a known technique, but getting started with it when you’re dealing with a multitude of other tasks can get overwhelming.
Here are some quick ways to do it.
Adding Infographics, Pie Charts, and Data-Driven Graphs For A Comprehensive Read
This is one of the easiest ways to create a piece that still engages with your audience but in an entirely different way on another channel.
For this, you just need to have the takeaways and pointers from your article ready, make them more crisp, and get an infographic designed to match it.
A good example of this is the report by Neil Patel referenced earlier in this article, which was pushed as a graphic on LinkedIn.
Infographics like this are also often used by other founders and creators in their decks, articles, and their research to support their claims. This would mean you’d get more visibility not just from the platform, but from people using both your infographic and potentially your article by linking them.
Long-Form Guides Are A Saviour And Fuels The SEO
If you’ve written content that spans over thousands of words for a long-form guide, just know that it is a goldmine for all types of content.
Multiple snippets can be pushed as text posts. One section of the article discussing a topic briefly can be expanded on as a separate article. You could even fully expand the topics discussed to turn the guide into an ebook and distribute it for a premium. The options are endless.
Summing Up
To create a solid content strategy for B2B companies today, you need to have an insight into the current SEO best practices, the channels where your customers are most active, and an idea of how you can engage with them in a way that is human-like and valuable. The best way to engage with your customers the most is to publish regular content in ways they understand and appreciate.
The quote by a content legend #AnnHandley sums this up very well, “When we create something, we think, ‘Will our customers thank us for this?”
Shikha Tyagi
