7 principles for building a kick-ass content marketing machine

Content marketing has emerged as a key differentiator in B2B marketing in this era of personalization, account-based marketing and PLG (Product-led Growth).  I will share with you the seven principles that will help you build a kick-ass content marketing machine within your organization.  I have used these principles very successfully in both situations – in my several roles as a CMO, as well as a product marketing advisor to many B2B software companies.

1. Focus on the entire buyer journey:  Make sure your content strategy covers the entire buyer’s journey from awareness through consideration to decision.  Many B2B companies, especially in a sales-led growth (SLG) model, mistakenly place their content marketing focus on top of the funnel, leaving webinar recordings and analyst quadrant reports to fill the gap for middle and bottom of the funnel.  A good content strategy should place equal focus on all aspects of the buyer journey.  The reason is that it’s not good enough for content strategy to just help bring a large volume of leads in – if it fails to help the sales organization convert them to opportunities and then eventually get them to a closed deal. Focus not just on the prospects who don’t know you, but also on the prospects who know you, as well as the customers who know you – since upsell, cross-sell and renewals are critical in SaaS models.
2. Create a content plan in alignment with GTM leaders: Create your content plan with content type by personas, use cases, industries, funnel stage, with key metric and time frame for obtaining the metric. Then your plan can drill down into how your content plan will support various campaigns by funnel stage and highlight where there will be gaps.  This will ensure that once your plan is finalized and approved by GTM leaders, you are all in alignment, not only with how you are choosing to invest (and where you are not), but how you are measuring success of your content investments and in what time frame.  For example, are you aligned on what personas, use cases and industry segments you are choosing to under invest in?  Frequently these issues surface later, if alignment is not sought earlier, when a GTM lead is not seeing the right lead /opportunity flow to hit their targets.
3. Build different strategies for PLG (Product-led Growth) vs SLG (Sales led growth) companies:  PLG companies should primarily focus their content development efforts on a) increasing awareness and driving trials b) Driving usage and providing value. Educating prospects on the value of the solution with a heavy SEO focus to drive traffic to the website and encouraging them to try new features with shows demo videos are some of the examples of their PLG content marketing tactics. On the other hand, SLG companies should focus on increasing awareness, assisting customers in the consideration stage with the right content that answers their questions, and helping sales reps close the deal with right white papers, customer case studies and ROI studies as a part of their content strategy. Both SLG and PLG companies should also use content to help customers get more value from the product to help with renewals.  These include content on best practices, benchmarks, and additional use cases of the product.
4. Build a flexible team structure: Do you insource or outsource content development?  From my experience use external free lancers or new writers for the top of funnel content, but lean on internal staff, that knows your product, customers and use cases, for middle and bottom of funnel content.  The quality and depth of that content matters a lot, and it is often hard to find freelancers with expertise in your solution area, unless you tap into someone who knows that space.
5. Implement a high impact content operations role: Ensure you have content operations focused resource(s) in place, so that can help you measure the performance, understand what is working and what is not, and refine your strategy. They can also surface new ideas for content based on keyword searches.  It should be a full-time role for that person. Their key metrics include:
   • Traffic metrics such as views, time spent, return visits click through etc.
   • Engagement metrics such as pages/session, average session length, bounce rate etc.
   • Conversion metrics such as signups, opportunities, revenue, and other down-the-funnel metrics
   • Demographic metrics such as job function, location, industry etc.
   • SEO performance such as SERP ranking, domain authority etc.
   • Social metrics such as shares, followers etc.
6. Create a goal-based attribution model: Use goal-based attribution to determine which content had the greatest impact on customer’s decision to convert, or take the desired next step. This will help you refine your content strategy and move resources accordingly.  Depending on the length of conversion cycle, either a single or multi-touch attribution model may be the right technique to use. For most PLG models, with a large focus on traffic and signups, a single touch may be the right model for top-of-funnel conversions. For SLG companies with long sales cycles, a multi-touch attribution model, with time-based decay (which assigns the most value to touchpoints that happen within a short time from the conversion event) may be better than a linear model (where all touch points get the same credit value)
7. Use Automation: With generative AI in play now, use automation as much as possible to speed up the content development process.  Examples include edits, recommend titles and headings, recommendation on shortening to fit word limits, summarization, recommendations on visual content to support text etc.

The value of content marketing is more today than ever before, as companies try to personalize content for roles or industry, to increase engagement or to implement ABM strategies. The seven principles discussed above should help you build an effective content marketing machine within your organization.  If you have any questions, please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/applicationsmarketing/