The Importance of B2B Content Marketing Goals for Business
Developing B2B content marketing goals is critical to attract new customers and grow your revenue.
But strategizing a content plan can seem daunting for a B2B content marketer. Content yields high returns, but without a roadmap, your efforts will be for naught.
Say your boss wants to scale your company’s content and see more results. But your blog does nothing, nobody downloads your ebooks and your conversion rates are underwhelming.
So how can you achieve results for your B2B brand? You can’t exactly assume that doing much of the same will improve the situation.
You need to set content marketing objectives with direction and purpose.
This is why it’s important to define content marketing goals. You connect content marketing to company growth goals to build revenue.
B2B content marketing goals clarify business goals focused on lead generation to help you produce that extra revenue and hit targets.
And content marketing is a perfect fit! Content marketing delivers 3x more leads than outbound sales and B2B companies increase lead volume by 67% when they blog regularly.
When you define content marketing goals, you generate brand awareness, improve SEO, educate leads, foster customer retention and drive revenue.
This guide outlines B2B content marketing goals, explains what makes great content and lists example goals to help you win at content.
Now you can create a content marketing plan that actually works, so let’s dive in!
Developing a Strategy for Your Content Marketing Goals
What makes great content marketing strategy goals? A strong content marketing strategy relies upon quality content designed with purpose.
Defining content goals for quality and relevance is the best way to align content marketing with company revenue goals.
But let’s be honest. It’s almost impossible to determine revenue produced by content marketing with precision.
Bottom-of-funnel content about buyer concerns or product fit might work for last-touch attribution.
Though most content delivers organic traffic and introduces your brand to potential leads. At this stage, people are still learning.
Your content needs to educate and nurture. Along with a strong brand story and a great user experience, your content functions as part of a holistic whole to move leads down the funnel.
An optimal B2B content strategy thus emphasizes quality and relevance.
About 47% of potential B2B buyers engage with 3–5 pieces of your content before purchasing—and a sizable chunk with more than five!.
Focusing on quality, value-driven content makes your content discoverable and engaging for leads. This is how to align content goals with revenue goals (and make your bosses happy!).
So, how to define, produce and leverage high-quality content?
What Makes Great B2B Content?
Great B2B content provides relevant value to your audience, answers questions, and forms part of a strategy that scales your business.
There are four steps for how to grow your business using content marketing and make B2B content work for you:
- Planning content. The days of designing blog posts one at a time based on generic keywords are gone. Cluster content around relevant topics for your audience to signal your expertise in certain fields.
- Developing content. Set brand standards to ensure content is well-researched, succinct yet still comprehensive, simple to digest and connects with your target audience. Play around with different formats to see what moves the needle.
- Distributing and amplifying content. Never “set it and forget it” after publishing. B2B content is only great with an audience, and a relevant one too. Create a marketing flywheel for content around a distribution and amplification plan.
- Restrategize content. Customer expectations will develop over time and your competitors will adapt. Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit content clusters, guidelines and influencers to keep things fresh.
With a holistic strategy in place, you can then hone in on crafting content quality itself during the production stage.
How to Create Quality B2B Content
The goals of content marketing rely on relevant blog posts and touchpoints for leads to find you, gain interest and become customers.
Focus on Storytelling
Just because you sell to businesses doesn’t mean your content should be boring and esoteric.
Guide readers through a journey connected to the heart of your company; narratives humanize brands and are key for conversions.
Develop Smart Buyer Personas
Create content that speaks to your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents part of your audience.
But avoid defining personas around generic characteristics. A common trap is that buyer personas are often based on stereotypes, thus deflating their value.
Instead, focus on needs, not useless demographic information. Two people with similar backgrounds, equal amounts of wealth and of the same age could differ a lot.
For example, Kazoo designs content around buyer types and needs. They focus on categories like challenges, industries and solutions.
Format Content Like a Pro
Giant walls of text put off most readers.
Before you publish a piece of B2B content, make sure it’s easy to read. Bolded headings, bulleted lists and other formatting elements make it easy to digest content.
For example, concentrate on brevity. Short headers generate 36% more organic traffic than longer ones.
Map the Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey is the path a potential customer follows when evaluating your products or services.
If you publish content only relevant to leads in one stage of the journey, you can’t connect with them as their intents change at different stages.
Map out the journey stages to different pieces of content, inclusive of destination pages with targeted conversion points.
Goals of Content Marketing
We’ve overviewed the importance of devising a content strategy aligned with revenue goals that focuses on quality and relevance to target leads based on their needs.
Part of this process involves understanding the steps needed to develop great content that actually works and what goes into creating & leveraging quality content.
Content marketing goals guide these principles that enable you to succeed and provide a roadmap towards that success.
If this seems overwhelming, start with the end in mind. Once you know where you’re going, you can determine the best way to get there.
Let’s take a look at content marketing goals to consider—and why.
5 Example B2B Content Marketing Goals
- Drive Brand Awareness
- Improve SEO
- Educate Prospective Buyers
- Impact Revenue Metrics
- Foster Customer Loyalty & Revenue Retention
1. Drive Brand Awareness
Before your content can help qualify leads or convert qualified leads into customers, it has to generate leads.
Content is especially valuable in driving brand awareness. Since increasing brand awareness is the top priority of half of all B2B marketers, it should be a go-to content marketing goal.
Design top-of-funnel content that speaks to buyers’ aspirations and pain points. This will make you discoverable as they look for ideas before they even know what solutions they need.
Gong executes a great example of this content marketing goal.
They created the content category “Revenue Intelligence” for information about improving company revenue and to establish themselves as experts in their field.
And as an added bonus, they doubled-down on this brand-awareness campaign by highlighting the category in their metadata!
2. Improve SEO
One of the most vital content marketing goals is to improve SEO and deliver more organic traffic to your website.
This goal should drive your content marketing because of how effectively content contributes to SEO.
Engage in best practices for article writing SEO by targeting keywords and search queries your audience might find interesting with researched and well-written posts.
And go after interactive elements on SERPs (search-engine results pages) to augment this approach.
For example, HubSpot are masters at capturing featured snippets with their content marketing.
They execute a structured system within their content to answer queries their target audience would search on Google.
HubSpot leverages typical questions their potential customers might ask for more organic traffic.
Then they implement SEO tactics, such as in the below HTML, to signal to search engines that this type of content is worthy for exposure. Genius!
3. Educate Prospective Buyers
Leveraging content to educate people about the possibilities of how they can improve at their jobs and hit their metrics is one of the most impactful content marketing goals to strive for.
When possible buyers have pain points, they’ll seek out information to fix their problems.
By educating them on solutions, you’ll build trust and cement your expertise to encourage them to buy.
Let’s say you struggle to optimize your productivity because of an insufficient tech stack. None of your tools integrate with each other and it eats up hours each week.
Enter Zapier. They produce B2B content about “productivity tips” complemented on their blog with a dedicated CTA for a newsletter signup.
Makes sense. Increased productivity for B2B buyers is at the heart of their messaging since it’s a core benefit of their offerings.
In the above example, they don’t merely point out the integration they offer with Google Calendar; they lead with the educational message about how to better manage your day.
This content reinforces their reputation as leaders in the productivity space as they educate potential buyers about solutions they didn’t even know existed.
4. Impact Revenue Metrics
Earlier we mentioned how it’s almost impossible to attribute revenue to your content marketing. This is especially true with top-of-funnel content like blog posts.
But it’s simpler with middle- or bottom-funnel marketing content for specific, short-tail queries that address immediate pains.
Besides, the overarching purpose of B2B content marketing goals is to align with wider revenue goals. Well-executed content serves this purpose.
If you’re doing well and ready to start scaling, hone in on content that leads to shorter turnaround times for converting leads to paying customers.
Again, Zapier provides an exemplary case study here.
Their “insane SEO strategy” involves content pieces spread out across many webpages and elements targeting prospective leads looking for specific solutions.
Think about it. You’re a prospective lead who encounters a gap in one of your daily workflows. Your stack is insufficient and your tech team feels capped—they can’t help you.
So you search for potential ways to solve the problem yourself. You need to send emails as Slack messages.
Behold Zapier, with three webpages, one about Gmail, one about Slack and one about the solution.
It’s dedicated content designed to spur direct revenue—and it works!
5. Foster Customer Loyalty and Revenue Retention
Nurturing customer loyalty for better retention rates is an underrated goal of content marketing.
How can you achieve this goal?
Create content marketing campaigns around information that helps both new and existing customers.
When you provide curated and expert content for your base, they’ll value your services more and stick around.
One B2B organization that does well at this goal with their content marketing is the accounting company Bench.
They produce content every tax season on a dedicated website hub about advice and resources for filing business tax returns.
They reinforce their expertise and reward clients with content full of tangible benefits. This tactic also provides upsell opportunities and delights website visitors with great content.
This is a winning formula for B2B content marketing. It inspires loyalty and spurs business growth!
Get Amazing Content to Hit Your B2B Content Goals
Setting B2B content marketing goals provides a roadmap to develop and put your content strategy in place.
When you know what to achieve with content goals, you’ll attract & educate leads, create brand awareness, drive organic traffic and increase retention rates.
But none of this matters without quality and relevance for your target audience. To achieve results, you need quality content you can produce at scale.
Crowd Content’s content writing services save you time and deliver expertly written B2B content so you never have to write again.
No matter what stage of the buyer journey you’re targeting, you can tackle your B2B content marketing goals with confidence.
