B2B content marketing strategy: insights and examples for 2024

By Afton Brazzoni | Updated January 2024

The results of your content depend largely on the quality of your B2B content marketing strategy. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have flooded the internet with a tsunami of new content — its calibre questionable. This means B2B marketers and entrepreneurs alike need to be more strategic than ever with their content marketing to build credibility and rise above the mediocre.

How? Take customer research as an example. We’ve all been bombarded with the phrase “know your audience.” In fact, 79% of top performing content marketers attribute their success to their audience knowledge, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI)’s 2024 annual survey. However, a surface-level understanding of your market is no longer going to cut it. Going deeper with your audience research and crafting your content strategy to respond to the insights you gather (and even involve your audience in content creation) will be key in 2024.

In this guide to B2B content marketing strategy, you’ll find:

• A B2B content marketing strategy definition

• A brief rundown of B2C vs. B2B content strategy

• Benefits of creating a B2B content strategy

• 6 elements of a solid content strategy

• How to create your B2B content strategy

• 6 B2B content marketing examples for inspiration

What is a B2B content marketing strategy?

A B2B content marketing strategy is a plan for how your company will reach certain business goals using content marketing (a form of inbound marketing, which is rooted in relationship building, as opposed to outbound marketing like advertising). 

The “B2B” aspect means that the marketing strategy is targeted at other businesses, rather than individual consumers.

B2C vs. B2B content strategy

The biggest difference between these two strategies is that the former targets individual consumers while the latter targets companies.

However, even in the B2B world, you’re still marketing to human beings within the companies you’re targeting. So, while the marketing tactics and channels you use might differ (think LinkedIn vs. Pinterest), you still need to cover the basics like creating an emotional connection with your audience.

One of the biggest mistakes B2B marketers and entrepreneurs make is creating soulless content. B2B audiences like to be entertained, too!

In B2B marketing, more decision makers tend to be involved in purchasing decisions, and they’re often highly focused on return on investment. B2B products and services are generally more complex than consumer goods and services, and require content marketing that educates potential buyers and helps them solve problems.

Benefits of a B2B content marketing strategy

Where, when and how your B2B company shows up in your market is incredibly important. Outbound marketing and sales alone won’t cut it if you want to become an industry leader. In 2024, you need to create content that provides value to your audience while showcasing your credibility.

Over 45% of marketers told the CMI that just one person or group in their organization is responsible for producing all types of content. So, it’s critical to manage your resources wisely and ensure your marketing efforts have the greatest possible impact. Enter the B2B content marketing strategy.

While content marketing is a long-term investment, it can drive powerful results. Here are three big advantages of having a B2B content strategy.

1. Serves your audience more deeply

Surface-level content is no longer enough to win at marketing. You need to go deep to show your audience that you understand their needs and can solve their problems.

Developing B2B digital marketing strategies that resonate with potential buyers means they’ll be better off in their roles from reading your content. As a result, they’ll see you as a useful and credible resource.

2. Helps you reach your goals faster

The objectives for your B2B content strategy will be unique to your company. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, improve search rankings, or book more sales calls, a content strategy can help you make it happen more quickly than throwing proverbial spaghetti at the wall. 

Respondents to a 2021 Demand Gen survey reported that they first learned about solutions from a web search (56%) and that the marketing content of the winning vendor significantly impacted their purchasing choice (79%).

When you package a compelling, consistent brand voice with interesting, valuable content and use the right channels to reach your audience, this builds trust and drives growth.

3. Makes better use of your resources

Your B2B content strategy informs your content calendar, enabling you to plan for the content you need and allocate resources accordingly.

Being strategic about the types of content you’re going to produce, and the timeline, will help you stay organized and efficient. It will also prevent you from overcommitting to a schedule that isn’t realistic for your team.

6 key elements of a B2B content strategy

Getting creative with your content strategy will ensure the best results. You don’t want a carbon copy of a generic business to business content marketing plan (yawning yet?). However, there are a few overarching categories you should include and customize as you see fit.

Note: If your B2B company doesn’t yet have a brand messaging playbook, you should start there before worrying about a content strategy. You need a clear sense of your mission, vision, values, brand voice, story and key messages before you dive into content creation.

1. Buyer personas 

If you don’t already have this information documented, your B2B content marketing strategy should start here, with who you’re trying to reach. Check out buyer persona examples to help craft your own template. Try to incorporate a solid amount of detail.

2. Competitor research

You need to know what you’re up against to capture your audience’s attention. Research what marketing channels your competitors are using and how they’re performing. Document this information in a competitive analysis and audit your own content alongside your competitors’. Here are a few competitive analysis insights to get you started. 

3. Content goals and tactics 

Now it’s time to think about what you want to accomplish with your content and how it will support your company’s overall business objectives. Do you want your audience to sign up to your email list? Register for a webinar? Book a product demo? Determine your content goals with a few examples of B2B marketing objectives to get you warmed up:

• Build trust with your market: In an increasingly automated world, B2B buyers are continuing to seek out connection and a trustworthy relationships with vendors. Transparency in your company's purpose and values will allow potential buyers to understand your ethos as a business beyond the products and services you offer. If building trust is one of your primary goals, your content marketing strategy should align with and communicate your company values in ways that are true to you and relatable to your audience.

• Improve customer relationships: We’ve all seen the stats on the benefits of customer retention, like this one: with as little as a 5% increase in retention, you could see up to a 95% jump in profits. Setting a goal in your B2B content marketing strategy to nurture your customers well so they’ll buy more from you, and more often, is a no-brainer. This means your content tactics must walk the walk and show that you care about helping customers solve problems, learn new things and get inspired by ideas they can try in their own businesses.

• Drive more sales conversations with new prospects: With your existing customers taken care of, you can focus on expanding your B2B company’s reach to continue building relationships. Building this objective into your content strategy and executing on it with content creation will ensure your sales team has access to different assets they can use to explain the value of your products and services easily. For example, case studies are excellent sales enablement tools, which is why nearly 75% of B2B companies use them. 

4. Content tactics

Your next step is to determine the content marketing tactics you’ll use. Here are a few ideas:

• Drive organic traffic to your website through blogging: Blogs can generate three times more leads than outbound tactics like advertising. Blogging also makes your website four times more likely to be found by your audience through organic search, as long as you’re blogging about topics that are relevant to your market. When properly optimized, your blog posts will drive traffic to your site, beginning the process of relationship building with your audience as you provide them with useful information. Wondering what to blog about? Start by determining what your buyers find valuable, and think about how you can best help them. Check out these B2B blogs for inspiration. 

• Publish customer stories to celebrate successes and build trust: Customer stories (AKA case studies) share engaging narratives about real customers who overcame similar obstacles to those your audience is facing, with your solution as their helping hand. When assessing vendors, 97% of B2B companies said case studies are the most reliable type of evidence to support purchasing a product or service. If you’re not already using case studies in your content marketing, you can get started by brainstorming with your team to identify a few customers who had an interesting or tricky challenge to solve, as well as a great experience with your company that they’d be willing to share and have published.

• Tempt potential buyers to join your email list with gated content (or, if you prefer to offer value with no strings attached, create an ungated resource): Publishing a research report with insights from your customers and broader network is a fantastic way to offer information that is useful to your audience and that delves deeper than a blog post could. You can also repurpose content from your report for future social media posts and infographics, blog posts, videos and emails.

5. Keyword research

If organic search is a tactic in your content strategy, you’ll need to conduct thorough keyword research.

Since you’ll have your buyer personas by this point in the process, you’ll understand what motivates your prospects and customers. Now, you must determine the right keywords to use in your content to align with their search intent and your website’s domain authority.

6. Content calendar 

Your content calendar should include your content goals, tactics, topics, audience segments (who each piece of content is for — this is key to staying organized if you have more than one audience) and buyer’s journey stage.

It should also indicate who on your team is responsible for creating the content and when each piece will be published, on which channels. You can include other items like content topic categories, keywords and calls to action as well.

How to create your B2B content marketing strategy

Knowing what goes into a business to business content marketing strategy is the first step. To actually get it built, you’ll need to collaborate with your team. Don’t skip these steps.

1. Gather key stakeholders 

To create a winning strategy, you need input from subject matter experts (SMEs) in areas such as product marketing, social media marketing, sales, customer success and more. Your team may not be that large, but the key is to seek out other perspectives early in the planning process to get their buy-in and uncover any pressing concerns. 

You could start by talking to your sales team to find out what kind of case studies they need to help them close deals. They may be looking for customer stories from specific industries or those that showcase results from a particular product in your suite of offerings. 

2. Determine your goals 

With your SMEs’ guidance, you can now set goals that fit the timeline and budget you have to work with. We’ll skip over the SMART goal framework, but it’s worth a read if you’re new to the concept. The bottom line is to make sure you have carefully crafted goals as well as team consensus on these strategic objectives before you draft the rest of your plan. See the goal examples in the previous section for inspiration.

3. Assign roles and responsibilities 

Every successful plan includes information on who will do what, and when. So, develop a content workflow that outlines how your team will collaborate to finalize your strategy and start putting it into action. Who will oversee the competitive analysis, tactic and topic ideation, keyword research and content calendar? Who will communicate with your external vendors (if applicable)? Get everything in writing with a deadline.

4. Set project milestones 

Arrange check-ins with your team members to monitor the results of your B2B digital marketing strategies. Build time into your schedule so you have the ability to make adjustments to your content formats or specific keywords as needed.

Tracking content performance over a specific time period will tell you how successful your efforts have been. Depending on your KPIs, you may choose to look at shares on social media or the number of new email subscribers gained from the content.

5. Optimize and repurpose your content

Optimizing old content should be part of your business to business content marketing strategy. Repurposing content into different formats should also be part of your plan. Both of these activities can help you reach more people and solidify your credibility on specific subjects without always having to pump out something brand new.

6 innovative B2B content marketing examples 

1. Datadog – a system of content assets

Datadog is a cloud application security platform with expertise in areas like Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring and machine learning. The company has a customer list of heavy hitters like Deloitte and Samsung.

You can bet that the Datadog brand didn’t get to where it is today without a content strategy, but this example is nothing fancy. Rather, it focuses on the foundations of effective content marketing, which we’re huge proponents of at Scribe National.

For instance, Datadog has a full roster of case studies on its website, supporting sales enablement by telling real stories about real customers who got results using its software. The company also has a robust library of white papers and ebooks on topics like improving uptime and monitoring cloud apps to build the brand’s credibility and help its audience learn.

2. NATIONAL Public Relations – a values-driven portfolio

Tech brands aren’t the only B2B companies that need strong content strategies. And while having a system of content assets is critical, it’s also imperative to showcase your company’s values in your content. That’s exactly what NATIONAL Public Relations does with its case studies that showcase its brand values through the firm’s work.

Taking this approach to its content marketing strategy allows NATIONAL to build relationships based on trust and transparency, by communicating that the company only works with honourable and reputable organizations. NATIONAL’s portfolio highlights projects with merit, so the firm can demonstrate that it, too, is creating a positive impact alongside its clients.

3. HubSpot – free tools and education  

You can’t turn anywhere in the content marketing industry without bumping into HubSpot, but the brand is prominent for a reason. As an inbound marketing software company, HubSpot sells various marketing and sales tools. The company also offers a free customer relationship management (CRM) platform and free online training for marketers, salespeople and customer service professionals. 

These free tools and education are excellent B2B content marketing examples. They deliver immense value to HubSpot’s audience before potential buyers ever spend a dime. HubSpot’s certifications in content marketing, email marketing and social media marketing (to name only a few) have become popular among industry professionals who show off their credentials on LinkedIn, further spreading brand awareness. 

4. McKinsey & Company – in-depth research

Consulting firm McKinsey & Company is a pioneer in thought leadership with tons of solid B2B content marketing examples. Through partnerships with medical doctors, engineers, designers, data scientists, business managers, civil servants, entrepreneurs, and research scientists, McKinsey & Company has established its authority as a trailblazer in business consulting.

Pairing business guidance with recognized professionals across numerous fields allows for expert perspectives to bolster McKinsey’s content strategy. In-depth research demonstrates the firm's expertise, as well as highlights its connections to other thought leaders.

5. Semrush – gamified content

Semrush is a brand synonymous with SEO. Several years ago when the brand was struggling to educate users about new features, Semrush created a virtual Easter egg hunt. It encouraged users to try different tools and complete actions on the company’s website. 

This gamified approach motivated users to discover Semrush’s many offerings, while also learning how to apply the tools to their advantage without reading through boring tutorials. It’s a memorable example of putting your customers’ needs first.

6. Buffer – leveraging and building community

Buffer is a toolkit for companies looking to grow through social media. Using a guest blogging strategy, Buffer was able to gain visibility and establish brand trust with potential buyers by publishing content on other platforms. 

In addition to leveraging other communities, Buffer is also building community through its own blog where founders share their stories of social media success. Case studies and podcasts are part of the company’s content strategy, too.

Stick with us! This post is part of a series on developing a 10-step content creation workflow for exceptional results. Read the next post.

Are you looking for B2B content strategy guidance?

Top performing B2B companies use content strategies for a reason — to make their marketing efforts worthwhile and build powerful relationships at every stage of the buyer’s journey. In 2024, publishing thought leadership and repurposing your best content will be paramount for B2B marketers, as the most recent CMI annual survey shows. Now is the time to incorporate these activities into your content marketing strategy if you haven’t already.

Our team at Scribe National can help you reach your goals with a customer-centric content strategy that builds credibility and communicates the value of your offerings. Explore our B2B Content Foundations package to find out how you can get started.