In my experience, every successful B2B content marketing strategy follows the same basic formula:
My company has used this approach to generate leads for hundreds of clients across a wide variety of industries. Below, I’ve selected three examples from actual campaigns we’ve run to illustrate how you can customize this formula to achieve impressive results tailored to your organization.
3 B2B Content Marketing Strategy Examples to Consider
Example 1: Flood the Search Results
A software company enacted a thought leadership content strategy with First Page Sage based on a strategic “flood the search results” approach, wherein we stormed a niche industry that didn’t have much SEO sophistication or thought leadership presence. At the time we started the campaign, the most content any other competitor was publishing was two articles per week. Our goal was to gain a first mover’s advantage and climb the search results quickly, with the ultimate aim of stealing market share and increasing sales.
To meet these goals, we published 10-20 articles per week with each post focusing on a unique valuable keyword that target audience members would search. After five months of consistent publication, Google’s trust levels for the site rapidly increased and results started to come in. Site traffic tripled in a nine-month period, from ~90,000 unique visitors per month to ~290,000. Even better, this campaign increased total sales revenue by over $11M in the first year.
Applying These Tactics to Your Strategy
This example shows the power of keyword and competitor research. You might consider storming the search results if your industry has very little published online, your competitors don’t appear to be invested in content marketing, and your key search terms all have sufficient volume. This indicates that decision makers are searching Google for information that’s not yet available. You can swoop in and deliver.
To be fair, publishing 10+ articles per week is ambitious for just about any company. Even we had to get creative to publish this volume of content in such a specific software niche, and we create thought leadership articles at scale for a living. If you’re looking to flood Google with content, this is not a strategy you can enact in-house right away. You’ll need to think critically about the possibility of outsourcing in order to generate a high volume of B2B leads.
Finally, the issue of quality is important to consider. “More” isn’t always “better” in the content marketing world. But in this case, it certainly was. Still, each of the pieces we published was written by a subject matter expert and complied with extremely high quality standards. When you put quantity and quality together in a niche industry, you quickly begin to look like a leader in your field, and a dramatic increase in sales tends to follow.
Example 2: Drive Upward Pressure
A home goods manufacturer that sells into individual stores worked with us to create landing pages that answered every commercially-driven question that homeowners had about their products—questions like “How much does X cost?” and “What are the health benefits of X?” There were hundreds of unique questions that expressed a desire to buy, many of which mentioned health conditions and lifestyle needs that had an urgent feel to them.
By publishing the best answer to every valuable question consumers asked on a unique, search-optimized page, the company achieved a dominant position in the search results. They ranked on the first page for over 4,000 keywords, which led to far more requests for their product in stores, and hence, far more orders. By its second year, the campaign was generating more than $3 million in additional annual wholesale orders.
Applying These Tactics to Your Strategy
This strategy could be applied to your campaign in two parts. First, you would identify a host of question-related keywords for your industry and create landing pages to answer them all. We use tools like Answer The Public to generate a list of question keywords to target. If not very many questions come up for your key terms, this may not be a strategy that works for you.
Second, you would aim to significantly improve the total volume of keywords your website ranks on the first page for. That total ended up being over 9,000 in this example—but that doesn’t mean we published 9,000 pages in the first year. In actuality, the number was closer to 80.
The truth is, a well-written blog post will rank for more keywords than the one main phrase it’s designed to target. We achieve this naturally by including major keyword container phrases and industry terms in each of our blog posts—and never by keyword stuffing. Don’t just repeat the main keyword phrase ad nauseum. If you’re writing high-quality posts, you’ll naturally include variations of your keyword phrase. Allow those variations to come through, and you might be surprised how many additional keywords you can rank for at the end of a year of publication.
Example 3: Own the News
A technical consulting firm partnered with First Page Sage to create a brand presence for themselves in an industry that was dominated by a handful of big names. The strategy we employed was to create a news website focused exclusively on their niche service area, a category that was covered in industry periodicals but for which no dedicated site existed. In its first year, the site grew to prominence, reaching more than 70,000 unique visitors per month and leading to $5M in new consulting revenue for the firm.
Applying These Tactics to Your Strategy
The “news site bonus” is the primary reason we recommend publishing content twice weekly at a minimum. Google picks up on this regular publishing schedule and delivers your content at the top of SERP results. If you only publish content once per month, it could take years for those posts to rank (if they rank at all). But with the news site bonus, you have a greater opportunity to rank within days or weeks of each post’s publish date. This is the quickest way to increase the number of visitors to your site, and thus your chances at conversion and new sales.
Most companies can only keep up that publishing schedule for a few months before fizzling out—and that’s because few people realize how much work goes into developing thought leadership content. You have to research the keyword landscape continuously to find new high-volume terms to target. You have to create human-friendly titles for each of these terms, and draft comprehensive blog posts that add value by offering original insights. And you have to track the performance of these posts continuously so you can pivot the entire strategy as needed.
With all of those efforts included, publishing content twice weekly for multiple years is a big ask. But that’s exactly what it takes to reach big success in the world of B2B content marketing. Considering how much it costs to employ multiple dedicated writers and a full editorial team in-house, you’ll get more value by outsourcing to experts who can do the work for you.
Next Steps in Outsourcing Your Content Strategy
If you’re looking to hire a thought leadership marketing firm to do this kind of work, make sure you hire a good one from the very beginning. We’ve helped hundreds of clients who wasted years on content campaigns that went nowhere—primarily because the content they paid for wasn’t consistently well-researched or well-written.
A good thought leadership marketing firm starts with excellent content as a foundation. From there, they will work with you to transform the basic content marketing strategy formula into something entirely unique for your website and the keyword landscape it resides in. With an expert partner like First Page Sage, you’ll have a much better chance at achieving the kind of results displayed in the strategy examples above.
At First Page Sage, we’re proud to include these examples as a sample of our industry-leading work in B2B content marketing and SEO. If you’re looking for an expert partner to help achieve your content goals, contact us today.
