The FINITE Forum on content and messaging for B2B tech companies was filled with top tips for any marketer looking to start or expand on their content strategy.

As we know, in B2B marketing, if you’re not at the top of Google search for your target keywords, you’re not generating critical inbound traffic that can drive leads and conversions for your company. This is a missed opportunity, especially for high intent keywords that showcase that traffic’s willingness to buy – shortening lengthy B2B sales cycles and acquiring high quality customers.

Read on to hear Kylie Whitehead’s tips on building out a lucrative B2B content and messaging strategy for your tech organisation.

Content challenges faced by attendees: 

  • Diminishing the damage competitors have made with their worse quality products 
  • Driving brand awareness through outbound content and traffic through inbound content 
  • Combining content with social media promotion to drive awareness and traffic 

Content for the entire buying funnel 

Make sure you have content for every stage of your buying journey, and think about the first level of the message you want to communicate at these stages.

For top of funnel content, it helps to start with the challenge; an easy thing to skip but very important. Most times in B2B, in tech particularly, you need to tell your audience their problem for them to recognise they need a solution.

A pillar / cluster model 

Once they’re aware of their problem in reading your top-of-funnel, educational content, ask yourself, ‘what would they ask next?’ This will help form the content you make to cater to traffic at later stages of the funnel. 

You can organise these pieces into a pillar and cluster model to rank well for target keywords. Check out this blog for more information on SEO best practices in 2022, and how to use pillar pages. 

Gated and ungated content

A good tip is to wrap up all the content you’ve produced and put it in a gated form, such as a whitepaper or e-book. This directly generates leads for your website, while the ungated content drives traffic and showcases your expertise. 

If you’ve got your website integrated with a CRM like HubSpot, you can use the gated content to adjust lead scores for contacts, as whitepaper downloads are often an indicator of higher purchase intent. This is very important in complex buyer journeys that last months and years. 

Remember, both organic social and SEO are all about time. It’s about building up your content engine steadily.

Sales enablement 

Working with sales to come up with new content ideas is a great way to respond to what your audience is directly asking. Your sales team will have their ear to the ground on common questions, concerns and challenges they’re facing. 

This also helps with creating sales material, so your BDRs know exactly how to respond when these questions arise on a call. Sales material can help standardise the sales process so that your team can speak with more people in a more impactful way, and scale. 

We’ve got lots of forums happening throughout September. Read about the fundamentals of ABM from our forum with Kartik here!