This post on content strategy is very specific to B2B professional technology services.

If you’re a marketing, practice, or sales leader, then this post should hopefully give you a simple yet effective formula to create a content strategy that directly influences revenue.

Quick disclaimer: This post is NOT about increasing your website traffic.

Why?

Because you don’t need it.

I have nothing against this goal, but I have found that in B2B services, traffic (and SEO) is a red herring and one of the primary reasons why most content marketing programs go to the graveyard without having lived fully.

So, instead of traffic, SEO etc., our goal for this content strategy formula is revenue. A good and achievable goal is to “increase the opportunity pipeline by 3-5X within 6 months”.

PS:

1. One of the outcomes could very well also be traffic / SEO. We are not fighting this goal, we are just not putting it at the center of our plans.
2. There is also an attached content strategy worksheet you can download and use to get started.

The goals of our content strategy

Our content strategy will care about 3 primary goals:

1. Building trust with clients “when” they engage
2. Allowing your client facing team (sales, account leads, project leads etc.) to communicate with their clients from a position of expertise
3. Allow our client facing teams to communicate with clients in context of an “opportunity”

We can boil these down to “building authority”. Not the SEO type of authority, but real authority, as in, expert and helpful when it matters.

So in this this post, we will be talking about content strategy from the perspective of building a “client engagement system that builds authority” that puts multiple available tools to work. These tools are our offers, partners, solutions, case studies, and so on.

Done well, the outcome we expect is a measurable impact on opportunity pipelines for the targeted offers, say 3X in 6 months.

That could mean an upside of several million dollars in ACV (annual contract value) or much more in terms of TCV (total contract value) over 3 years.

The ingredients of our content strategy formula

Since the goal of our content strategy is revenue, it needs to be aligned to the “thing(s)” that will generate the revenue. It follows that our services will be able to generate revenue (client will engage us and pay us) when we solve a pain and achieve some kind of transformation for our clients.

So our first task is to identify that offer or service that we expect to create revenue from (or generate transformation from), and then define who will pay us for it.

So offer => transformation expected + beneficiary

More than one are also great, but if you are new to this, then being more focused will help.

Let’s take an example. Suppose we want to win projects building digital systems for our clients to provide personalized experiences that will drive up online commerce. And say the stakeholders who will accept that offer are “Chief Digital Officers” or “VP of digital customer experiences and/or applications”. This gives us the essential starting point for our content strategy. Other examples could be in AI, analytics, security, cloud management, and so on.

Our second step is to determine 3 things:

1. The personas and their key priorities, needs, and challenges
2. Relevant partners who we’ll engage and who are selling to these personas everyday. Some popular examples are MS / AWS / Google, Adobe, Salesforce, Snowflake etc. But if you have smaller niche partners, that’s fine too.
3. A tangible offer of engagement – what specifically can we pitch that solves a very specific problem that will hook our target persona and make them want to engage. e.g. these offers could be our solution accelerators or POCs if they have been created based on customer feedback and demand. We’ll likely not sell these for revenue.

These offers of engagement (or hooks) help the clients solve a specific challenge that is also reasonably common. For e.g. while building digital CX systems, we may bring something specific to better build a personalization engine, use robotic process automation (RPA) to make migration easy from one tech to another, or have an integration between demand and supply systems. This can also be a tried and true architecture we have used before. These are hooks that help us engage clients in tangible conversations.

PS: While determining the above. it’s obvious that it’s a very collaborative exercise between sales, client facing teams, practice leads, and marketing. It’s important to get this right.

OK, now we have almost everything that we need. So let’s think about actually putting these ingredients together.

Creating and executing the content strategy

Recall the goals of our content strategy.

They are to build trust and allow our client facing teams to operate from the position of expertise and opportunity.

So the content strategy will consist of 2 workstreams:

1. Creating content and directing readers to our tangible offer(s)
2. Getting our message in front of clients (and prospects)

It’s helpful to think in terms of workstreams or swim-lanes, because they indicate fluidity or constant movement just like a river or stream.

The two workstream work together – the content we create will be used to communicate with clients (opportunity or expertise), and it will build trust and reputation when consumed. It will show our target personas how they can achieve the transformation they are seeking.

Creating Content:

Let’s go back to why we created the personas defining the who of our offers. Our content needs to have a goal and that is defined by our personas’ challenges, priorities, questions, and aspirations that we are trying to meet.

Once we think in those terms, then creating the individual content pieces becomes easy. We can simply create a maturity model that will make sense to this persona. This model will visualize the transformation this persona needs, and we can get started.

In our example of digital CX systems, such a model would contain the elements that we think are needed and a way to assess how the customer may be performing on those dimensions. e.g. UX, personalization, steps to complete a transaction, trackability, content, integration, catalog management, communications, etc.

In this blog on content marketing automation, I outlined the various elements that go into creating content. The popular ones are – webinars, blogs, success stories, and how-to-use blogs on the partner technology. Each of these will also lead to one or more tangible offers we have already defined. Those are the call to action in each piece.

Communicating:

The second workstream of content strategy is about communicating. As we publish content (say every 2 weeks), we also use it to engage with clients. We send it proactively to clients, invite clients to webinars, and follow-up on what they thought about it. We also use it to create external authority by getting these published in the publications that our personas already trust. When we combine this approach with lead gen channels such as events, we can drive much high conversion rates than otherwise.

This also solves a big problem of having a good pretext to write to clients and creating multiple quality touchpoints. What could be better than a targeted content item that is 100% relevant to our persona.

What kind of results can you expect?

The primary benefit of this content strategy is that you are laser focused on your value proposition and target persona.

That converts new leads as well as creates cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. So achieving the revenue targets becomes much easier.

In addition, the key leaders in your company get to unlock the expertise in their presentations, and share it more broadly with clients. The mentions and inclusions in relevant authority publications also help drive up both corporate and individual brand recognition and value.

Next Steps

I have created a spreadsheet workbook. Download and use it to define your content strategy. Remember to keep it simple and add to it as you go along.

There will obviously be many twists and turns. So be prepared.

If you’d like my help creating and executing a content strategy that yields revenue results, please contact me for a free strategy call.

Good luck!