This guide will teach you how to create a multi-channel B2B content marketing strategy from scratch. If you read to the end, you'll learn how to:
We’ll start with some key terms:
So, a multi-channel B2B content strategy is a planned and coordinated strategy to promote your products and services to other businesses across a variety of channels. Content is used effectively and intelligently to create conversions, and specific objectives are established and analysed.
A good B2B content marketing strategy gives consumers choices and allows them to engage via the channel(s) they enjoy using, meaning they will perceive your brand more favourably.
The rest of this guide will explore each aspect of a B2B content strategy in more detail. There’ll be a handy list of steps at the end for you to print and stick on the wall.
Your content strategy objectives will be determined by what you’d like to achieve.
Objectives may be overarching: “achieve more conversions”, “increase engagement in a new demographic”, and “upsell to a segment of our existing consumers”.
Or they may be more granular: “achieve 15% open rate for our newsletter”, “achieve 4% conversions from our Facebook advertising campaign”, “achieve 10% increase in the number of qualified leads from digital”.
The objectives will determine which channels you use and which content you create.
The metrics you collect to analyse the effectiveness of your strategy will vary. We will go through this later after your channels and content have been decided.
Using multiple channels allows you to engage with more potential consumers, through the formats they choose. Understanding how the channels interact with each other prevents siloed thinking and allows for better analysis..
You should decide which combination of owned, earned and paid media activity to use.
Each has merits and all can work in harmony. A strong, consistent brand that creates high-quality content will attract engagement via mentions, follows and coverage, and may choose to supplement this with paid promotion to increase its reach at all stages of the marketing funnel.
Once your preferred marketing method(s) has been chosen, you should then decide which combination of inbound and outbound channels to use.
Finally, you should decide which combination of channels is most suitable, based on their individual merits. Here are the pros and cons of ten marketing channels to get you started. These vary in popularity and cover the full spectrum outlined above:
Owned, Inbound. Ubiquitous so your content is likely to be seen, however, consumers may be jaded with brand content.
Paid, Outbound. Adverts are highly targeted based on Facebook’s in-depth demographic data but again, people may be jaded.
Paid, Outbound. You pay for each click, and Google is taking more steps to make ads harder to differentiate from organic results.
Earned, Inbound. The top spot is the dragon all SEOs are chasing, and leads to significantly higher click-throughs than other positions, but requires a lot of work.
Earned, Inbound. Thought pieces, whitepapers, eBooks and similar perform well on this channel, but the user base is lower than Facebook.
Owned, Outbound/ Inbound. If someone is on your mailing list, especially after GDPR, it is implied they are interested and engaged with your brand. Lots of brands use email marketing though so people may be jaded.
Paid, Outbound. Goes direct to someone’s phone.
Paid, Outbound. Will be seen by lots of people but is harder to attribute because it is offline.
Owned, Inbound. As above, requires a large investment in design time as well
Owned, Inbound. Demonstrates credibility and knowledge and works well for B2B audience, but requires a large investment of time.
And some other channels you might consider are Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, catalogues, networking, stores, stalls at events, and billboards. The list goes on. These are not given in any implied order. Invest time in deciding which channels best suit your brand, your strengths and your objectives.
Remember also that channels fall in and out of favour over time (remember QR codes?). It’s also something of an arms race; people skip through TV ads now so they must be effective when viewed on fast forward; people install AdBlock and become jaded with brand-managed Facebook channels.
You should be willing to adapt your marketing efforts accordingly to these factors or you risk funnelling money into an ineffective channel.
You should create different types of content for different channels, based on your objectives and an understanding of your target audience and their behaviour.
Strong content will create value for consumers and will attract genuine engagement. It will demonstrate your credibility and trust, as well as enhance your reputation. Certain decisions are made for you; whitepapers are not compatible with Twitter’s microblog format, for example.
Other decisions are up to you. Should you present the results of your research as a whitepaper? Or an infographic? Or a series of videos where your MD talks through the results?
Creating a persona is your first step in answering these questions.
Meet Karen, who we’ll be using as an example.
As personas go, Karen is quite basic. We created her by typing “Prince Harry” into the free version of the YouGov Profiles tool, which then combined the data of 22,895 people who said they liked our newlywed prince.
You can see that even basic information paints a picture. Karen is probably more likely to flick through The Sunday Times than browse Reddit. She will likely be less tech-savvy than younger users, meaning AdBlock won’t be installed on her computer.
These insights will advise your decision on which channels to use. A persona is also useful for consistent messaging; a vital component of an effective content strategy. The tone of voice should be consistent across all channels. You should create a persona, with these steps:
Choosing which type of content to create will be a lot easier if you have a persona in mind. So your next step should be to formulate content ideas relevant to your identified personas and audience.
Luckily, we have written a comprehensive guide to have and build on content ideas, in our 12 must-have (mostly) free content creation tools resource. This goes into more detail on every single one of the following tools and techniques:
We highly recommend reading this. It will help you decide which content formats lend themselves best to your ideas.
We can’t give specific advice here because it will depend on your specific objectives, the channels you’ve chosen, and the ideas you’ve come up with. What we can do is give you a few guiding rules and multi-channel marketing examples:
We mentioned earlier metrics that will help you track the success of your strategy. These will vary depending on the channels you use, but we recommend considering the following:
You should use these to assess whether your multi-channel content strategy is performing as planned both during and after implementing it. You should then make refinements to your strategy: keep doing what is working and stop doing what isn’t. Then make a note of these insights to ensure you achieve success with future content strategies.
Now you should know how to answer the question, “what is multi-channel content marketing?“ We’re confident that this guide will help you to achieve success.
Here is a list of points you can take away, to remind you how to create a multi-channel B2B content strategy from scratch.
We’re off for a cuppa now after writing that, pretty sure you’ve earned one by reading too. If you have any further questions, get in touch with one of our experts today - we'll be happy to provide any additional insight or assistance.