What is a B2B content strategy? A practical guide

Most businesses I speak to are already producing content in some form. They've got a blog on their website, someone occasionally posts on LinkedIn, and there's usually a newsletter that goes out whenever somebody remembers it exists. They might also have a collection of case studies, downloadable guides and webinar recordings that have gradually accumulated over the years.

But when I ask how all of that fits together, or what they're hoping to achieve from it, the answer isn't always particularly clear.

And I understand why. Content marketing has become such a normal part of running a business that it's easy to fall into the habit of producing things because you feel you should. You publish a blog because it's been a few weeks since the last one, or put something on LinkedIn because you've heard that posting regularly is important.

Before you know it, you've got a fairly busy content calendar, several people contributing to it and absolutely no idea whether any of it is helping the business.

This is where having a proper B2B content strategy comes in. It gives you a reason for creating content, helps you decide where to focus your time and makes it much easier to understand whether your efforts are achieving anything useful.

And while the phrase 'content strategy' might sound like something that requires an enormous PowerPoint presentation and several workshops involving sticky notes, it doesn't have to be particularly complicated. You do, however, need to put some thought into it.

What is a B2B content strategy?

A B2B content strategy is a plan for how your business will use content to achieve its marketing and commercial objectives. It considers who you're trying to reach, what information those people need, which subjects your business should be talking about and how you'll create and distribute content that supports your goals.

It also covers how you're going to manage everything, who's responsible for what and how you'll measure whether it's working.

The important thing to understand is that a content strategy isn't the same as a content calendar. A calendar tells you what you're planning to publish and when, whereas your strategy explains why you're creating that content in the first place.

For example, a content calendar might say you're publishing a blog about cyber security awareness on Tuesday, sharing a customer success story on Thursday and promoting a webinar the following week. Your content strategy should explain who those pieces are intended for, what you want people to learn from them and how they support the wider objectives of the business.

Without that thinking, you're essentially making a series of individual decisions about what to publish and hoping they add up to something useful.

A good strategy should also be realistic. There's very little point creating an ambitious plan involving weekly webinars, daily social media posts and three long-form articles a month if you've got one marketing manager who's already doing the work of four people.

The best content strategy is one your business can actually deliver.

How is B2B content strategy different from B2C?

The basic principles of content marketing are fairly similar regardless of who you're selling to. You need to understand your audience, create content that's relevant to them and give them a reason to engage with your business.

But B2B marketing often comes with a few additional complications, particularly when you're selling expensive products or services that require a significant commitment.

Buying decisions usually involve more people

If someone wants to buy a new pair of trainers, they can usually make that decision themselves. They might read a few reviews, compare prices and decide whether they like the look of them.

Buying a new enterprise software platform is rather different.

You might have a head of IT evaluating the technical requirements, a finance director reviewing the cost and a senior leader considering how the investment fits into the business's wider plans. There could also be people from procurement, compliance or operations involved, depending on the organisation.

Each of those people will have different questions and priorities, which means your content needs to do more than appeal to one individual.

For example, a technology provider might need content explaining how its platform integrates with existing systems, alongside information about implementation costs and customer case studies demonstrating the results businesses have achieved.

You don't necessarily need a completely separate content strategy for every person involved, but you do need to understand the different perspectives that influence a purchasing decision.

The buying process can take months

B2B customers don't always make decisions quickly, particularly when they're considering a significant investment or changing an established supplier.

Someone might discover your business through a LinkedIn post, visit your website a few times and download a report before disappearing for several months. They could then return when a contract is coming up for renewal or a new project has received approval.

Your content needs to support that longer process without expecting everyone to be ready for a sales conversation immediately.

That might mean producing educational content for people who are still trying to understand a problem, more detailed resources for those comparing potential solutions and practical information for people preparing to make a decision.

It also means recognising that content can be valuable long before someone becomes a customer.

Your audience often needs more detailed information

B2B products and services can be complicated, particularly in sectors such as finance, technology and cyber security.

Prospective customers might need to understand how something works, what regulations apply or how a proposed solution will affect their existing processes. They're unlikely to make a decision based on a catchy slogan and a few attractive graphics.

This creates an opportunity for businesses that are willing to share useful expertise.

Detailed articles, practical guides and case studies can help prospective customers understand their options and make more informed decisions. But the information needs to be accessible, even when the subject itself is technical.

There's no point demonstrating how knowledgeable you are if your audience has to read every sentence three times to understand what you're talking about.

Why does your business need a B2B content strategy?

One of the biggest benefits of having a content strategy is that it helps you make better decisions about where to spend your time.

Most marketing teams have far more ideas than they have resources to deliver, and there's always another campaign to support or a new platform someone thinks the business should be using.

Without a strategy, it's easy to get distracted by whatever seems most urgent or interesting at the time.

A content strategy gives you a way to evaluate those opportunities against what the business is actually trying to achieve. If your priority is generating enquiries from a particular industry, for example, you can focus on creating content that addresses the challenges facing those customers rather than publishing general industry updates that attract a much broader audience.

It also helps you build consistency across your marketing. Your website, LinkedIn content and email campaigns should feel like they're coming from the same business, with a recognisable message and a clear understanding of who you're trying to reach.

And perhaps most importantly, it makes your content easier to evaluate. If you know what each activity is intended to achieve, you can look at the results and decide whether it's worth continuing, improving or doing something different.

Step 1: Start with your business objectives

Before you start planning topics or deciding how often to publish, you need to understand what the business is trying to achieve.

This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly easy for content marketing to become disconnected from commercial priorities. A marketing team might be focused on increasing website traffic while the business is trying to attract larger customers, or spending time promoting services that aren't particularly profitable.

I'd recommend starting with a conversation about what success looks like over the next six to twelve months.

Perhaps your business is entering a new market, launching a product or trying to generate more enquiries from a particular type of customer. You might want to improve awareness amongst senior decision-makers or reduce the amount of time your sales team spends answering the same questions.

These objectives should influence the content you create.

If your goal is to attract more customers in the financial services sector, for example, you might develop industry-specific website content, interview existing customers for case studies and create LinkedIn content addressing the challenges facing financial services businesses.

If you're launching a new software product, your priorities might be quite different. You could need educational articles explaining the problem it solves, practical demonstrations and content that helps prospective customers understand how it compares with their existing approach.

The important thing is being able to explain how your planned content supports a wider business objective.

Turn broad goals into something measurable

Objectives such as 'increase brand awareness' or 'generate more leads' are perfectly reasonable starting points, but they're difficult to evaluate without a little more detail.

Think about what you'd actually expect to see if your content strategy was working.

For lead generation, that might mean more relevant enquiries coming through your website or an increase in the number of prospects engaging with your educational resources before contacting sales.

For brand awareness, you might look at whether your content is reaching the right people, whether more visitors are finding your website through relevant searches or whether your business is being mentioned in industry conversations.

You don't need to attach an arbitrary target to every piece of content, but you should have some way of understanding whether you're making progress.

Step 2: Understand your audience properly

Once you've established what you're trying to achieve, the next step is understanding who you're trying to reach.

And I don't mean creating a fictional persona called Marketing Manager Mike who enjoys podcasts, drives a BMW and apparently spends his weekends researching CRM platforms.

I mean understanding the people who are likely to buy from your business, the problems they're dealing with and the information they need to make decisions.

Start by looking at your existing customers. Which businesses are the best fit for your services? What do they have in common? Why did they choose to work with you, and what were they trying to achieve?

You should also think about the different people involved in purchasing decisions. The person who first discovers your business might not be the person who signs the contract, and their priorities can be quite different.

Speak to the people who know your customers

One of the most useful things you can do when developing a content strategy is speak to your sales team.

They spend their time having conversations with prospective customers, which means they usually have a pretty good understanding of the questions people ask and the objections that come up repeatedly.

Ask them what prospects are struggling with before they get in touch, what they tend to misunderstand about your services and which questions they find themselves answering over and over again.

It's also worth speaking to customer-facing teams who deal with people after they've bought from you. They might be aware of challenges or misunderstandings that could be addressed through better educational content.

If you have the opportunity, speak to customers directly too. Find out what prompted them to look for a solution, how they researched their options and which information helped them make their decision.

These conversations often reveal far more useful information than making assumptions about what your audience wants to read.

Think about the problems behind the search terms

Keyword research can be incredibly useful, particularly if organic search is an important part of your strategy. But I'd recommend looking beyond individual keywords and thinking about the problems that lead someone to search for them.

Someone searching for 'security awareness training' might be comparing software providers, but they could also be trying to understand why their existing training programme isn't working.

Those are quite different needs, and the content that helps one person might not be particularly useful to the other.

Understanding the intention behind a search helps you create content that answers the questions people are actually asking, rather than writing articles purely because a keyword has an attractive search volume.

Step 3: Audit the content you've already got

Before you start creating lots of new content, it's worth looking at what your business has already published.

You might have useful articles buried in your website archive, customer stories that haven't been promoted for years or webinar recordings that could be turned into several other resources.

Equally, you might discover that you've published six articles covering almost exactly the same subject, none of which is particularly comprehensive.

A content audit helps you understand what you've got, what's working and where the gaps are.

I'd start by creating an inventory of your main content assets, including website pages, blogs, case studies and downloadable resources. Depending on the size of your business, you might also want to review newsletters, social media content and recorded events.

Look at which pieces are attracting relevant traffic, generating enquiries or being used by your sales team. You should also check whether the information is still accurate, whether the messaging reflects your current services and whether the content is genuinely useful to your intended audience.

Decide what to keep, improve or remove

You don't necessarily need to delete everything that's old or underperforming.

An article that isn't attracting much traffic might still be valuable if it answers an important customer question or supports a particular stage of the buying process. Equally, something that generates a lot of visitors might not be particularly useful if none of those people are relevant to your business.

Some content will be worth updating, particularly if the information is outdated or the article could be made more comprehensive. Other pieces might be better combined into a single resource, especially if several articles are competing for similar search terms.

And sometimes you'll find content that no longer serves any purpose and can be removed, although it's worth checking search performance and existing links before making that decision.

The aim isn't to create the largest possible content library. It's to make sure the content you've already invested in is doing something useful.

Step 4: Identify your main content themes

Once you understand your objectives, audience and existing content, you can start deciding what your business should be talking about.

I usually recommend identifying a handful of broader content themes that relate to your expertise and the problems your customers are trying to solve.

For a managed IT provider, for example, those themes might include cyber security, IT support challenges, cloud technology and the practicalities of managing business systems.

A corporate finance advisory firm might focus on preparing a business for sale, understanding company valuations, private equity investment and navigating the transaction process.

These themes give your content some direction without restricting you to an overly rigid list of topics.

They also help you build a more comprehensive collection of resources around the subjects that are relevant to your business.

Build depth rather than publishing random topics

One of the mistakes I see businesses make is jumping between unrelated subjects because they're worried about repeating themselves.

But if your business specialises in a particular area, there's nothing wrong with discussing it regularly. In fact, there's usually far more to say about a subject than you might initially realise.

Take cyber security awareness as an example. You could write about why employees fall for phishing scams, how organisations measure changes in behaviour, what makes training effective or how attackers are using AI to make social engineering more convincing.

Those articles all sit within the same broader theme, but they're addressing different questions and providing different information.

Over time, this gives you a useful collection of content that demonstrates your understanding of the subject and helps prospective customers explore it in more detail.

The important thing is making sure each piece has a clear purpose rather than publishing several slightly different versions of the same article.

Step 5: Plan content for different stages of the buying process

One of the biggest differences between a collection of blog posts and a proper B2B content strategy is how well the content supports people throughout their buying journey.

Not everyone who encounters your business is ready to speak to sales. Some people are only just becoming aware of a problem, while others have already decided they need a solution and are comparing potential providers.

Your content should help people at those different stages.

Awareness: helping people understand a problem

At this stage, your audience might not be actively looking for your product or service. They may be trying to understand why something isn't working or researching a challenge they've recently encountered.

Educational blogs, practical guides and thought leadership can be useful here, particularly when they explain a problem clearly and offer genuinely helpful advice.

For example, a business selling compliance software might publish an article explaining common challenges with managing regulatory reporting. The purpose isn't necessarily to persuade someone to book a demonstration immediately, but to help them understand the issue and become familiar with the business's expertise.

Consideration: helping people explore their options

Once someone understands their problem, they may start looking at different ways to address it.

This is where more detailed resources can be useful, including comparison guides, webinars and content explaining different approaches.

A technology company might publish an article comparing the advantages and limitations of building a solution internally versus buying an established platform.

The aim should be to help prospective customers evaluate their options, even if that means acknowledging situations where your own solution might not be the best fit.

Decision: helping people feel confident about choosing you

When someone is getting closer to making a purchase, they'll often want more specific information about your business.

Case studies, product demonstrations, implementation guides and detailed service pages can all help answer those final questions.

For example, a customer considering a new software platform might want to understand how long implementation takes, what support they'll receive and how other organisations have used the product.

This is also where content can support your sales team directly. Giving them relevant resources to share during conversations can help prospective customers understand your offering and make more informed decisions.

Don't forget about existing customers

Content marketing doesn't stop when someone becomes a customer.

Existing customers might benefit from educational resources, product updates or guidance on getting more value from the services they're already using.

And depending on your business, that content can support customer retention, encourage wider adoption or help people understand additional services that could be relevant to them.

It's worth considering these needs as part of your strategy rather than focusing all your attention on attracting new customers.

Step 6: Choose the right content formats and channels

Once you know what you want to communicate, you need to decide how and where you're going to share it.

This is where businesses can get a little carried away, particularly when there's a new platform or content format everyone seems to be talking about.

You don't necessarily need to be producing videos, podcasts, newsletters and daily LinkedIn posts to have an effective content strategy. You need to understand where your audience spends time and which formats are most useful for communicating the information you want to share.

For many B2B businesses, the website is an important starting point. It's somewhere prospective customers can learn about your services, explore your expertise and find the information they need before getting in touch.

LinkedIn can also be useful, particularly if you're trying to reach business decision-makers or build the visibility of senior leaders within your organisation.

Email marketing gives you an opportunity to maintain relationships with people who've already shown an interest in your business, while webinars and downloadable resources can be helpful when you're dealing with more complicated subjects.

But there's no reason to use a channel purely because another business is having success with it.

Think about how your channels work together

Rather than treating each channel as a separate activity, consider how they can support one another.

You might publish a detailed article on your website, share some of the key insights through LinkedIn and include it in your next newsletter. Your sales team could also use the article when speaking to prospective customers who have questions about the subject.

That doesn't mean copying and pasting the same content everywhere. Each channel has its own audience expectations, and you'll usually need to adapt the message accordingly.

But working from a central collection of useful content can make your marketing much more manageable, particularly if you're working with a small team.

Step 7: Make the most of your internal expertise

If there's one thing I'd encourage more B2B businesses to do, it's spend more time talking to the people who actually understand their products and customers.

Marketing teams often have access to an enormous amount of expertise within their organisations, but it doesn't always make its way into their content.

The technical specialists are busy dealing with customers, senior leaders have other priorities and nobody particularly wants to spend their Friday afternoon writing a blog.

As a result, businesses sometimes end up publishing fairly generic content when they've got people internally who could offer much more interesting perspectives.

Interview your subject matter experts

One approach I regularly use is interviewing internal experts and turning those conversations into content.

You don't necessarily need a formal interview process. Sometimes a half-hour conversation about a particular challenge or industry development can give you enough information for several articles or social media posts.

The important thing is asking questions that go beyond the obvious.

Rather than asking someone to explain why their product is useful, ask what customers tend to misunderstand about it. Find out which problems they're seeing more frequently or whether there's any popular industry advice they disagree with.

Those conversations often uncover insights that wouldn't appear in a standard marketing brief.

It's also worth involving senior leaders where appropriate, particularly if building their professional visibility is part of your strategy. Their experiences and opinions can provide useful material for LinkedIn content, articles and industry commentary.

Of course, someone still needs to organise those conversations and turn the information into something suitable for your audience, which is where having proper content management in place becomes important.

Step 8: Build a realistic content plan

Once you've worked through the strategic thinking, you can start putting together your content calendar.

This is where you decide which pieces of content you're going to create, when they'll be published and who's responsible for producing them.

I'd recommend planning around your main content themes and business priorities, while leaving some flexibility for things that come up unexpectedly.

If you're launching a new product in three months, for example, you'll probably want to plan the supporting content well in advance. But you might also need space to respond to an important industry development or a question that's suddenly coming up frequently in customer conversations.

The level of detail you need will depend on the size of your team and how much content you're producing.

For a smaller business, a straightforward spreadsheet might be perfectly adequate. Larger teams may benefit from a dedicated project management system, particularly if several people are involved in drafting, reviewing and approving content.

Don't underestimate how long content takes to produce

One of the most common problems with content calendars is that they look wonderful until someone actually has to deliver them.

It's easy to schedule four blogs, a case study and a webinar in the same month without thinking about the amount of research, writing and approval involved.

If you're relying on internal experts to provide information, you'll need to allow time for those conversations. You should also consider who needs to review the content, particularly in regulated industries where additional checks may be required.

I'd much rather see a business publish two genuinely useful articles a month than struggle to produce eight that nobody has had time to think about properly.

Consistency is helpful, but it needs to be sustainable.

Step 9: Put someone in charge of managing your content

This is the part of content strategy that I think gets overlooked most often.

Businesses can spend weeks developing a strategy and agreeing on their priorities, only for everything to gradually fall apart because nobody has clear responsibility for making it happen.

Content production involves quite a lot of coordination, particularly when you're working with multiple stakeholders.

Someone needs to organise the briefs, speak to internal experts and manage the writing process. Drafts need reviewing, feedback needs incorporating and finished content needs publishing and distributing.

Then there's the ongoing work of checking performance, updating existing content and making sure the plan still reflects what the business is trying to achieve.

If those responsibilities aren't clearly assigned, content can become something everyone agrees is important but nobody quite has time to manage.

What does a content manager actually do?

A content manager is responsible for overseeing the practical delivery of your content strategy.

Depending on the business, that might include planning content, managing writers or agencies, coordinating approvals and making sure everything is published on time.

They may also be involved in creating content themselves, particularly in smaller teams where there isn't a separate person responsible for every task.

The important distinction is that someone is taking ownership of the process rather than treating each piece of content as an isolated project.

You might already have someone internally who can take on that responsibility. Alternatively, you could bring in freelance or fractional support if you need experienced content management without hiring another full-time employee.

Either way, your strategy is much more likely to succeed if someone is responsible for keeping it moving.

Step 10: Measure the results and keep improving

Once your content strategy is up and running, you need to understand whether it's achieving what you hoped it would.

This is where it's important to go back to the objectives you established at the beginning.

If your priority was generating more relevant enquiries, look at which content is bringing prospective customers to your website and what they're doing once they arrive.

If you're trying to build awareness amongst senior decision-makers, consider whether you're reaching the right audience and whether your content is encouraging useful conversations.

You might also look at how content is supporting your sales team, particularly if you've created resources designed to answer common questions or help prospects evaluate your services.

Look beyond the obvious metrics

Website traffic, social media engagement and email clicks can all provide useful information, but they don't tell you everything.

A LinkedIn post might receive thousands of impressions without generating any interest from the people you're trying to reach. Meanwhile, a detailed technical article might attract relatively few visitors but be incredibly useful to the small group of decision-makers researching that particular subject.

This is why I'd recommend combining quantitative data with feedback from the people in your business.

Ask your sales team whether customers are mentioning your content during conversations. Find out whether the resources you've created are helping them explain your services or answer common questions.

You should also look at how people move between different pieces of content, particularly if you're trying to support a longer buying journey.

Not every result will be directly attributable to one article or social media post, and that's fine. The aim is to understand how your content contributes to the wider marketing and sales process rather than expecting every individual piece to generate an immediate return.

Review your strategy regularly

A content strategy shouldn't be something you write once and then forget about for the next three years.

Your business priorities will change, new competitors will emerge and your customers may start asking different questions.

I'd recommend reviewing your content performance regularly and having a more substantial look at the strategy every few months.

You might discover that a particular content theme is generating useful enquiries, while another isn't attracting much interest. Perhaps your audience is responding well to expert-led LinkedIn content, or your sales team has identified a new challenge that deserves more attention.

Those insights should influence what you do next.

What should a B2B content strategy document include?

By this point, you might be wondering what the finished strategy should actually look like. The good news is that you don't need a 60-page document full of diagrams and marketing terminology. In fact, I'd argue that the more complicated you make it, the less likely people are to use it.

Your content strategy should be detailed enough to guide decisions, but straightforward enough that the people responsible for delivering it can understand what they're supposed to do. While the exact format will depend on your business, there are a few key things I'd recommend including.

Business objectives: Start by outlining what the business wants to achieve and how content will contribute to those goals. This gives everyone a clear understanding of why you're investing in content marketing and what success should look like.

Target audience: Explain who you're trying to reach, the challenges they're dealing with and what they need to know before making a purchasing decision. If you're targeting several different audiences, it's worth identifying how their priorities differ.

Key messages: Identify the main things you want people to understand about your business. These should reflect your expertise and what makes your offering relevant to your audience, rather than relying on generic statements about quality or innovation.

Content themes: Set out the main subjects your business will focus on and how they relate to your audience's interests. These will help guide future content ideas and keep your marketing focused on the areas where you have something useful to contribute.

Buying journey: Consider what information prospective customers need at different stages of their decision-making process. Someone who's only just recognised a problem will probably need different content from someone who's comparing potential suppliers.

Channels and formats: Explain where you'll publish content and which formats you'll prioritise. You should also include the reasoning behind those decisions, particularly if you're choosing to focus on a smaller number of channels.

Content production: Make it clear who's responsible for planning, writing, reviewing and publishing content. If you're relying on internal experts or external freelancers, explain how they'll be involved and how the approval process will work.

Distribution: Outline how you'll get your content in front of the right people once it's published. This might involve organic search, LinkedIn, email marketing or sharing relevant resources directly with prospective customers.

Measurement: Identify which metrics you'll use to understand whether your content is achieving its objectives. These should relate to the outcomes you're trying to achieve, rather than measuring activity for the sake of it.

Review process: Finally, explain how often you'll review your content performance and update the strategy. Your priorities and audience needs will change over time, so it's important to build in opportunities to assess what's working and make adjustments.

You can then use a separate content calendar to manage the day-to-day publishing schedule. The strategy provides the direction, while the calendar helps you put it into practice.

An example of a B2B content strategy in practice

To make this a little more tangible, let's imagine you're a managed IT provider that wants to attract more customers with between 50 and 250 employees.

Your business offers managed IT support and cyber security services, but most of your marketing currently consists of occasional LinkedIn posts and blogs about general technology news.

You're getting some website traffic, but relatively few enquiries from the businesses you'd most like to work with.

Start with the commercial objective

Your main goal might be to generate more qualified enquiries from businesses that are considering changing their IT provider.

Rather than trying to attract as much traffic as possible, you'd focus on reaching people who are likely to be involved in that decision.

That might include managing directors, IT managers and finance directors, depending on the size and structure of the organisation.

Identify what your audience needs to know

Through conversations with your sales team, you discover that prospective customers are often worried about the disruption involved in changing IT providers.

They're also unsure what's included in a managed IT contract and how to compare the costs of different suppliers.

These are useful starting points because they reflect real concerns that could prevent someone from making an enquiry.

Develop relevant content themes

You might decide to focus on managed IT support, cyber security risks and the practical challenges of maintaining business technology.

Within those themes, you could create content explaining what happens when a business changes IT providers, which questions to ask before signing a managed services contract and how to identify gaps in existing cyber security arrangements.

You could also develop case studies showing how you've helped businesses with similar challenges.

Choose your channels

Your website would provide a home for the more detailed resources, while LinkedIn could help you reach decision-makers and share insights from your internal experts.

You might also use email to keep in touch with prospective customers who've downloaded a guide or attended a webinar.

Rather than creating completely separate content for each channel, you'd look for opportunities to adapt your main resources into different formats.

Measure what happens

Over time, you'd want to understand whether the content is attracting relevant visitors and encouraging them to explore your services.

You could also ask your sales team whether prospects are arriving at conversations with a better understanding of the switching process or whether they're using your articles to answer common questions.

This gives you a much clearer picture of what your content is supposed to achieve than publishing general technology updates and hoping someone gets in touch.

Common B2B content strategy mistakes

Even with a good plan in place, there are a few problems I see businesses run into fairly regularly.

Trying to appeal to everyone

If your content is aimed at absolutely anyone who might conceivably buy from you, it can become so general that it doesn't feel particularly relevant to anyone.

You don't need to exclude potential customers unnecessarily, but it's worth being clear about which audiences are most important to your business.

Focusing on quantity rather than usefulness

Publishing more content doesn't automatically mean you're doing better marketing.

If you're producing five articles a week that repeat information people can find anywhere else, you might be better off spending that time creating one genuinely useful resource.

Treating content as a marketing-only responsibility

Your marketing team shouldn't have to invent every idea or become experts in every aspect of your business.

The people working in sales, customer service and technical roles can provide valuable insights that make your content more accurate and interesting.

Creating content without promoting it

Publishing an article on your website doesn't guarantee anyone will find it.

You need to think about how you'll distribute your content, whether that's through search, LinkedIn, email or direct conversations with prospective customers.

Forgetting about existing content

It's easy to become so focused on producing new material that you neglect the resources you've already created.

Updating an existing article or improving a service page can sometimes be more valuable than starting something new.

Expecting immediate results

Content marketing often takes time, particularly when you're trying to build awareness or reach customers with longer buying cycles.

You should still measure performance and make adjustments, but it's important to set realistic expectations about what your content can achieve and how quickly.

How much does a B2B content strategy cost?

The cost of developing a content strategy will depend on the size of your business, the complexity of your offering and how much work is involved.

A smaller business with a clearly defined audience and a relatively straightforward service might need a focused strategy project covering its objectives, audience, messaging and content priorities.

A larger organisation operating across several markets or product lines may need a much more detailed approach, particularly if multiple teams are involved in content production.

You'll also need to decide whether you're looking for someone to develop the strategy and hand it over, or whether you want ongoing support to implement and manage it.

Those are quite different requirements, and it's worth being clear about which one you need before approaching potential partners.

For some businesses, a one-off strategy project is enough to give an internal team the direction it needs. Others benefit from working with a fractional content manager who can take responsibility for planning and delivery on an ongoing basis.

If you're comparing options, I'd recommend looking beyond the initial cost and considering how much time and internal resource will be needed to put the strategy into practice.

Who should be responsible for your B2B content strategy?

There isn't one correct answer, and the best approach will depend on your existing team and resources.

In a larger organisation, content strategy might sit with a dedicated content marketing manager or head of content who works alongside the wider marketing team.

In a smaller business, it might be the responsibility of a marketing manager who also oversees other activities.

And if you don't have the right expertise or capacity internally, you can bring in external support.

This is where a freelance content strategist or fractional content manager can be particularly useful. They can help you develop a clear direction for your content and, depending on the arrangement, manage the work required to deliver it.

The main thing is making sure someone has responsibility for the strategy and understands how it connects to the wider business.

Without that ownership, even a well-developed plan can quickly become another document that everyone agrees is important but nobody actually uses.

A good B2B content strategy makes marketing easier to manage

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about content strategy is that it's an additional layer of work businesses don't really have time for.

But in my experience, having a clear strategy can actually make content marketing much easier.

Instead of constantly wondering what to post on LinkedIn or which blog topic to cover next, you've got a framework to guide those decisions. You understand who you're trying to reach, what they need to know and which activities deserve your attention.

It also becomes easier to involve other people in the business because you can explain what you're trying to achieve and why their input is useful.

And when you've got limited time and resources, which most marketing teams do, that clarity can make an enormous difference.

You don't need to create more content for the sake of it. You need to create content that has a purpose, reaches the right people and contributes to what your business is trying to achieve.

Need help developing your B2B content strategy?

I've worked in marketing since 2009 and have been running Popcorn Content since 2020, helping businesses communicate complicated subjects in a way their audiences can understand.

Over the years, my work has evolved from primarily writing content to helping businesses plan and manage it too. These days, I work with marketing teams and business leaders, particularly in finance and technology, to develop content strategies and make sure the work actually gets done.

That might involve reviewing your existing content, identifying opportunities you're missing or taking responsibility for planning and managing your ongoing content activity.

If you're producing content but aren't quite sure whether it's achieving what you need it to, or your team could do with some experienced support, get in touch and we can have a chat about what you need.