B2B content teams today hardly struggle with output. They're consistently producing content, publishing it on many platforms, and most are putting genuine effort into what they create. On the surface, everything looks fine.

But when someone asks what the content is specifically doing for the business, answers can become less clear!

Yes, the content exists, and it’s getting published. But there’s a clear misalignment between the business needs and what’s being created.

It’s one of the most common problems we encounter, and it often boils down to the same issue: the strategy wasn't directly tied to the business goals in the first place.

Or the development of a robust content strategy was never a priority... perhaps even skipped completely.

This is the second instalment in our seven-part series on B2B content strategy. The first part covered what a content strategy is and why it’s vital to have one. If you haven’t caught it yet, check it out.  

Also check out:

• Part 1: What Is a B2B Content Strategy (And Why Does It Matter?)
• Part 3: How to Use Competitor Analysis to Strengthen Your B2B Content Strategy
• Part 4:  How Do You Build a B2B Content Strategy Around Clear Messaging and Positioning?
• Part 5: How to Choose Your B2B Content Channels & Formats
• Part 6: Why Repurposing & Distribution Should be Built into Your Content Strategy
• Part 7: How to Measure Your B2B Content Strategy (Without Drowning in Data)

In this episode, we are going to dig into something that even the most well-resourced content teams trip up on. And that’s how to directly link your content strategy to your business goals. Without that connection, even with consistency and high output, your operation may be missing the mark.

It’s not completely bizarre to start a content strategy with “content.” In fact, there’s a reason most teams start with it. Everything about creating content feels productive and satisfying.

Strategy, on the other hand, is a lot slower, abstract and easy to glaze over and get to the planning and production.

That instinct to jump straight into action is often where the misalignment begins.

Many teams map out their content strategies backwards. They kick things off with creation, publishing platforms, calendar population and format choice. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s built on assumptions. And as we covered in the last episode, What Is a B2B Content Strategy (And Why Does It Matter), that’s exactly how you end up with random acts of content.

Before you think about what to create, you need to answer one fundamental question: What is the business trying to achieve? That’s the one true origin of content strategy.

Once you clearly understand your business goals, you can move on to frame your audience understanding and content around those goals. At the end of the day, your job is to ensure that every piece of content you create is doing something that matters to your business.

The result? No content decision you make will be at the expense of either your business goals or your audience.

But when there’s no clear-cut content connection? You're not running a content strategy, it’s more like a hobby.

One of the most common goals we have seen content built around is brand awareness. If the business needs to become more recognizable in the market or reach new audiences, content is a great way to make that happen.

It could also be a key focus for your business to drive pipeline growth. And to attract new audiences, your content has to work hard to engage and move people toward that final “yes.”

Product adoption and awareness may be your priority when the business has something new to bring to market, or when existing products don’t have as much reach. Content can bridge that gap.

It could be that you are trying to become a leader of a category or even create a new one. This requires content at its core.

One aspect of content planning that often gets overlooked is customer retention. But if holding onto current customers is a business priority, alongside attracting new audiences, then the content strategy should reflect that.

Another business goal could be to strengthen your employer brand, which content teams sometimes don’t think of as their responsibility (but they absolutely should). If you’re looking to expand your team and attract strong talent, content can help shape potential employees' perception.

These are just a few examples of the kind of business goals that your content strategy needs to support. No doubt, every business has unique priorities, and they will evolve as time passes. The main point is that your content strategy needs to reflect those priorities, because you’re not just creating content for the sake of it.

Once your business goals are clear, the buyer journey pushes you closer to achieving them.

It’s worth noting that your audience isn’t linear.

At any given time, people are at a different stage of their journey with you, and this mainly boils down to:

• Awareness — just becoming aware of a problem
• Consideration — actively weighing up their options
• Decision — close to making a move
• Post-purchase — already customers, with their own needs and expectations

Your content, therefore, isn't supporting an audience, but supporting audiences at every stage of that journey.

So, you could have a higher percentage of content focused on one stage than another.

And the stage they're in matters because it changes what they need from you. So, match the content to the moment, not just to the audience.

The buyer journey gives you that answer.

In practice, that might mean demand generation (it's worth being specific about whether you're generating demand or capturing it). It could also mean thought leadership, sales enablement, or customer education.

Overall, the buyer journey dictates which one, and when to use it.

In How to Use Competitor Analysis to Strengthen Your B2B Content Strategy, we look at how understanding your competitors feeds directly into these content decisions.

In B2B, buying is a lot more complex.

And that complexity is highly relevant here because, as just mentioned, your audience is rarely one person (all at the same time), and there isn’t one buyer making a single decision.

This matters for your content strategy because you are rarely, if ever, selling to one person. Most B2B purchases involve a buying committee. And each member of that committee is coming at the decision from a completely different angle, for example:

• The technical evaluator wants to know if it works
• The budget holder wants to know if it's worth it
• The internal champion needs to know if they can sell it internally
• The end user wants to know if it makes their job easier

Whoever you need to appeal to the most should shape the amount of content you produce for each member.

This makes B2B organizations a bit more complex as an audience, and that's reflects in the magnitude of work that goes into the content strategy.

Knowing your audience is one thing. Understanding what they need is a whole other. That’s where audience insight comes into play, and there are a handful of ways to gather it.

A straightforward route is to speak with your sales team. Since they interact with customers and potential leads on a daily basis, they’re a goldmine of useful information that no tool can replicate.

But don’t put down tools completely. You can use them to listen in on customer calls. You’ll gain access to the actual language people use to describe their own problems. And that’s some of the most valuable raw material a content team can have.

The most direct route is speaking to customers – a highly valuable, yet underused method. You can gain key insight from booking interviews and having discussions that tackle questions your content should be answering.

Your CRM data paints an equally vivid picture that you can use to track things like where friction often appears at each stage of the journey.

There are audience insight tools such as SparkToro.

Don’t overlook social channels. These offer up comments, replies and overall engagement patterns that tell you what your audience responds to (and what’s not landing).

What you are looking for in these insights, of course, is the different stages along the buyer journey. That will shape not just what content you create, but how it connects back to the business goals you started with.

This connects back to the house analogy from What Is a B2B Content Strategy (And Why Does It Matter).

We established that your content strategy is a blueprint of sorts, and it defines what you're building and why. But when it comes to matching content to the buyer journey, visualize the rooms in that house.

You wouldn't expect to cook a great meal in your bathroom, the same way you wouldn't expect a good night's sleep in the kitchen.

Think, different rooms, different purposes.

The same logic applies to your content. If a piece is built for the awareness stage, then it would be out of place as a decision-stage asset.

If all this information has got you thinking about your content strategy, why not take our

B2B Content Operations Benchmark – it’s a free self-assessment that covers a huge part of what we've discussed today (it covers content strategy and planning, tech setup, operations, team capability and culture).

It's a series of quick-fire questions that shouldn’t take you more than four minutes.  You get a personalized report with specific resources, actions, and recommendations that you can take action on immediately. We're getting great feedback !

Thanks for reading. We hope you found this helpful, let us know on LinkedIn.

Content 10x is the world’s leading authority on content repurposing. Specializing in transforming your content into multiple formats and distributing it across various platforms, Content 10x helps maximize your reach and impact. Our expert team takes your core content and creates a diverse array of high-quality, engaging assets, including videos, podcasts, social media posts, and more. Trust Content 10x to enhance your content strategy and ensure your message is seen and heard by the right audience.

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