3 Stages for Creating Powerful B2B Marketing Content to Support Your Sales Team

Content is no longer just for steering B2B prospects into your sales funnel. Today, your marketing content is the fuel that drives customer engagement at all stages of the buying cycle. Consider that, according to a 2021 Content Marketing Institute study:

• 79% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy
• 85% of B2B marketers rate their organization’s level of content marketing success in the past 12 months as moderately-to-extremely successful
• 60% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented content strategy
• 83% said the most important success factor was content value

The right content first positions your leadership team as an industry thought leader, then increases your brand loyalty, sales, market share, and revenue. But with so many content types available, creating the right content development strategy can seem overwhelming.

We understand if you’re unsure what to create first: blogs, social media posts, videos, webinars, whitepapers, or sales presentation slides. It can be overwhelming. To ensure maximum content return on investment (ROI), we recommend dividing the buying process into three distinct stages of communication. As you develop content, you can leverage pieces for different purposes at each stage, including lead generation, SEO traffic, nurture stream campaigns, and customer retention. But conceptualize your strategy with these stages in mind:

Stage 1: Discovering challenges

At this stage, informative blog posts, SEO web content, and whitepapers can drive prospects from an initial query about a particular business challenge to understanding the larger picture. These types of content enable you to attract high-quality search leads, educate them, and present your company as a genuine thought leader in the industry.

Stage 2: Exploring solutions

Targeted case studies, research reports, live webinars, ebooks, and videos can be effective once the prospect has a base-level understanding and engages with sales. Content can answer specific questions, address certain pain points, and steer customer segments toward appropriate solutions using each of these formats. These formats can be mixed into a nurture stream campaign to take the place of sales calls and visits.

Stage 3: Committing to purchase
 

Approaching closing, content creation should be hyper-personalized for each client’s unique needs. Marketing develops templates for emails and sales presentation slides that are personalized for the sales representative and the client company. Customized ROI calculators, performance projections, and other materials advance the sale to the final, personalized sales proposal.

Creating content for these stages ensures that buyers and sellers gain more control over the buying process. Buyers are informed with empowering information they can use to gain company buy-in, and sellers know precisely when to start insightful dialogues that build trust and expedite closings.