Tips for Creating Valuable B2B Content That Converts

Investing in content that doesn't provide value is risky business.

Creating valuable content means helping your customers get what they want. Posts about your latest hire or staff celebration don't cut it.

Valuable content can be new information on a familiar topic, actionable guidance to solve specific problems, or thought leadership that challenges conventional thinking.

In this article, we'll share tips for creating valuable B2B content that helps your customers. In the first section, we’ll talk about choosing topics using audience insights, subject matter experts, and industry research. In section two, we’ll discuss how to make your content interesting by finding the information gap and a unique angle your audience can’t turn away from. In the third section, we’ll cover how to ensure success by streamlining your content creation and aligning your team and a content calendar to map your strategy.

How to Choose Valuable B2B Content Topics

The best way to choose valuable topics is to take a step back from your sales point of view and examine your content through the lens of a customer who's never had a thought pop in their head about your company. Instead of company updates, think about frustrations your customers had before you helped them, and how your experiences taught you what you now know.

Use Audience Insights

Using audience insights for content topics is a great way to ensure your content is helpful and valuable. Far too often, companies prioritize topics based on internal interests, company news, or sales information about their products.

There is a time and place for these types of topics. But customer-centric content is much more likely to break through to cold audiences.

Content that demonstrates a deep understanding of your customers’ challenges and desires will resonate with them. To help you identify audience insights, start by creating qualitative customer personas. Describe your personas’ professional situation in detail, outlining things like desired outcomes, behaviors, common challenges, who they work with, motivations, beliefs, and what frustrates them.

Get inspiration from your current customers. Think about the decision-makers and influencers that purchased from you recently. Talk to your sales and customer success teams for valuable perspectives from the people that worked closest with them.

Use these insights to identify key themes about the challenges they were facing and specific solutions they were seeking. Based on these insights, brainstorm topics that would have been a valuable solution on their journey. Frame these topics as actionable guides.

Use Subject Matter Experts

Your company’s subject matter experts are a gold mine for topic ideas. Their experience and understanding of the market can help identify unique themes others can’t see. These experts come from a place of practitionership rather than theory and general knowledge. 

Ask your subject matter experts (SMEs) about the history of their field. They can tell you the rationale that led to their skill set being developed from a market perspective, as well as where their field is heading based on current trends and innovations.

SMEs can highlight the nuanced challenges others don’t understand. They can tell you what obstacles someone might face if they were starting from scratch. This is valuable information for your audience, and can help them dramatically accelerate their path to success.

When brainstorming topic ideas, include subject matter experts in the process so they can point out opportunities to turn bland ideas into rich value for your audience.

Use Industry Research

Industry research is a gold mine for compelling topics your customers will line up, and sometimes even pay for. Think about industry reports that provide data and insights about customers, competitors, and market trends. This type of content can be very time consuming to discover and summarize, but the investment can be more than worth it.

There are a number of ways to go about harnessing industry research for your content. One way is to start with desk research. Seek out the latest sources from customer surveys, trade publications, and industry reports in your field. Review the information with your team to form a perspective about what the research means for your customers. Turn these perspectives into content topics and highlight the data with a unique angle.

Another approach is to survey your market for proprietary first-party data. If going this route, it's important to be very intentional about the data you collect. Clearly define your research project with the help of an expert. Once data is collected, distill your findings into insights that can help your customers make data-driven decisions.

How to Make Your B2B Content Valuable to Your Audience

Identifying valuable topics is only the first step to creating valuable content. The next step is to elevate the quality of your content to exceed your audiences’ expectations. You’re already committing significant resources to this marketing initiative. Now it’s time to follow through and maximize your investment in quality for the best return.

When the content you create is interesting, engaging, and truly valuable, your audiences can identify with the subject and associate themselves with it, sharing it with their colleagues makes them look smarter. This should be your goal- to make your content so interesting that it makes the people want to share it.

Find the Information Gap

Find the gaps in your audience’s journey that go deeper than surface level. Help close the gap between what your customers already know and what they actually need to know. The internet is overflowing with general information about every topic imaginable. Your audience is looking for information they could only get from sitting down with an expert to learn about obstacles they don’t even know exist.

To find information gaps, start with your own experiences. List your customers’ desired outcomes associated with your services. Then think about every step you would need to take to be successful. Get as detailed as possible. On the surface, it might seem like there’s just one or two things someone needs to think about. For example, if your goal is to implement an effective content strategy, most of the information available will tell you to define your goals, create content for your target audience, and optimize your content for SEO. But based on experience, we know there are many more detailed steps that you may not be thinking about and wouldn’t know from general information. So we created this guide to help.

Information gaps are the details your customers are really searching for. It’s the type of information that stops them in their tracks and changes the way they think about a problem.

Find a Unique Angle

Finding a unique angle sets your content apart and draws your audience in. If you spend much time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed the catchy posts about how the author achieved something extraordinary. These posts capture your attention because they share a behind-the-scenes view of someone’s real world experience. Their story is something you won’t find anywhere else, and you can’t help but read it to learn more.

A unique angle is the foundation for thought-leadership that changes your audience’s perspective of what’s possible. Here are a few ways to help you find unique angles.

For a given topic, list your personal experiences. What stories can only you tell about your experience with them? Your audience wants to know about it.

Challenge the status quo. Think about the conventional wisdom your industry frequently talks about. Most of these ideas are likely based on “best practices” of the past. How are things changing? Based on your in-depth knowledge of the subject, what is changing and evolving that people aren’t talking about enough?

Conduct original research. Create a list of questions you would love to have definitive answers to. How can you get data to support them? Industry reports that survey their customers are one of the most viral types of content because they present a unique angle that isn’t broadly available.

Creating content with a unique angle may require more time to create than conventional content, but the investment can be worthwhile when customers discover its value.

How to Streamline B2B Content Creation

One of the most common challenges companies face when executing a content strategy is a lack of consistency. Valuable content requires collaboration with stakeholders throughout a company, and not everyone will prioritize content creation the same way. This leads to shifting deadlines and misaligned strategies that can compromise the quality of your content.

To improve consistency, it helps to have a system in place to ensure everyone knows the role they play in the big picture of your content strategy. This section helps identify important tools and processes that reduce the risk of failure.

Start With a Fully-Aligned Team

Everyone involved in your company’s content creation must be aligned to your strategy. Far too often, one person will be in charge of content and be held responsible for outcomes. But executing a content strategy for a company requires input and participation from people across the organization. If everyone doesn’t understand how their role contributes to the betterment of the company, content will be deprioritized.

Team alignment starts with clear communication and buy-in. All of the stakeholders involved should be brought in as contributors to the strategy. They should be educated about how content contributes to their success. Sharing exactly how a subject matter expert interview translates into hundreds or thousands of impressions with your target audience is information they need to know. This will help ensure everyone understands the importance of their contribution.

Hold a strategic alignment meeting with all of the contributors, decision-makers, and influencers. Share your plan and ask for their input. Listen to their feedback and incorporate it where it makes sense. 

Schedule regular meetings to update the team on progress and outcomes so they can see how their contributions are being used. Again, seek feedback. You never know where good ideas will come from. Aim to make these touchpoints frequent enough that they’re not forgotten, but only as much is necessary. We believe quarterly progress and performance reviews are a good cadence, but it will vary by organization.

Create a communication channel for asynchronous updates. A monthly email newsletter for internal stakeholders with a link to a KPI dashboard may be suitable for most. This will help to keep the team from feeling like their contributions are only wanted when needed and help them feel a sense of ownership in the strategy.

Master Your Content Calendar

A content calendar may seem like generic advice. But it’s a critical tool that often gets misused. Teams will put a lot of effort into coming up with topics and planning content, then pivot or abandon their plan as soon as an obstacle presents itself. 

Your content calendar visualizes exactly how your brand plans to communicate with your market. At a glance, you should be able to see major campaigns, messaging themes, and specific topics your customers will have the option to engage with.

It allows you to take a step back and ask questions about the effectiveness of your strategy from a higher vantage point. Does your content align with seasonal challenges your customers may face? Does it help guide decisions they make at known milestones throughout the year? 

There are many, many content calendar templates available that leverage various tools or platforms. We believe a simple, flexible spreadsheet is the perfect tool. Remember, your content calendar is not the same as your project management tool. The latter is used to manage deadlines. The calendar is a strategic tool, used to make decisions across the calendar year.

If you’re unsure how to start, try this simple content calendar. In a spreadsheet, add each month across the top row. In the first column, list customer milestones, campaign themes, followed by awareness, demand creation, demand capture, and nurture. 

In the Customer Milestones row, add any relevant activities, like “begin annual planning”. 

In the Campaign Themes row, fill in each quarter with one overarching theme based on major issues you want to address that may or may not correlate to relevant customer milestones from the first row.

In the Awareness, Demand Creation, Demand Capture, and Nurture sections, list the relevant topics you want to create content for each month, adding rows to each section as needed.

Review this calendar with your team to gain feedback and identify opportunities for improvement. When you’re satisfied, begin adding each piece of content to your project management tool.

Final Thoughts: Tips for Creating Valuable B2B Content that Converts

Creating valuable B2B content that converts is no small feat. It requires a deep understanding of your audience, a commitment to quality, and a systematic approach to content creation. By focusing on customer-centric topics, leveraging insights from subject matter experts and industry research, and ensuring your content is both interesting and unique, your content will stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Remember, the goal of your content should be to provide real value to your audience. This means addressing their challenges, offering actionable solutions, and presenting information in a way that is engaging and memorable. Consistency is key, and having a well-aligned team and a well-planned content calendar can help ensure your efforts are sustained over the long term.

As you implement these strategies, keep in mind that your content strategy will evolve as you go. Continuously seek feedback, measure your results, and be willing to adapt your approach as needed. By staying focused on your audience's needs and maintaining a high standard of quality, you'll be well-positioned to create content that not only captures attention but also drives meaningful business outcomes.

Are you working on a content strategy for your company? If you want help making it as successful as possible, get in touch with us! We’d love to learn more about your goals and explore how we can help you develop a strategy, gain team alignment, or create high value content that converts. Contact Us.