Web & Content
B2B Content Strategy: What to Publish and Why
Updated April 15, 2015By the CalliArc team
Key takeaway
Write the answers to the questions your prospects ask before they're ready to buy — costs, comparisons, how-to, and what goes wrong. Those pages attract people with genuine intent and keep working for years, unlike announcement posts that are read once by nobody.
Most business blogs publish company news and industry commentary, and produce almost nothing. The content that generates enquiries answers a specific question a buyer typed into a search engine at the moment they had it.
Write what buyers search for
- Cost and pricing questions. Everyone wants to know and most competitors refuse to say, which makes an honest answer unusually valuable.
- Comparisons — this approach versus that one, and the trade-offs. Buyers are choosing between options, not deciding whether to buy.
- How-to and process explanations that show what a project actually involves.
- What goes wrong, and how to avoid it. This builds more credibility than any capability statement.
- Take the questions from your own sales calls. If prospects ask it, others are searching it.
Match content to buying stage
- Problem-aware: they know something is wrong but not what to do. Explanatory content, no product.
- Solution-aware: comparing approaches. Comparison and cost content, honest about when your approach isn't right.
- Vendor-aware: choosing who to work with. Case studies, process detail, and what it's like to work with you.
- Most companies publish only the last kind and wonder why traffic is low.
Fewer, better, maintained
- One genuinely useful page a month beats four thin ones a week — and is far easier to sustain.
- Give each piece a clear primary question it answers, and answer it early rather than after six paragraphs of preamble.
- Update and expand existing pages that rank rather than publishing new pages on the same topic and competing with yourself.
- Date content and revise it. Advice with an old date and stale figures damages credibility more than no content.
Measure honestly
- Enquiries and qualified conversations, attributed to the pages that preceded them — not page views.
- Search rankings for the specific questions you targeted.
- Assisted conversions: content usually influences rather than closes, and last-click attribution will tell you it did nothing.
- Be patient. Content takes months to rank and then produces enquiries for years, which is precisely the opposite shape from advertising and requires different expectations.