How to Craft a Killer B2B Content Marketing Strategy

‘- Hey, what’s up everybody, Chris Mechanic here.

I’m Co-Founder, CEO here at WebMechanix. Today I want to talk with you about content marketing.

Obviously, it’s hot, it’s all the rage, everybody is doing it, it’s great.

If you know me, you know that I’m kind of like have a tendency towards the tactical side of things. So I like to talk about sort of quick-wins and hacks. With regard to content marketing there is a lot of little quick-wins and hacks that I could talk about.

But I want to sort of gear more towards the strategy side of things today.

So I’ve spoken with dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of different organizations that are engaged in content marketing. They all say, “Hey, we should be creating content, “We should be blogging. We should be writing, doing videos and such.”

And that’s all well and good, that’s fantastic.

The problem is just the way that we’re going about, sort of, “What are we writing about? What are the topics? And the way that it typically works with most organizations is they have a meeting.

A whole bunch of people get together into a room and they say, “Okay, we got to be writing. “What should we be writing about.”

And some person says, “Hey you know, “Dandelions are hot. “One of my clients just asked me about Dandelions. “Let’s write about Dandelions.” And then another person is like, “Well, is that right, I mean, you know, “CNN just did a nice piece on Tulips, “I think Tulips are really all the rage.”

And a third person is like, “It’s gotta be Sunflowers man, Sunflowers, Sunflower seeds.”

And so what ends up happening usually is kind of a decision by committee. And usually they’ll create a piece on Dandelions, a piece on tulips, and a piece on Sunflowers and it’s all well and good, you know.

They’ll get some traction and some people will read them. But it’s not as nearly as effective as it could be.

So this method of choosing topics which basically is based around, “How do I feel. “What do I think is going to be good.” There’s a lot of thoughts and feelings around it, and not a lot of science.

I call that blind blogging.

Just like blogging with blinders on. So blind blogging is basically just, “Hey, what should we write about?” “Okay, let’s write about these things.”

Now the opposite of blind blogging is a framework that we’ve developed called, Ninja Jedi Blogging.

Very technical term but Ninja Jedi Blogging is basically the opposite of blind blogging.

Whereby you’re using advanced keyword research methods and market research essentially to determine what the topics are. Then you go one level beyond that and you create topics around feeds.

So let me tell you what I mean. Keyword research, first of all, is near and dear to my heart. I think it’s one of the most powerful things that marketers can do in general.

And a lot of people will say, “Yeah, we do keyword research.” But really they just do very surface level keyword research. If you don’t know what keyword research is there’s a lot more in the guide that we’re going to offer.

But basically, if you do a Google search, search for keyword planner, or Google keyword tool.

And you can basically go to this tool, it’s free, you can put in a word such as Dandelions and push enter. And this tool made specifically by Google will show you basically a whole bunch of variations of this keyword Dandelions.

And along with each keyword it shows you specifically how many searches that keyword gets in a given month. So you can see, okay, Dandelion seeds gets a thousand searches a month versus “How to plant your own Dandelions” gets whatever, 1,500 searches a month.

So in that way you can determine the popularity of these different terms which turn out to be topics.

So first and foremost, do some keyword research. Add some science to the process of selecting what it is that you’re writing about.

Second is you want to create content in themes. So as opposed to, say you’re going to do one blog post a month. As opposed to creating one blog post about Dandelions and then another blog post Tulips and a third blog post about Sunflower seeds.

What if you spent an entire month writing just about Dandelions but about different factors or different topics within Dandelions?

So blog post number one might be, “What are Dandelions?”

Blog post number two might be, “Benefits and use cases of Dandelions.”

Blog post number three might be, “How-to plant your own Dandelions.”

And then blog post number four might be like, “Advanced Dandelion care tips for gardeners.”

Or whatever it is, I’m just making these things up. But, if you do that, if you publish content in themes what happens is, instead of just having four content assets at the end of the day you can take these four pieces and basically stitch them together to create an eBook or a Whitepaper.

It could be the script for a webinar that you feel like doing. It could be dripped out to your email newsletter subscribers to keep them warm.

It could be used as landing pages in your paid campaigns. So all of the sudden, just because you’ve done these two or just because you’re creating this content and themes now instead of just four content assets you have a whole bunch of content assets.

But really the science the SEO science behind things in that theming of content. Like when Google or any of the search engines see that, “Hey, they’re publishing heavily on Dandelions.”

It sends a really strong jolt of relevancy to the search engines that says, “Hey, see this website right here, “This is very highly relevant about Dandelions, “therefore, show them in the searches more often when people are searching about Dandelions.”

So it’s just these two very simple things. So if you’re already creating content, if you’re already blogging, it doesn’t take much extra effort to go from just pure blind blogging.

Which is what everybody is doing, which is going to deliver some results, but just very incremental at best.

It doesn’t take much to go from blind blogging to go to Ninja Jedi Blogging.

It’s just some keyword research, to add some science, and then content theming. To basically create more content assets and then send this really strong jolt of relevancy to search engines.

So do those two things, there’s a guide.

Probably left, right, up, or down from this that you can download for more details.

I give a talk, like an extended talk on blind blogging. Which you’ll find the slides within that guide. So check it out, put in that little bit of extra effort and you’re going to see.

Results are just going to start skyrocketing and you can thank me later.