Success Strategies For Creating and Publishing Awesome B2B Content

Each of us consumes some form of content on a daily basis.

Our consumption of content keeps us informed, educates our decision-making, entertains us, and gives us solutions to issues that we encounter in business, or life.

Once upon a time, before the internet, content was the domain of media houses and publishers. It needed huge investments to create and distribute content.

What the internet has done is make content creation possible by individuals, groups, brands, and of course companies of any size.

Today, brands and businesses invest in content to endear themselves to customers – educate, entertain, persuade and more.

Businesses and brands have also realized that they can no longer rely on simply offering a product or service to attract and engage audiences, let alone persuade them to buy.

You need content to fuel trust and authority before you get customers to buy.

Because of this widespread interest, content creation has now evolved into a science.

Whether it’s content creation, planning or promotion, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in marketing.

We often overlook important aspects of content generation when we are overwhelmed with work or rushing to launch a campaign.

This is why having a well-defined, efficient process for creating and publishing content is vital to prevent gaps and drive sales.

Create, distribute and analyze/ measure are parts of a comprehensive content strategy.

This blog covers:

Ideas for creating content
Content Publishing: What is it?
The Tools and Resources You Need to Publish Content Successfully
Fundamentals Of Content Marketing Strategy
What Is The Optimal Frequency For Brands To Publish Content?
Conclusion

#1. Ideas for Creating Content

According to Melanie Deziel, content needs to have 2 things: Focus and Format.

Focus is about what to say. You can use the pegs below to start thinking about topics.

Examples of focus include

Basics such as a Beginners Guide
More advanced topics like an Advanced Guide
Studies/ Research/ About Statistics or Data
Opinions and Interviews
Stories About People – Pioneers/ Founders/ Management Team
The History and Origins of a Product or Service
Process Explanations and How To’s
Roundups that are curated
Examples such as Case Studies/ Portfolios/ Teardowns

Once you have determined what to say, then the media format that’s best for presenting that content, kicks in.

Formats include:

PDF, eBooks, white papers
Webinars – Live or Recorded, or Livestreams
Videos
Image Gallery with captions, or simply an article embellished with contextual images
Infographics
Quiz
Tools/ Scripts
Maps
Timeline
Audio/ Podcast

When you combine Focus and Format you can get a lot of ideas for creating content.

Another way is to think of content in the form of blogs, social media posts, case studies, whitepapers, webinars, FAQs, Templates, Cheat Sheets, Guides, etc.

Regardless of how you create content, the chief thing is that you tailor it to the different stages of the buyer journey – awareness content, consideration content, and purchase content.

For blog ideas, here is an infographic from Blogging Wizard that you can use to generate content.

Source: Blogging Wizard

For social media posts, the infographic below from Big Income Paradise outlines 120 ideas.

Source: Big Income Paradise

The beauty about these ideas is that these are not restricted to one media or format. You can change the context and the format.

If you are hunting for Lead Magnet ideas, here’s a great list.

Plus, here are some great tools for generating ideas.

Once you have created your content, determined the format, it’s time for publishing it.

#2. Content Publishing: What is it?

Content publishing for brands and businesses is a series of actions that guide commercial and editorial positioning.

You have to create a publishing workflow, schedule, and frequency to ensure that your content is seen and engaged with by as many people as possible.

A typical content workflow looks something like this

Think content concepts
Research it using keywords, or topics
Write out a Content Brief
Create a Draft Article
Review the draft for improvements
Revise the content
Optimize the content for SEO using 2-3 keyword phrases/li>
Approve the content for publishing
Publish the content
Promote, or distribute the content

Before you publish content, you must first determine who you are writing for, what type of content you will be providing and the format for the content presentation.

To ensure you always follow industry best practices, you must understand why and how people consume content, as well as the various digital content formats currently available.

Also read: Content publishing: Definition and more

#3. What Tools And Resources Do You Need to Publish Content Successfully?

Publishing valuable content does not happen overnight or by magic — it takes time, planning, and the right technology to pull it off.

Whether you’re writing for blogs, emails, or social media, these tools can help you organise a messy process and save you time and energy.

Basic Content Planning Tools

Preparing your content before publishing it will save you time and ensure that it aligns with your campaign and brand goals.

It assists you in staying on track, establishing consistency, and anticipating and addressing potential problems.

Choose a content planner that includes content objective, type, target persona, deadlines, publishing dates, content brief, media type and author name.
Content Publishing Tools for the Absolute Beginner

The stats for Content Marketing tell us that it’s significantly less expensive than traditional marketing and produces three times the number of leads.

First, you need to produce high-quality content. Then distribute it across multiple platforms for your target audience to find and consume.

With the help of content publishing tools, you can create content that stands out, generates leads, and increases brand awareness and revenue.

Some of these tools serve multiple objectives. They can be used for other tasks such as content curation, creation, promotion, optimization, and analysis.

Content Strategy at Its Most Fundamental

You don’t need a heavy tome telling you exactly what to do in order to efficiently produce content that gets results for your brand.

What you do need is to stick to the fundamental and proven strategies and the metrics that matter. Let metrics guide your content strategy.

It’s possible that you’re wondering, “Well, what are the fundamentals?”. The next section addresses that.

Read:

#4. Fundamentals Of Content Marketing Strategy

Ride on what works

You can use tools such as AHREF, or BuzzSumo to find out popular, widely shared content, based on keywords.

Use this as a starting point for creating great content for your blog.

Test the idea first. You can always go back and edit and embellish your content later.

Don’t overthink things because you’ll end up wasting valuable time and energy.

Instead finding out what works and testing it are better ideas.

Begin small, observe how your audience responds, and use the feedback or data analysis to iterate on your concept.
Track your progress

Monitor and analyze the performance of each campaign to determine the success or failure of your content marketing efforts.

Pay attention to what people in your audience are saying to you.

Identify at least one or more metrics that can adequately tell you whether your effort was a success or a failure, and then devise a method for measuring it.

Some of the metrics you could use are: Social shares, traffic to the content, social post engagement such as comments, number of backlinks, time spent on page, the bounce rate for a piece of content, the click-through rate from that piece of content, etc
Pay attention to the data insights

Though you might have started with popular topics, it does not mean that your content will be just as popular.

After you’ve published some content and analysed its performance, you can use the information to inform future decisions and optimise your efforts.

If the data indicates that a particular idea does not work, discard it and try something else.

If it shows that some piece of content is performing better than others, see if producing more of that type, or format, or style makes a difference to your traffic.

Do read:

#5. What’s The Optimal Rate To Publish Content?

The frequency with which you publish new content can make or break your content marketing efforts.

You want to share content as many times as possible in order to maximise engagement, brand awareness, reach, and customer retention.

At the same time, you want to avoid posting too frequently and annoy your audience, as well as diluting the effectiveness of your content.

How Frequently Should Blog Posts Be Published?

To be successful in content marketing, you must blog regularly.

Regularly published original blog content increases website traffic, leads, and conversions.

So, where is the sweet spot for blogging?

A recent HubSpot report suggests publishing four blog posts per week to increase blog traffic.

However, this magic number may not be suitable for you or your brand.
How Frequently Should You Post on Social Media?

Posting too frequently can become a nuisance. Posting infrequently can make you lose your audience.

Each social media platform has an optimal posting frequency for its audience.
> Post to Facebook at least 3 times per week.
> On Twitter, 3–30 tweets per day is ideal.
> A minimum of 1 Instagram post per day, with a maximum of 3.
> Post at least twice a week on LinkedIn, but no more than once per day.

Remember that finding the best times to post on social media is just as important as posting regularly.
How Frequently Should You Send Emails?

Receiving too many emails is a common reason for unsubscribing.

Spam complaints and sender reputation can be harmed by sending too many emails.

Not only that, but your subscribers expect a weekly update.

Set a weekly posting goal of one to three emails per week.

This will help you build customer trust and brand visibility.
How Frequently Should You Post on YouTube?

Adding a new video to YouTube every day is the best way to maximise your content and channel’s potential.

You can start with one to four videos per month if you don’t have the time or resources.

Let people know you have valuable, evergreen content.