The Building Blocks of Content Marketing- How to Plan Your B2B Content Library with Ruth P. Stevens
In this 30‑minute Biznology webinar, host Mike Moran introduces B2B content marketing expert Ruth P. Stevens, who walks the audience through a practical framework for building and managing a B2B content library. Stevens begins by citing recent Content Marketing Institute data that shows near‑universal adoption of content marketing in B2B, but also highlights the difficulty marketers face in creating high‑quality, audience‑centric assets. She argues that content should be treated as a strategic, educational tool rather than a sales pitch, and outlines four primary B2B applications: thought leadership, inquiry generation, SEO/lead‑nurturing, and relationship deepening. The core of the presentation is a two‑step process. Step 1 is a deep dive into the customer buying journey, including typical enterprise buying stages and the multiple buying roles (e.g., specifier, influencer) that influence decisions. Stevens stresses the need to map each role’s pain points, job titles, and preferred media, and to consider variables such as industry, company size, and device usage (mobile‑ready formats). Step 2 is a systematic content audit: inventory every existing asset across sales, marketing, and support, then categorize it by medium, buying‑stage relevance, industry, role, freshness, ownership, and distribution channel. The audit produces a “monster spreadsheet” that reveals gaps and informs a content‑to‑stage mapping matrix. She demonstrates how to collapse complex buying stages into early, middle, and late phases for a specific role (the specifier) and suggests appropriate formats for each phase. Repurposing is presented as a cost‑saving tactic—existing assets can be re‑engineered for different stages or channels. Finally, Stevens answers audience questions about getting started, tracking content diffusion (via social‑listening tools and tracking codes), segmenting delivery, and the biggest challenge in B2B content marketing—overly promotional, low‑value content. The webinar closes with a reminder of Biznology’s training workshops and upcoming events.
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Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology Digital Marketing Webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of the Biznology blog and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. I'm also co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, and a former IBM Distinguished Engineer. Today, you'll be hearing from Ruth Stevens, who will present the building blocks of content marketing. But first, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and will email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Ruth. While we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com, so if you're not already a subscriber, we hope you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let me introduce today's speaker. Ruth Stevens is one of our bloggers at Biznology and president of eMarketing Strategy, a consultancy in New York City specializing in B2B marketing, particularly sales lead generation. Ruth is the author of 2 business books, Maximizing Lead Generation: The Complete Guide for B2B Marketers and Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote, Profit. Crain's B2B Magazine named Ruth as one of the 100 most influential people in B2B marketing. So if you've ever struggled with planning your B2B content, this is the webinar for you. Ruth, take it away.
Thanks, Mike. Delighted to be here, and what I'm looking forward to discussing today is the whole concept of how to plan your B2B content library. And to put this in some context, I thought I would share some interesting data points about the state of content marketing today in the B2B world. And what you'll see at the top of this slide is some interesting fresh data that suggests that basically everybody in B2B is using content marketing. And they're planning to grow their use of content marketing as well. In the lower left-hand corner of this slide, you can see the relative popularity or usage of different types of B2B content. And this was produced by a study just last month from the Content Marketing Institute combined with MarketingProfs. And I also wanted to point out in the box on the right how I believe the strategic content thinking can have its best applications in the B2B world. Beginning with thought leadership, where if your company is trying to establish itself as a knowledgeable authority in a certain area, content can help you prove that value. And especially if you are using content that is non-salesy and is highly targeted to the needs of your particular audience. Another great application is as an offer for generating inquiries. If you include a piece of content as a kind of product, then use it as an offer in outbound communications of any sort whether social media, email or in any vehicle and invite people to respond by downloading the content. It also helps you with your search engine rankings as we well know. And finally, we find content very useful in staying in touch with prospects until they are ready to see a salesperson, a process known as lead nurturing. So content is used across the B2B spectrum. Surprisingly, I was very surprised by this fresh data that B2B marketers are finding content marketing not as easy as we might think. And of course, I think what's really going on here is the problem with content creation. And we are all being asked to behave like publishers, and we are really not trained for that. We are trained to be marketers. And as a result, what we are doing as marketers tends to be sometimes the wrong thing. So you can see this very interesting data on the right which supports the data on the left of this slide, and suggests that the real challenge that we have here is creating content that is really needed by our target audience, that's good quality and really serves them well. So that's why I want to get into the meat of today's material on how to plan for great content marketing in B2B. And my inspiration for this is Paul Gillen, who I'm sure many of you know. He has been a columnist for Crane's B2B Magazine for many years. And he wisely pointed out that what we need to be doing when we're thinking about content marketing is responding to the needs of our prospects and current customers. And so our mission needs to change from sell, sell, sell to more of a helper and a relationship deepener. And in order to do that, we need to be producing content that really helps. So I'm dividing today's material into 2 steps. And the first step is to understand your customer's buying process. I'll talk about that. And then I'm going to explain how to develop a content audit. And ultimately what I'm trying to do is help you avoid the sort of random acts of content marketing, which means we say, oh, let's get some content going, and we just create something afresh. It is a much better idea to think about it strategically and put your content planning into the context of, guess what, your customer. So step 1, to begin with is to take a deep dive into how your customers buy. And fortunately, in the B2B world, the buying process tends to be pretty easy to discern. Most— here's an example of a large enterprise typical buying process, and you'll want to change this up based on the behavior of your various target audiences. You might want to organize it by company size or industry or even the type of person or buyer in the target. But my point is that the beauty of analyzing the buying process of your customers and breaking it into identifiable stages like the list we have here is you can then develop content that serves their needs at each stage. And thinking about what we as marketers are trying to do, our objective is to move our targets from stage to stage. So the content strategy at each stage really ought to be designed to help them satisfy the existing stage so that they are ready to move to the next stage. I mean, we can't force them to move, but we can certainly help them. Now, to complicate this a little bit, I'm going to introduce the concept of buying roles, which I'm sure you're already familiar with, but my point here is that we want to consider not only the enterprise or the account-level buying process or the possibly the industry-level buying process. Because even though we're selling into accounts, there are a lot of parties in there. And Marketing Sherpa had some data recently that suggested in the large enterprise world, there may be as many as 21 parties involved in the buying process. And we need to understand what's on the minds of each of these. So each player— I've listed here the types of buying roles that are involved in the buying process. OK. Are typically found in a B2B buying circle or buying group. And on the right, I've listed some of the issues that confront them, or that keep them up at night, or what they really care about. And these can then be converted to the more useful, possibly more actionable context of their job titles, as listed in the box in the lower right, but my point here is that you want to add a bit of complexity to your analysis of the customer's buying stages by expanding it to include the concept of the individual buying role within the target account. And wait, there's more. There are some additional variables that you might want to consider. As you're identifying the buying process and the needs of the customer. And these could be, as I mentioned earlier, industry and company size. They also may be what you're trying to get done at each stage. As I said, you know, generally we're all trying to get them to move to the next stage. Not all stages are created equal, and some may be more important to you, or you may have particular strengths at earlier or later stages. So my point is that you can refine your planning in the first step of understanding the buying process by using these additional variables. And then the last point, and this has come clear, especially clear with the rise of smartphones and tablets, the medium through which they are going to consume the content has taken on fresh importance because for example, if your customers and prospects are using their mobile devices to receive your content and consume it, it is going to be tough if you are delivering thick meaty PDF white papers. Nobody wants to read stuff like that on a smartphone. So what some B2B marketers are doing is creating mobile-ready content like video, and including a link to a downloadable, or a request for an email with an attachment of the thicker PDF and the meatier material. So all of these variables can be helpful. And I hope you are not overwhelmed, I think this gives you some idea about how to think strategically about planning for content marketing, so you are not just randomly creating stuff without its having a context in terms of your market targeting. So let's move on now to step 2, which is all about developing a content audit. And this is simply an analysis of what you have on hand around your firm. And allowing you to then fill in the gaps by going out and preparing fresh content so that you have a complete library to serve your marketing needs. So I've listed here some of the major content types that we find in B2B. And this can be expanded infinite. But these are the types most often used. And I've got some examples, visual examples on the left. But what we're trying to do is go around our company. And if you're in a large enterprise, this is not going to be easy, because there can be content all over the place. And it can be a challenge tracking it down. This is why companies are establishing a role called Chief Content Officer, and otherwise investing in the function of content creation, management, and usage, because it can really be difficult to find everything that you already have on hand. But if you dig around, you will find a lot of material that might have been created by your sales team. It might have been created by marketing operations. It might even have been created by customer service. Any organization in your company that has material that could be useful for content marketing purposes, you want to go track that down, pull it into a central repository, or at least have it accessible through a URL so that you know what is available and what you're going to need to go create afresh. So then the second part of this is once you have an inventory of everything that's available, you want to start categorizing it. And I've listed here a variety of variables that can be used as part of your categorization. These can be— I'm not going to go through each one, but these can be anything from the sort of tactical stuff like Well, what's the medium? And to more strategic questions like, where is this best applied? Which layer of the buying process does it make the most sense for? Is it specific to a particular industry or specific to a particular job role or title or job function? Or is it a segment by industry, or company size, or whatever? And the idea here then is that you are going to create frankly a monster spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be a monster, but pretty soon you will see an example of how it can get pretty complicated. And just to make it even more complex, you might want to add additional columns on subjects like, well, where does this thing live and who owns it? So that can end up being related to some of the politics in your organization. You also want to look at whether it is fresh or not. There is clear evidence that content has a tendency to degrade over time in its perceived value. So something that has been around for more than 12 or 24 months may need to be updated. And you also want to consider it from the point of view of length or possibly the distribution channel through which it will be delivered. So all of these variables— and oh, by the way, I like to have a notes column because there are always things to observe or keep in mind that I want to have preserved. What you end up with is a spreadsheet that might be similar to, to this one that I actually created for a client at one point. And my objective with this was to not only assess everything that was on hand, but also to identify the gaps for the purpose of eventual publication of fresh material. But strategically, of course, Where I want to go with this as a marketer is by identifying how all of these wonderful content assets, which either I have on hand or I'm going to create fresh, should be applied to the buying process of various customer segments. So in this example, to boil it down so that it's more manageable than that crazy spreadsheet I just showed you, I have created a a type of buying process stage application for a specific buying role, namely the specifier, who tends to want a lot of technical information, but like any business buyer has various stages of his or her thinking about how to acquire the solution to the business problem at hand, and I've collapsed that long list of large enterprise buying stages into 3 simple ones: early, middle, and late, and added a single identification of what are the needs of that audience. So in the early stages, it's all about getting educated and finding information in general about how to solve the problem at hand. In the middle stage, it's more about getting a deeper dive. And at the late stage, it's about getting close to decision-making. So I've suggested the kinds of formats that may be most appropriate at each of these stages. And this is of course just a suggestion and very generic and may not apply to your business at all. But what you can end up with is a set of charts like this for each of your most important audiences. It could be refined even further by industry. But where you want to end up with is a list of how you are going to apply all of this content planning work that you have developed. And then I'm just going to add one other tip which is Now that we are publishers, we want to think about how to be more efficient. And in the planning stage, it is a good idea to be thinking ahead to how you can repurpose existing or developing content so that it can be applied across the sales and buying process. So here is a list of a handful of ideas for how An existing or individual piece of content known as a content asset can be repurposed for other uses. And if you plan in advance for repurposing, you can save a lot of time and money later on. And I've got an article listed on the lower right which will give you even more ideas than the ones I've associated or boiled down to here. And then I'd like to wrap up with a suggestion that the Content Marketing Institute, which was founded a couple years ago by Joe Pulizzi and has really taken off, is a wonderful resource for questions and answers about content marketing in all its forms. And I'd also like to refer you to a book that I wrote recently on Lead Generation where I'm offering a sample chapter for free as a download. If I didn't mention that, my publisher would kill me. So with that, I'm ready to hand the floor back to Mike and available for questions. Hope this material has been useful to everybody today.
Thanks, Ruth. I'm sure it's been useful. And not only your publisher would kill you, I'd kill you. That's a great book. And I really appreciate you making that offer to the listeners today. So I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to plan their B2B content libraries. But Ruth, you didn't answer every question. I've got several good ones teed up for you.
Good.
And I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own questions by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to those questions, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for corporations who want to apply what they learn directly to their own businesses and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Ruth and I teach the B2B Digital Marketing course and will be there to guide you and help you persuade the— that executive to say yes. Go to biznology.com/training for more information on all of our offerings. Before we get to that first question, we need to thank our sponsors one more time. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. Now on to your questions. Our first question, Ruth, is how can you get started in content marketing?
Great, great question. Well, I'm just going to repeat what I said earlier, which is that you want to assess what you have on hand content-wise, and also apply it to your customer's buying process. And then develop the assets that are needed to support your marketing along the selling process, which is the opposite From the marketer's perspective versus the buying process on the customer's perspective. But if you're absolutely completely green, I would revert back to the slide that I mentioned about the best applications in B2B for content marketing, namely thought leadership, inquiry generation, lead nurturing, and determine why you want to get into content marketing in the first place, meaning not just slavishly follow the pack, but actually develop a strategic reason and objective for content marketing. And with those 2 steps, I think you can get started pretty— with using some marketing sense rather than just jumping in That's great.
Are there any pharmaceutical companies doing true content marketing, and is it even possible?
Great question. I wish I knew more about that category. I'm sorry to say I don't. But I have seen pharmaceutical companies using material for doctors certainly that is educational and informative to help them determine what to prescribe. It tends to be highly technical, but my friends who are doctors find it extremely valuable. So I gather that it's in wide use in the B2B context of clinical practices, and I'm just not aware or familiar enough with consumer marketing in the pharma space to Well, this is a B2B seminar, so that seems reasonable.
Now another question is, is there a way to track how content moves around the Internet? So if you have a video on YouTube, and then it is tweeted, and then someone shares it in their blog post, is there a way to track how that content is being shared across the web?
I'm pretty sure that if you are using tracking tools, Like Radian6, that kind of information is available. Mike, I would actually refer that question to you. Do you have some specific advice for our audience on that subject?
Sure, Ruth. You are right that you can use social listening tools to look for that. The other thing you can do is you can use a tracking code. So the same kind of thing that they put on a banner ad, you can put on your content. And then you can see when people have clicked on it. Our next question for Ruth is, what are some tips for delivering content to specific customer types? For example, an influencer at a specific point in the buying cycle. Do you begin by kind of segmenting your email distribution list to do that?
If that's the delivery vehicle for staying in touch with that target, yes. What do you think? I think undergirds that question is really about the data, meaning, have we established a relationship, an addressable relationship with these various targets? And if so, we need to understand not only what is their role in the buying process, but also what stage are they in. So, until those sort of theoretical questions get answered, then all of these great ideas are really not actionable. So that speaks to the importance of having a marketing database that is sortable, accessible, and allows you to deliver content according to the needs of your target audience based on on true information. And truthfully, the only way to understand where they are in the buying process and what their buying role is, is by either observing their body language digitally and taking some inferences, or by asking them. And there are techniques using email and other outbound media With a couple of questions at each touch to capture information about what's on their minds and where they are in the buying process.
That's great, Ruth. We have time for just one quick answer to a question. What do you see as the biggest challenge in content marketing, and how do you overcome it?
I would say the biggest today is lousy content, meaning Marketers, I'm afraid, are guilty of being too promotional, or too chest pounding, or too salesy in their content development. And they need to understand, just as Paul Gillen has said, that when it comes to content marketing, we need to be about education, about objective and informative help. in relationship building and take off our sales caps.
Boy, Ruth, I couldn't agree more with that myself. And unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. So Ruth, I just want to thank you again on behalf of our audience for all these great ideas, and thanks to our audience for attending today. If you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email your questions to eileen@mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to give them to Ruth for the answer. Later this week, we'll send all of you a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Build a Breakthrough Brand with a Clear Competitive Positioning, with Denise León, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on November 19th. We hope to see you all back here then. Bye, everybody. Bye.
