A large number of content marketing for B2B lead generation efforts are wasting money right now.

There are a lot of companies out there creating lots of content, trying to build hundreds or thousands of articles and focusing on page views (e.g., blog traffic) that won't create any traffic for their business in terms of revenue.

So you know the story by now, right? A writer has spent months working on a comprehensive guide to all the latest developments in their industry.

The piece receives a lot of search engine visibility and thousands of people read it, and none of them purchased your software.

Traffic is not the way to achieve "build your pipeline." If your content strategy is only going to attract people who want to learn for free, then you have a charity, and not a business.

The real purpose of creating content is to generate qualified demo requests, help move the sales process along, and create a consistent number of deals getting pushed.

You can't accomplish this without implementing a system completely based on buyer pain, sales data, and actual metrics.

Why Content Marketing for B2B Lead Generation Focuses on Revenue, Not Page Views

If you want to move away from "guessing" your revenue and instead prove it, then you need to completely change the way you think about creating content.

Many companies fail to generate enough revenue because they primarily focus on top-of-funnel awareness and skip the other stages of the decision-making process.

They don't include their sales team in the content creation discussions, nor do they measure anything beyond Google Analytics sessions.

To succeed, you need to be focused on all high-intent, bottom-funnel searches. You should use the sales call data you have to determine your content topics, and you should measure the influenced opportunities through your CRM.

Stop using generic ideas and instead focus on creating content that is directly relevant to your audience and that your team members will utilize in their follow-up activities.

You will build assets that focus on price comparisons, alternatives, case studies, etc. Also, you should use AI to create and facilitate content faster and not as a replacement for strategy.

There are still many marketing leaders that believe that the only way to fill the sales pipeline is through attending large, expensive conferences and in-person events.

However, numbers don’t support that.

Last year, Kellogg/Medill did an extensive study on B2B sales. They analyzed data from 1,203 digital events versus 919 in-person events, using a sample of over 160,000 employees among 784 strategically important accounts and nearly 50,000 sales opportunities.

The conclusions were conclusive.

Digital content creates more leads and completed sales than in-person events.

In fact, in-person events do not have any measurable impact on lead generation or won opportunities.

How Digital Content Makes the Sale

Digital assets are imperative and simply the most effective way to generate interest among buyers.

The study provided evidence that webinars, whitepapers and branded blogs generate increased volume of leads when consumed by senior-level executives.

It's important to note; the study found, engagement of junior and mid-level employees also creates significant increases in pipeline growth.

Digital assets have scalability. Digital content may be created with the intent that it is reusable and will last for many years to come, whereas in-person events occur on a one-time basis.

Content Marketing for B2B Lead Generation Supports Search Behavior

You cannot pay the bills with top-of-the-funnel traffic.

A person searching "What is marketing" may be a student, but someone searching "Best Marketing Automation Tools for SaaS" is a budgeted buyer ready to purchase.

Your SEO efforts should target the lower funnel of the purchase process.

Focusing on Buyers Ready to Purchase

The majority of your most effective organic traffic opportunities will result in very near to the point of purchase.

Put a large focus on creating pages for "alternatives" to products. Someone searching for their competitor's name and typing in the word 'alternatives' is very displeased with them and looking for a replacement.

If your page contains a side-by-side comparison of the features of both products and lists why your product is better, you have created a high-intent lead.

Follow the same strategy for pages that discuss "pricing". Follow the same strategy for pages that discuss "vs" comparisons.

Create content that is devoted to the application of your product for specific use cases related to your exact ideal customer profile (ICP).

These pages will typically not receive millions of visits per month; they may receive hundreds of visits per month. However, those visitors will generally convert into booked meetings.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales

In content marketing for B2B lead generation, the single biggest problem is the large divide between content creators and sales people.

Marketing creates content (articles) based on high-volume keywords; however, most of the content created by marketing does not help sales people close business.

The result is a database of irrelevant pages.

To solve this problem, you need to redesign your content topic selection process.

Identifying Potential Topics Through Customer Conversations

Do not attempt to guess what your customers want to read; instead, you should listen to your customers.

Your sales team is currently speaking with customers daily. They are hearing the specific objections, fears and questions your customers are experiencing.

The best way to identify your next content topics is to record customer calls and use a software program such as Gong or Chorus to monitor the calls.

If you're hearing the same objection three times in one week, you've likely got an idea for your next piece of content (i.e., a white paper or blog post).

Building Follow-Up Resources

You should ask your sales team one question: "What do you want to be able to send to a prospect after a demo?"

They won't necessarily want thought leadership about the future of work; they're going to want a case study detailing how one of their clients had a 40% return on investment.

They'll ask for a one-pager that explains how your API integrates with their tech stack and other information relevant to the sale they'll be making.

The content that sales teams can use to follow up with prospects must provide them with the resources they need to be successful selling your product, otherwise your content will not impact your sales pipeline.

The Technology Tools for Creating Pipeline Content

You must have the tools in place that allow you to build, measure and scale a content marketing for B2B lead generation system that generates actual sales opportunities.

While the market is oversaturated with the same content being created every day, the most successful sales teams are using the same technology stack to quickly and accurately measure sales opportunities.

Discovering and Optimizing Content

In order to discover what people are searching for and how to create the structure of your pages, you need to be aware of what is being searched for and how to structure your pages to ensure they are found.

Ahrefs and Semrush are considered the go-to tools for discovering "bottom-of-funnel" key phrases (i.e., individuals closer to making a purchase decision) and identifying gaps in competitor offerings.

Ubersuggest is a good source for verifying volume and doing basic quality audits.

After you have determined the topic you want to write about, you must write the article in an optimized way for both search engines as well as the reader, and not create something that sounds like a robot.

ClearScope and Surfer will help guide your authors so their articles are optimized for both search engines and readers and give them the ability to hit all the necessary search engine signals.

Sharing and Networking Strategy

If you simply write a post and publish it, but don't distribute it in the places where your buyers are located, you have failed in the distribution of your content.

To successfully distribute your content to your target audience, it is necessary to push content out to where buyers reside.

To assist with this, Shield is capable of tracking the performance of your LinkedIn posts, as well as the growth of your audience on LinkedIn.

CrystalKnows enables you to gather and utilize personality data to help you develop customized outreach when delivering your newly published content directly to specific target accounts.

The benefits of using ChatGPT in this process are huge. In contrasting its application to the overall approach used for developing your marketing strategy (in this case, what your actual marketing strategy will look like) ChatGPT should NOT be used to create the final marketing strategy for the business.

Instead, ChatGPT is best utilized to transform a lengthy original white paper into either a series of 10 separate LinkedIn posts, a series of 3 separate email drafts, or even a video script.

Tracking Sales and Impact

While measuring page views is also important, they are not worth the investment of time, energy, and/or talent without being able to demonstrate that they resulted in actual earned revenue for your business.

When utilizing Google Analytics, you can determine the baseline amount of traffic (as well as the flow of activity) coming to your pages.

However, to show proof of "B2B" revenue, you will need to look deeper into the records, which can be accomplished by using HubSpot as your primary customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

By utilizing HubSpot's functionality, you will have the capability of linking a contact with the precise articles they read prior to booking a sales demo.

Using Dreamdata allows users to view how various activities and communications combine to create a complete journey through a B2B sales process.

Dreamdata tracks all of the complex pathways through which contacts go over the course of an average six-month sales cycle and shows which specific blog articles or webinars influenced a successful business outcome, even if the buyer consumed them long before signing the contract.

Creating a Daily Plan

Having a strategy is meaningless without maintaining the discipline necessary to follow a clearly established daily process.

A systematic approach to creating a piece of content should start with an outline that clearly articulates what you want to say.

Once your outline is complete, you should determine how this content will be evaluated, based upon these criteria.

Grading Your Topic Ideas

You should not just choose an idea that sounds like a good one. You need to evaluate your idea on a topic score card.

Prior to a writer beginning to write any words, each idea should be assessed using these four (4) criteria.

Criterion #1—What is the Objective? Is your audience seeking to obtain general information regarding a particular subject, or are they attempting to compare various software applications?

Criterion #2—What is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? Does your selected topic appeal to a senior management level person (for example) or is it appealing to an entry-level intern?

Criterion #3—What is the Deal Impact? Will this content be used as a selling tool by a sales representative to actually close a sale?

Criterion #4—What is the production cost of your content? A short checklist may take one (1) day to put together. For example, original research may take two (2) months of time. Evaluate the value of the time spent preparing the content and the estimated total amount of pipeline value.

Reusing Your Best Content

There should never be a single instance of creating a piece of content.

If you spend a month interviewing multiple experts and writing an extensive guide, take the time to ensure you get the most possible benefit from that guide.

For example, you could convert the main guide into a downloadable PDF, which would serve as a lead capture tool; break your data points down into five (5) smaller posts on social media; create a webinar, where you discuss your research findings with the viewers; and finally, take the webinar transcript and create an email campaign, where you nurture your new leads.

This strategy allows you to ensure that your high-value content reaches your target audience at each point along the buyer's journey.

Checking Your Content Every Three Months

Great teams clean up their mess.

Every three months you should audit your entire content library by reviewing engagement statistics, as well as which types of calls-to-action are working.

If you have a site with a lot of traffic to a post (but no conversions), then make changes to your call-to-action on that post.

Or, if you have a post that ranks for a high-intent keyword and sits at the bottom of page two in search results, then you should re-write that post and update all of the dates.

In addition, remove or redirect any pages that provide no value to the site. Having a smaller, more focused blog will always out-perform having a huge site filled with old, broken pages.

Neil Patel emphasises the importance of these little tests and quarterly content audits, and says that it keeps your website on track.

Problems You Might Face Inside Your Company

Building this system will not go perfectly, and you will face some internal obstacles.

For example, your sales force may forget to use the content, your CRM may be missing data, or it may take time for your legal and leadership teams to review content, which then causes delays in production.

You need to acknowledge these limitations from the very beginning.

Establish a clear handoff policy between marketing and sales, and provide your sales reps with training on how to locate and use the case studies.

You should keep pushing your operations team to resolve issues of attribution gaps within your CRM. While it will take time, each step forward generates measurable results from your content.

The Final Verdict on Content Marketing for B2B Lead Generation

The time when companies wrote generic blog posts to create high numbers of visitors is gone.

The companies that will be successful today are those that treat their content marketing for B2B lead generation as a revenue-generating operation.

To do this requires a radical shift away from vanity metrics; you must focus on the pain points that impact the buying decision, and you must create content that your sales team wants to use on sales calls.

To do this, you should create your topic maps to line up with your bottom-funnel intent, use actual sales data for your content ideas, and track your final pipeline impact in your CRM.

Anything less will generate noise rather than success.