1. White paper and research report

A white paper and its close cousin, a research report, are common types of content used in B2B marketing. They are appropriate for presenting an academic perspective, which means being sure that what you provide doesn’t feel like marketing or promotional material. Educational and informative, this content type is relatively long, ranging from six to twenty pages, and often more for research reports. The longer format means that someone who reads the whole paper spends up to twenty minutes reading it, which can boost the metrics.

It’s common to gate such content, which means requiring people to provide their contact information before they have access to the white paper or report. Companies can invest several months as well as substantial cash in the research, writing, editing, and design required to create a white paper, and even more if the end product is a paper based on original research such as an industry survey. The payoff comes when people are interested enough in it to be willing to share their business contact information. This is how most companies gather leads.

Besides attracting external audiences, white papers and research reports can fill internal purposes of larger companies or academic institutions. For example, several years ago, Northwestern University undertook a large project to align its many departments over many campuses underneath a global brand. How did the university go about communicating with its many faculty members, deans, and other administrators? A committee of the Northwestern Board of Trustees wrote a white paper to help articulate the new vision.

2. Blog post and article

Blog posts and other types of articles are popular with marketers because they are extremely flexible content types. They allow words, images, and sound or video to be combined onto one page. They also enable companies to more easily reap the benefits of search engine optimization.

Developing an article for a blog or other outlet requires the writer to research a topic—which may include conducting interviews with subject-matter experts—create an outline, draft the piece, have the content edited and, lastly, proofread before it’s published. Once an overall design has been established for a blog post or other article type, not a lot of additional design or production work is needed. Most web CRMs allow content to be published instantly.

Blog posts can be generically published for the reader from a brand. Recently, however, there has been a movement toward content coming to the reader from specific individuals, often with their own unique perspectives. There’s something about knowing that a blog post comes from a particular individual that makes it more credible. Publishing content from the individual also means companies can more easily scale their content, because every post need not be written by one writer. Although various writers will have different perspectives and will focus on different topics, it’s important to have editorial standards in place for all blog content, to keep the reader’s experience consistent.

Think beyond publishing content on only your own company’s platform. It can be hard to build one individual’s or company’s own audience, and one way to expand it is to borrow someone else's audience. If the audience for a different platform likes the content, some of them will seek out other articles from the same source and follow the writer or company on social media.

Consider publishing articles in external publications. For example, SpencerStuart, a global recruiting and leadership development firm, published “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture” in Harvard Business Review. As a result, the firm reached a whole new audience via the business journal’s readers, and it ended up with a published article to use for its own content marketing purposes.

Also consider becoming a guest contributor on someone else's platform. LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions blog is one example of a platform with a lot of different contributors. Ever since it decided to publish contributing writers, the blog publishes content much more frequently, up to four to six pieces of new content a week. This is a win for both LinkedIn and the contributing writers.

3. E-book

If you need to get the attention of someone you don't already have a relationship with, an e-book is a good way to do it. They’re usually longer than an article, but shorter than a white paper or research report. They tend to be more casual and, often with lists, tips, or checklists. Most important, e-books shouldn’t focus on what a company has to offer. It should help the customer solve a problem.

E-books usually have more interesting designs and a variety of visual elements to capture the audience's attention. Because of this, creating an e-book requires a designer as well as a writer and is likely to take more time to create. Because people usually read e-books on desktop or laptop screen or a tablet, a design with pages that are 8.5 x 11 is fairly standard.

Make sure that at the end of your e-book you have a strong call to action. What do you want the audience to do? Be as clear as possible. This is usually the time to pitch your product/service. Make sure they know your company offers services related to your content.

4. Case study

Case studies are great at telling the story of how a product or service has helped a customer. It's always more effective when someone else tells a story on your behalf, and in this case your audience will relate to the situation of the customer telling the story.

Put another way, “Don't take it from us, take it directly from our client.” Using this content type to show social proof is very effective. A customer with big brand-name recognition makes your content even more credible.

A case study usually includes several sections: background or context, the challenges or challenges the customer faced, the solution your company provided, and the impact or results. Use the same organization for all your company’s case studies so that your audience understands how you tell these types of stories.

Generally, case studies should be no more than one or two pages long, since they are brief snapshots of what has happened. The best case studies are based on interviews with the customers themselves and include direct quotations, which humanize the story and enhance the social proof.

Obviously, you need to get permission from the person or company featured in the case study. When interviewing your customer, try to get real numbers and specific results instead of generic descriptions. Sharing results in case studies is critical to making them believable as well as a more interesting read. If your client isn't comfortable sharing the raw numbers, offer to use percentage changes to communicate the impact without providing detailed data.

Case studies can live online as well as web pages or PDFs. Some companies choose to distribute printed-out color PDFs as well. Depending on the company, topic, and potential readers, sometimes spending more on the visual presentation and production values makes sense.

For example, commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle used beautiful photography to illustrate “Every Building Has Story,” a leave-behind for prospective customers that showed what its design teams did to transform different types of spaces. The skillful presentation, supported by a website, captured the attention and imagination of Jones Day’s prospective customer, and the physical publication was an effective reminder of what the company had to offer.

5. Video

The popularity of video continues to grow. Videos are great at telling stories and capturing audience attention. It’s also easy to watch a video, which requires less effort than reading.

Video was once very costly to produce. With more affordable equipment, however, today it's possible to create a cost-effective video. However, it’s still a complex project to produce. You usually need three to five people to create it: someone to develop the vision, someone to shoot the video, someone to capture the sound, and then someone to edit what’s been captured.

If you're lucky, you can find one or two people who have multiple skills. For example, the creative director can also shoot the video and perhaps even edit it. This approach can reduce both production costs and production time.

Live online video is a newer approach that is gaining traction. It started with companies like U-Stream and Meerkat. Today, virtually every social media platform has live-streaming. The appeal of live-streaming is that it’s very efficient to make (since there’s no editing). And, since there’s only one take, what’s being communicated is very authentic—which can make it more interesting to the audience. However, live-streaming can be stressful to create, since no editing means you can’t go back and do anything over again.

6. Buying guide

A buying guide is a great type of content for prospects just starting to consider purchasing a category of goods or services. It helps them to understand how they should be thinking through and going about making their decision. The goal of a buying guide is to educate the customer in a neutral way. You want to describe how the entire category works and how a prospect should evaluate making a decision. You can even list out the pros and cons of each of your competitors, similar to how your customer would think about it.

The key here is to do so in an unbiased way. If you can do that, they’re more likely to consider you. You want to get your customer to think like this: “This company really helped me understand how to think about this decision… I should include them as one of the companies I’m considering since they seem to know what they’re talking about.”

Buying guides can have design elements to them, although it doesn't need to be as splashy as an e-book. It’s usually longer. It's not uncommon for a buying guide to be eight to twelve pages long.

7. Magazine

Publishing a magazine seems to be a dream come true for many B2B marketers. There’s something enticing about a thick, printed magazine as the final product. I recommend magazines only if you are serious about making a long-term commitment. If you create a quarterly or monthly magazine, usually it’s better to either build it in-house or work with an outside agency that specializes in magazines.

What's nice about the magazine approach is that a printed magazine is a physical piece. You can mail it to a customer or offer it in person. The obvious downside is the cost. Depending on how many you print, the cost might range anywhere from $1 to $5 per piece.

When you choose a magazine as your content type, don't expect to see a short-term return on investment. What’s the best way to measure it? Customer research tends to be an effective measurement tool. You can ask your customers things like the following:

- Do you have a more favorable impression of our company after reading the magazine?

- How would you describe our brand after reading the magazine?

Magazines tend to be chosen by larger companies, with bigger and more stable budgets. Even at larger companies, it’s not uncommon for a magazine to be printed for only two or three years. Then there's an initiative to reduce company costs, and inevitably someone says, “Do we really need to print this thing? Can't we just distribute it online?” The answer, of course, is, “Sure, we can create content and distribute it online. But that diminishes how its purpose is filled, because the physical copy of the magazine is what makes it interesting.” So, again, if you want to publish a magazine, be sure there’s a long-term commitment to do so.

8. Interactive content and tools

Most of the content types discussed in this chapter are examples of one-way communication; you're essentially talking at your audience. With interactive content, the audience role is more active. Examples of interactive pieces are quizzes, assessments, calculators, and games.

These two-way experiences are powerful for you and your audience. Beyond just capturing your audience’s attention, you are finding out what’s important to them. If you execute this content type the right way, this information is used to determine the messages you send in the future—or perhaps even remove from the mailing list the prospects who are not a good fit.

One of the leading companies in interactive content is Outgrow. Its platform allows companies to easily create and distribute interactive content. You can spend as little as five to ten hours creating a piece of interactive content within the platform before being ready to launch it. Plus, no coding is involved, so it’s easy to use.

SEO companies use the tool approach all the time. They ask you to enter your website address and they evaluate how effectively your website works. This approach is useful to the marketer, since they're not just telling you how great they are, they’re showing you what your weaknesses are. It’s rare for a company to be able to show value this quickly and directly. And a real person isn’t doing the work behind the scenes of an SEO company; with its tools, it happens automatically.

An early pioneer in interactive tools as free content is HubSpot. The company created a tool called Website Grader, launched it in 2006, and has graded more than four million websites since. After you provide your website URL, the tool, now called Marketing Grader, breaks out technical performance for a variety of categories, such as page speed, mobile friendliness, and SEO. It is also a great tool for competitive research. I've done many competitive assessments that showed how other companies’ websites were performing. Actual website-performance data for competitors is a useful window into those companies.

With Ceros, another interactive content platform, you can create experiential content that’s embedded into any web page. Adding this dynamic content to a blog post is very effective. With the use of this platform, I’ve seen increases by more than 25 percent of engagement metrics such as the time on the website and the amount of content shared. This is not uncommon. As Ryan Brown, head of brand strategy at Ceros, told me, “When you reimagine something from static to experiential, the marketing metrics always perform better.”

Option 1. Build an in-house team.

If you can make at least a two- to three-year commitment to content marketing, building an in-house team is the way to go. You can start with a team of three or four people who can execute both online and offline work. You’ll need a writer, a designer, and someone who can monitor and analyze the content’s performance.

The ability to hand-pick team members is the main advantage of building an in-house team. Doing it will take some time, however. It’s not uncommon for finding, interviewing, and onboarding employees to take two to three months. Among the additional advantages of an in-house team is that it’s pretty cost effective if you have enough work for the whole team. Your costs are fixed each year, and you can create as much content as you can schedule for the team.

Through working together and using similar processes to create similar content over time, the team will also become very efficient and able to create content faster. In addition, a full-time in-house writer will eventually develop expertise about your business’s subject matter.

Naturally, building your own team has some disadvantages. It can be hard to find the right talent. Why? Many content creators are independent contractors because they enjoy the flexibility of working on multiple brands and being able to say no to a project or increasing their rates when busy. And if one of the content creators leaves, it can throw a wrench into everything for a couple months, until the person can be replaced.

In addition, building an in-house team requires spending a substantial sum upfront. You need to factor in expenses like office space, benefits, and training. Plus, if you want to expand the team over time, you’ll need to factor in hiring someone to manage the work.

Option 2. Hire an agency.

Love-hate relationships between agencies and their clients are not uncommon. Some agencies are great partners. Others say anything to win the job and figure out later whether they can deliver it. Some agencies focus too much on their own agendas, such as winning awards, which causes headaches for their clients.

However, hiring an agency is an excellent approach if you want to both scale up your content marketing quickly and tap into people who know how it should work. These benefits come at a premium, of course, since agencies have to make money to survive and grow. Clients are often frustrated by the high cost, but that comes with the territory. Most agencies will bill based on the hourly rates of their various team members. Some are open to considering fixed-bid pricing, but only when they are comfortable with the scope of what’s being created.

In addition, agencies are not known for having lean teams. It’s rare to find an agency of only two or three people. Midsize agencies usually staff an account with four to six people. As for large agencies, it’s not uncommon to have six to twelve people on an account’s team. Extra layers can slow down the content creation and increase its cost.

Of all the B2B content-creation models, using an agency is the most unpredictable for clients. The team assigned to an account often changes over time, because someone either left the agency or wanted to work on a different account. And it’s not unheard of for agency leadership not to spend as much time on your account as they should, perhaps, because instead they are focusing on winning a new account or increasing their margin on a fixed-bid project, and only show up for client meetings.

When the relationship is scoped right and the people on the account are good, an agency can produce outstanding work. They usually excel at conceptual thinking, generating big ideas and creating campaigns rather than just a bunch of one-off deliverables. Upon hiring an agency, you can instantly leverage its process, people, and knowledge. It’s relatively easy to find and hire an agency, although the scoping process can take some time.

If you need to create content quickly, you could use an outside perspective, and are willing to pay a premium, working with any agency is an excellent option.

Option 3. Use a staffing firm to find freelancers.

I’ve used staffing firms before, when I worked inside Fortune 1000 companies. They’re a great model if you need quick access to specialized talent and don’t want to invest time in finding the right team. Within twenty-four hours of our initial phone call, the firm's account representative had two or three candidates ready for me to interview over the phone. Most of the candidates could start working within a couple days.

The primary benefit of using a staffing firm is the avoidance of the red tape required to hire a company employee, which can take weeks or even months. No long-term decisions are required; if you need someone for a three- or four-week project, that’s completely fine, as long as you have set with the firm upfront the expectations for the length of the project.

The main disadvantage of working with a staffing agency is that it can take up to 50 percent of the worker’s total hourly billable rate. This raises the chance of the person you’re working with being underpaid, based on his or her market rate. And, if underpaid, the person is less likely to want to have a long-term relationship with the staffing company, or with you.

But if you like the agency’s persons, can’t you work directly with him or her and pay the worker’s own billable rate? Nope. Most staffing agencies have both clients and freelancers sign one-year non-solicitation agreements that prevent them from working directly with each other. You can, however, choose to pay a one-time fee to “convert” a freelancer into your company’s full-time employee. This is a fair approach, and going down this path would probably be a little less expensive than paying a recruiting fee.

Another disadvantage is that a staffing agency handles only the matchmaking and billing. It isn’t around during the project and brings no thinking to the table, which can be frustrating. You need to be comfortable with the staffing agency finding the right person for you, and that’s it.

Option 4. Find and manage freelancers yourself.

Finding and managing freelancers yourself is an excellent option if you’re connected to various types of freelancers. Before jumping in, however, you should have experience managing content creators or other creative professionals. You need to understand how the creative process works and the type of structure required to get the best work out of a person. Sometimes it means providing specific guidance. Other times, it’s about defining a problem and letting the freelancer solve it creatively.

If you’re able to find freelancers on your own, this is usually a cost-effective solution. You’re not paying for an in-house team, and you’re not paying the markup fee of an agency or staffing firm.

But, as with option one, the best part is you hand-pick your team. You know upfront who you will be working with, rather than being at the mercy of people who have been assigned to your account. The flexibility of being able to hire a freelancer only when one is needed is a benefit as well. For example, if you need someone to write one or two articles, you can hire a person just for that. You don’t need to commit to paying someone for forty hours a week for three or four weeks.

The biggest challenge of working with freelancers is that their schedules change all the time. Sometimes, they’re available when needed and everything works out perfectly. Other times they’re booked solid and have no time to work with you. This is why it’s good to have in your “stable” of freelancers multiple people who can perform similar tasks—and to plan ahead, so that you can book the freelancers you will need in at least three to five weeks.

Option 5. Use a content marketing platform.

Content-marketing platforms gained traction around 2015, when marketplaces like NewsCred, Contently, Skyword, and Upwork became a legitimate way to find content creators. They work similarly to staffing agencies, except that you go online to search for the workers you need instead of working with an account rep or salesperson. When you find someone you want to hire, you are charged a fee but it is nowhere as steep as a staffing agency’s fee.

These platforms can be great when you have a specific need. For example, using an advanced search, in less than five minutes it’s possible to find a writer who has twenty-plus years of experience, works with SaaS startups, and is an expert in enterprise network security. Once you find what you’re working for, you can review their online work samples to confirm whether they would be a good fit.

Quick, easy access to talent is what makes content-marketing platforms so valuable. Some of them offer services beyond finding talent. For example, Contently has content-management software that helps with collaboration, governance, and performance tracking of content, which could be helpful for those just getting started with content marketing. Some platforms offer packages that include account-management services. This is a nice option for those at larger companies who don’t want to manage a team of freelancers and don’t mind paying extra for help with the heavy lifting.

Option 6. Use a content collective.

A relatively new approach, a content collective is a blend of the agency, staffing, and freelance models. The collective option uses an on-demand approach—that is, the client pays only when its content is being created. It’s ideal for companies that need content marketing but can’t invest a large sum in building a team or signing an agreement with an agency.

Collective approaches are good for clients that don’t have large budgets and are looking for people with expertise. The client receives agency-like service, as someone at the collective manages all the client’s freelancers. And transparency allows the client to know the team it’s getting. Often the client can even hand-pick its content-creating freelancers.

The collective model is also efficient, able to kick off a project quickly. Some collectives have moved to a fixed-pricing model. At 26 Characters, we created a menu of the more popular deliverable items and services that includes various pricing assumptions. It virtually eliminates the scoping process, which is appealing to companies that need to have content created quickly. On the downside, unless a client books a collective’s team for months at a time, a collective won’t have dedicated resources focused only on your business. They might also work across different cities, so in-person meetings with the client can’t be guaranteed. And, because the team members usually don’t work on-site, one can’t enjoy the luxury of walking down the hall and seeing them every day.

As with all the content-creation options, the pros and cons of the collective model must be weighed. But, it’s an excellent approach for those looking to create content and wanting to avoid building an in-house team or contracting with an expensive agency.

1. Define your goals

What do you want to achieve with your B2B content marketing? Do you want to build thought leadership, generate leads, or strengthen relationships with customers? Once you know your goals, you can start planning your content accordingly.

2. Know your audience

Who are you trying to reach with your B2B content marketing? What are their needs and pain points? What type of content will they find most valuable? By understanding your target audience, you can create material that is more likely to resonates with them.

3. Create an editorial calendar

A editorial calendar will help you plan, publish, and promote your B2B content. Having a clear publishing schedule will make it easier to stay on track and ensure that your material is timely and relevant.

4. Promote your content

B2B content marketing is not effective if no one sees your content. Be sure to promote your material through social media, email marketing, and other channels. You can also use paid advertising to reach a wider audience.

5. Measure your results

Keep track of the metrics that are most important to your B2B content marketing goals. This could include website traffic, leads generated, or social media engagement. By measuring your results, you can adjust your strategy as needed and ensure that your B2B content marketing is successful.

1. Media equivalency

Put simply, media equivalency is the cost you would have to pay to generate the same number of impressions. This approach can be quickly implemented because you don’t need infrastructure or technical resources.

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say your content generated 800,000 impressions on LinkedIn last month. If you used a paid LinkedIn campaign to reach the same target, you would have been charged a cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) of $14. Eight hundred thousand impressions were generated, which is the equivalent of $11,200 (800 x $14). This is also what’s known as “earned media,” the number of media impressions earned after your message reaches people online.

This type of model has been around for a while. It started when public relations departments wanted to quantify the value of media placements it received. For example, the appearance in the New York Times of your company’s story or quote from an executive has a value. PR departments determined the value based on how much room the coverage took up in the paper and paper’s circulation.

Not everyone believes in media equivalency. Some are skeptical because it’s not a tangible thing. After all, the value generated doesn’t end up as cash in a bank account. While there is something to be said for this approach being somewhat theoretical, I like that it uses market-rate CPMs to determine the value of what it would cost to distribute your message in a paid channel.

2. Lead generation

Most marketers measure the impact of their content by counting how many leads it enables them to capture. As touched on in the blog post, “Content Types,” these leads are captured by gating content behind a required form. The user receives access to the content in exchange for providing his or her contact information. These leads are then handed over to the sales team, who nurture the leads until they become real customers.

The nice thing about this approach is that it measures the direct impact of content on revenue. You can clearly say that a gated article posted on your company website created ten leads, and that three of them converted into actual customers. Add up all the revenue from each of the three leads, and that’s the amount of revenue generated by the content marketing effort.

Then look at how much that particular marketing effort (the article) cost relative to how much revenue it brought in. The result is the return on investment, or ROI, for that article. This is why lead generation is the most popular and noncontroversial way to measure the effectiveness of content marketing. It’s hard to dispute, since it clearly identifies the number of generated leads per marketing effort.

Lead generation also allows your content marketing’s effectiveness to improve over time. After creating various pieces of content, you’ll know which ones work and can tweak the others to improve their performance. The lead generation results of individual pieces of content should affect your approach to creating content. You could make the case, for example, that company resources are better spent on videos than blogs, or that content organized as case studies are downloaded more than general articles. Clearly, a lot of variables, including topic, format, design, and quality of execution, go into the performance of a piece of content, but over time the lead generation results will give you a feel for what’s working and what isn’t.

For this approach to be effective, you need a way to capture the leads and pass them along to the sales team. You also need a sales team that follows up and lets you know how each of the leads has performed.

3. Market research

If you have the resources to conduct market research, it can be an effective tool to measure the long-term impact of your content. This approach uses customer research to measure how people feel about the content you create.

This is a pretty straightforward approach. You can use this as a one-off research initiative or tie it into your company’s existing research. If you have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) program, as discussed in Chapter 16, “How Do I Improve Customer Retention?,” this is an ideal question to slip into that survey.

You can ask a variety of questions to learn about what people think of your company. There are a variety of best practices for how to ask these questions, which we’re not going into here. Just know that the way you ask the questions is really important. And you want to make the questions consistent over time, so that the results are comparable and you can monitor trends over time.

Market research is great because you collect information from your actual customers. The results are helpful for aligning internal teams on what to focus on. After all, it’s hard to argue with an editorial direction when your customers are telling you that’s what they want and need.

4. Sales force feedback

This is a down-and-dirty approach to seeing how content is working. It’s not the best approach, because the feedback is not coming from your prospects or customers. But marketers can take what you learn from their sales teams as directional learning.

With this approach, you send a five- to ten-question survey to the sales team. Ask them if they think the B2B content you’re creating is of any value. Make sure to frame the question in a way that focuses on the customer. For example, “What would your customers say about the content we create for them?”

The strength of this approach is that the cost is extremely low and implementation is easy. You can create a survey in ten minutes and have your head of sales send it out. You can also use this survey to generate new content ideas, since the sales force understands well what’s happening in the marketplace.

A word of caution: what your sales team wants and what your customers want may be two different things. Sometimes customers don’t reveal everything to a salesperson. And sometimes salespeople don’t always ask the right questions to determine customer pain or needs. So, again, don’t use this technique as the only way to understand how effective your content is.

5. Test and control groups

This is the most complex methodology for measuring content-marketing performance. When implemented, however, it can provide proof of the content’s impact. You split the same audience into two groups, the test and the control groups, and test different variables to understand the incremental lift. You need the right tools to set up the tests, but these are standard these days and easy to use.

You can test something as simple as different subject lines or pieces of copy. For example, in testing a renewal direct-mail piece for a fitness company mailed in March, the line “Swimsuit season is right around the corner” drove a lift in overall conversion compared to the control group. It’s amazing to see what one small tweak like that can have on performance.

Tests aren’t always so simple. For example, I’ve tested the effects of a series of tactics in one group of cities and a different series of tactics in a similar group of cities. We then looked at the difference in the two groups’ brand awareness and sales. The results helped us to determine the mix of marketing tactics and budgets that would optimize performance.

The main advantage of using test and control groups is that it’s a data-driven approach that provides a conclusion. You can also perform a chi-squared test to understand how confident you are that you can replicate the test results. Companies that embrace test and control are usually better at making more sound decisions about their sales and marketing. Why? There’s no guessing about the outcome; you letting the numbers tell you how to move forward.

You know you’re in a test-and-control culture when someone says something like, “Interesting idea . . . we should test it.” Letting the data make the decisions also helps reduce internal resistance to adopting new ideas and approaches. Endless debates can be avoided by basing decisions on the numbers.