You’ve poured out a lot into developing your content strategy.

But is that enough to help your B2B brand get the most out of your content marketing?

One of the biggest mistakes many brands make is to think content marketing is just about keyword research, writing SEO-friendly content, and publishing it.

But with your competitors doing the same thing, you need to put in extra work and effort. You need to have an effective content marketing strategy.

That’s where a B2B content management strategy comes to play. 

What is B2B Content Management?

Research shows that 47% of buyers research at least four to five pieces of content to help inform their purchase decision.

That’s why you must invest as much as possible in ensuring you’re producing and curating content that results in business growth.

You must invest in effective content management.

Content management (CM) is the process of ideating, sourcing, creating, managing, and delivering content throughout the content lifecycle. Core practices in content management include:

  • Information and data collection
  • Content planning and production
  • Delivery
  • Governance 

Content management also involves the storage or deletion of content where necessary. In short, it encompasses the entire digital lifecycle of any digital content your brand uses, including images, text, audio, video, and more. 

Content management also involves managing the tools and human resources associated with your content at each stage of its lifecycle.

Benefits of Having a Scalable Content Management Plan

Why is content management so important?

Why should you invest time and resources into developing a content management strategy?

Let’s briefly look at a few benefits of having a content management strategy, shall we?

1. Improve Your Content Team’s Efficiency

One of the most important reasons to care about content management is that it drastically improves your content team’s efficiency. From ideation to production to curation, strategic content management helps ensure that each stage of your content’s lifecycle produces the best results possible. 

2. Results in Extended Reach

Content management has the benefit of helping you make the most of your B2B content strategy. One reason for that is that it enables you to streamline your processes and take advantage of opportunities you discover. As a result, you can better extend your organic reach online.

3. Helps Boost Conversions

The main reason for creating and running content marketing campaigns is to drive inbound leads and boost sales. This is another reason to care about content management. Content management involves taking a deep dive into every aspect of the lifecycle of your content. Because of this, it helps you know exactly what to optimize to boost each content piece’s conversion rates.

Another reason content management helps boost conversion is that it enables you to create and serve the right content to the right person, at the right time.

4. Saves Your Content Marketing Budget

Despite being one of the best ways of obtaining organic traffic and leads, content marketing isn’t free. And an effective content management strategy is essential in ensuring you don’t overpay for your content marketing. 

How?

Content management helps you identify high-performing strategies and content. Investing more in this will not only save your budget but also increase the ROI of your content marketing.

Mitigate Risks

Managing resources, human and otherwise,

What Should a Great Content Management Strategy Include?

Now that you know what content management is, you’re probably wondering what should be included in a content management strategy.

Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.

Here are five essentials every content management strategy should have:

  1. Goals: Outline your content marketing and management goals clearly. This will help you know the steps to take to put your B2B content marketing strategy in place.
  2. Tools: Executing an effective content marketing strategy requires the use of tools. Your B2B content management strategy must include all the tools every team member will need to execute their duties.
  3. Workflows: Each stage of the content development and distribution lifecycle must have clearly defined workflows to help guide successful implementation. Unfortunately, over 21% of brands don’t have documented workflows to guide their content operations.
  4. Set roles and responsibilities: Your content management strategy must clearly define the roles of everyone involved in the entire content creation cycle. It must also clearly define their responsibilities.
  5. Timelines and calendars: A lot of components involved in executing an effective B2B content strategy are time-sensitive. Make sure to make timelines and deadlines clear. 

These are just a few examples of what you need to execute a robust content management plan. Other elements to include are largely dependent on your brand, product, and audience. 

How to Design and Implement Your Own Content Management Plan

Ready to get your hands dirty with your own B2B content management strategy?

Then let’s get to it. Here’s how you can design and implement one:  

Choose the Right CMS

One of the very first steps to getting your content management strategy off the ground is to invest in a good content management system (CMS). A CMS is an integral tool as it can handle most of the heavy lifting involved in managing content. A good CMS will help with managing your team and publishing your content. 

It can also help you monitor the progress of a campaign, particularly if you connect it to an analytics platform like Google Analytics.

When choosing a CMS, also ensure it will scale with you as your business grows.

Define Team Roles

Another critical element of designing and implementing a content management strategy is to define your team members’ roles. Some of the most important roles you must define include:

Content Manager

Content managers oversee the ideation, development, and distribution of content. They’re responsible for designing the right messaging for your brand and target audiences relevant to your brand. Also, a content manager is responsible for managing the content team and the tools they use.

Content Strategist

A content strategist is responsible for establishing and executing a strategy to guide your brand’s content activities. The key role of a content strategist is to ensure your content meets business and user needs. This way, you get better quality traffic and leads.

Writers

Writers are the heart of your content campaigns. After all, they’re the ones responsible for the actual creation of content. This is why you must invest in writers that:

  • Understand your industry, brand, and product
  • Can connect with your audience
  • Know how to create SEO-friendly, E.A.T content

Finding a writer who gets it, especially if you’re a B2B brand, can be quite a challenge. However, you need to ensure you get the best of the best as the quality of writing will impact your bottom line.

Managing a content team requires a lot of knowledge, expertise, and time. That’s why outsourcing makes sense in a lot of cases. And if you’re not sure how to pick the right agency to help with your B2B content management, use our framework.

Develop SOPs & Processes

Studies show that 63% of brands don’t take a strategic approach to content management due to a lack of defined processes.

For your content team and content marketing campaign to be effective, you must develop standard operation procedures (SOPs). These will help standardize your workflows, resulting in you being able to scale content creation and your B2B content management strategy, all without compromising quality.

How do you create an effective SOP your team can easily run with?

First of all, make sure to value clarity over cleverness. Your SOP must be easy to understand and follow. Next:

  • Write down a list of your processes
  • Note the steps required to take to complete each process
  • Write a manual to walk users through
  • Make the SOP easily accessible to everyone

In the same vein, you should also create a content management strategy template to help make it easier for you to keep a handle on all elements of your strategy.

With your SOP in place, you can now effectively implement and scale your B2B content management strategy.

Defining Success

With every element of your content management in place, you’re now ready to roll with it. Before you do, however, there’s one last piece of the puzzle to put in place.

You must put a system in place to define what success looks like.

So, how will you know if your B2B content management strategy is working?

Easy. Set key performance indicators (KPIs).

  • Team satisfaction rates: Effective content management results in high satisfaction rates from your content team. This also leads to high-quality content.
  • Content KPIs: Track metrics that show the effectiveness of your content. Examples include traffic, page views, sessions, and more.
  • Sales KPIs: These include MQLs and SQLs and deals closed that can be attributed to your content marketing campaigns.

Defining what success looks like is critical as it will help you know whether your strategy is working or not. And if it’s not, you’ll be in a better position to know what to adjust to get it to work.

Getting Buy-in From Your Whole Organization

One of the most difficult aspects of B2B content management is getting buy-in from stakeholders in your organization. Not everyone knows and understands the value of content marketing. Because of that, convincing them to invest in it can be quite a challenge.

So how do you get buy-in?

First, remember that you must prove the business case for B2B content marketing and the management that comes with it. To do this, you’ll have to prepare a pitch that showcases the power of content marketing — with case studies to boot.

If you can’t prepare this pitch yourself, consider having the agency you’re partnering with doing it for you — if they offer that service.

Scaling Your B2B Content Management Strategy — Key to Business Growth

Content marketing is one of the best ways to drive your inbound marketing strategy. Executed well, your efforts will pay off with high-quality leads and deals that will lead to high CLV (customer lifetime value) customers.

That’s why, as you grow, you must also scale your B2B content management strategy.

One thing to remember is, just like your business, your content marketing strategy is a living entity. To be effective, you must ensure to scale your content management strategy. With the tips outlined above, this should now be a walk in the park. Well, not exactly, but it should make your job easier.

Need help with your B2B content management strategy?

Feel free to reach out and lets talk about effective content strategy and marketing.