In B2B marketing, success comes from following a clear overall strategy that we focus on as a whole, rather than chasing quick wins. Content marketing should act as a unifying thread that connects your wider strategic goals. Your content is an investment and like any meaningful investment, you want to see a return.
Great content creation is built on a foundation of relevance, clarity, emotional and rational balance, creativity, and connection. When you get these elements right, your content delivers more measurable impact.
In this article we give you actionable recommendations to improve the ROI of your B2B content marketing by maximising its effectiveness. Throughout the concepts we explore, we highlight how data will be your guiding light in refining your content strategy.
The current landscape
To understand what drives high-performing content today, it’s essential to look at the shifts shaping the B2B environment. Our Year of Opportunity report explores the key trends creating new opportunities for marketers. Highlights include:
- The ever-changing B2B buying committee, which includes more stakeholders than ever.
- The changing demographic of buying cohorts – Gen Z and millennials form 71% of B2B buyers. They demand engaging, relevant content.
- Longer and more complex sales cycles.
- Influence of the dark funnel where the new decision makers are digital savvy, self-serving information, and researching solutions in the dark long before they can be spotted as “in-market” prospects.
- Evolved personalisation – the right content at the right time, and customised to their challenges.
- The widespread adoption of AI, and how transparency is more important than ever.
- Measurement metrics and moving beyond lead-based KPIs to measure brand awareness, engagement, and influence, aligning metrics with today’s complex buyer journey.
What does this mean for content creation? In the face of these shifts, high-performing content must earn trust, feel authentic and stand out amid the flood of material across every channel, both the great and the forgettable. The challenge is to build genuine connection while consistently prioritising quality over quantity across every stage of the customer journey.
The content lifecycle
The content marketing lifecycle includes key stages like goal setting, planning, creation, distribution, monitoring, analysis, and repurposing (source).
A common pattern we notice is that teams can overly focus on the first stages of the content lifecycle. The excitement and momentum behind a content initiative as a result often fades once the content is live. Content audits and content attribution are essential practices to ensure your content investment continues delivering value.
Content audits
You likely already conduct content audits, but how can you elevate them?
Here are some useful tips to improve your audits and ways to overcome common challenges you might find:
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- Break it down in stages
To simplify the process, define clear goals, identify potential complexities, and involve the right stakeholders early on. Delegating tasks from the start will also streamline the process. onebite can provide resources to deliver expertise, strategy and analytical tools, helping you streamline your audit. - Use technology as much as possible
Tools can help break down complexities, making the process less resource consuming and offering greater clarity. For data collection, tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, or Screaming Frog can assist with gathering both inventory and performance data. You’ll also collect insights from your social channels, Content Management Systems, and Content Relationship Management systems. To centralise this data, spreadsheets can be useful, though there are also dedicated tools available to support this task. Additionally, project management tools like Trello or Asana can greatly enhance your audit by enabling collaboration, assigning resources, and tracking progress. - What to look for
It is essential to focus on content that supports the goals of your business. This content might be spread across blogs, landing pages, case studies, reports and video content.Focus on the content that aligns with your audience and generates engagement.This content can be identified by reviewing engagement metrics like page views, time on page, and bounce rate, along with social engagement data. Spot missing content opportunities and identify what content is no longer resonating.
- Break it down in stages
Check out this helpful guide from Infuse on how to conduct a B2B content audit.
Content attribution
Content attribution helps you understand where your content is adding value by assigning credit to the touchpoints that influence a buyer’s journey.
It’s essential, but often underused, because of its perceived complexity.
The perceived complexity of the attribution model
Attribution often gets a bad reputation, as there are multiple models available. Add to this the fact that long B2B marketing cycles involve many touchpoints and individuals.
Attribution models aim to bring structure by distinguishing between leading indicators (early engagements) and lagging indicators (final actions). However, traditional models like first-touch or last-touch only capture a narrow view.
For example, a prospect might visit your site and read a blog, return later to watch a video, and eventually download a report. In a first-touch model, all the credit goes to the blog; in a last-touch model, it goes to the video. Both miss the full picture.
Multi-touch attribution models offer a more balanced view, distributing credit across all relevant touchpoints. While more accurate, they do come with added complexity, as they account for more variables and can be harder to implement.
The good news is that AI is making this process less complex. Machine learning based models have a more intelligent way of processing larger amounts of data with more variables, giving more realistic values to each interaction. They can automatically attribute, then re-attribute.
Did you say black box?
Content attribution often feels like navigating in the dark, partly due to its reliance on complex technology that performs sophisticated tasks without revealing its underlying logic. Real examples show that using AI and ML is a better way (source), as the efficiency of the task as well as the accuracy improves.
It’s true that using AI requires a degree of trust, but marketers still need to understand what the technology is doing and why. AI gives you scale and speed, but human oversight is essential to interpret results in the context of your specific marketing goals. No model is perfect, and outputs should always be reviewed through a strategic lens.
That’s where Explainable AI (XAI) comes in. This emerging capability is designed to help users understand and trust the outputs of machine learning models. In the context of attribution, XAI can highlight which content types and channels influenced results, and why, providing not just insight, but the reasoning behind it.
This data thing
We know that data is crucial in B2B marketing; it optimises budget use, provides proof points for decision-making, and enhances audience targeting. By using data feedback, content marketing efforts can continuously improve. However, reviewing the quality of content before you have user feedback and data can often be a subjective process. So how can you accurately define what “good enough” looks like?
How can data help us define if content is good enough?
There is a very useful framework popularised by Google, called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). It is used to evaluate the quality and credibility of content (source).
How is it measured?
Equip and empower your team with the following practical metrics to evaluate content quality using the E-E-A-T framework:
Experience
- To assess the experience of the author, look for social evidence, such as comments, testimonials, reviews that share personal experiences relevant to the subject. This evidence demonstrates the author’s knowledge and hands-on experience.
- Additionally, check if the content aligns with other pieces on the same website or publication that demonstrate experience, such as videos, images, or event coverage.
- Identify high-performing pages based on time spent on the page to further validate the content’s value.
Expertise
- Check the sources of the content to confirm they are credible.
- Evaluate how visible the author is within the industry and if there are more occurrences of the author talking about the topic.
- Looking at comments can help you gauge the audience’s perception of the author’s expertise.
Authoritativeness
- Assess the Domain Authority (DA) of the site publishing the content. Tools like Moz can provide insight into how the site compares to competitors in terms of search rankings.
- Check your website’s reputation by exploring mentions, reviews, ratings (such as Trustpilot or Google reviews).
Trustworthiness
- Check the bounce rates and click through rates of your site.
- Evaluate if the site has privacy policies and complies with laws and standard practices (for example GDPR as well as best practices to have a secured site).
By aligning your content with E-E-A-T principles, websites can improve their performance and build user trust.
Content tree
Content is king, said Bill Gates back in 1996. How can your content be a good king? I believe it is about having a clear structure and purposeful direction.
The content tree is an excellent framework that will help you develop and distribute your content, whilst aligning to your goals. It is based on funnel data and performance insights.
The leaves
The roots
The trunk
The branches
The fruits
Key Takeaways
To maximise the ROI of B2B content marketing, a data-driven strategy is essential. High-performing content earns trust and stands out in a crowded market, making it important to prioritise quality over quantity throughout the customer journey. Regular content audits are an essential part of this process, helping to uncover outdated material, assess how well your content connects with its audience, and refine your format and channel choices. With the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework, you can evaluate content quality and credibility before publishing. Data underpins all of this, guiding strategy and improving the impact of your content. Finally, adopting a content tree model can bring structure and clarity to your content planning, ensuring that every piece of content serves a clear purpose and is shaped by insight.
Need help turning insight into action? Our content strategy experts can uncover hidden performance drivers and help you build a content roadmap for scalable success.
Marcela Bohórquez, Senior Developer
Marcela, Senior Developer at onebite with over 25 years of experience in the digital media world. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Systems and Computing Engineering from the University of the Andes and a Master of Arts in Digital Media from London Metropolitan University.
Throughout her career, Marcela has developed a wide range of projects, including websites, web applications, interactive experiences, video and animation. She specialises in the intersection of creativity and technology and she is equally passionate about tackling technical challenges and creative ones, always striving to communicate and engage effectively through the strategic use of digital tools and platforms. She also shares her experiences, knowledge and research through collaborating in the onebite’s maketing blog. She is interested in how technology evolves and shapes our world.
