Content Marketing Template & Framework for Strong B2B Sales

A strong content marketing template and framework starts with understanding what your buyers need at each point in their decision process. Your content must guide prospects through multiple stages, from initial research to making a purchase choice.

Publishing random articles and hoping for results will not help you reach your goals. Building trust and authority requires a thoughtful approach that aligns your content with real customer problems and questions. Your content plan should focus on creating valuable resources that help prospects solve their challenges while positioning your company as the right solution.

This guide will show you how to create a content marketing strategy through a framework and template that will lead you to your content marketing playbook.

Strategic Content Marketing Framework for B2B SaaS

A strong B2B SaaS content marketing strategy starts with understanding your buyers and their needs. Your content must guide your prospects through the numerous stages of the buyer journey.

See our expert guide: 32 Content Creation Ideas for Business Executives

Oftentimes, when companies create content, they miss the mark because they focus solely on their products, solutions, or services. That type of content is relevant at the very final stage of the buyer journey when someone is looking for a vendor and trying to decide whether you’re the right fit. What’s missing is all of the stages prior to getting to that final decision-making point. That’s where a solid content marketing framework comes into play.

Guiding Prospects Through the Buyer Journey

Your content must guide prospects all the way from the awareness stage through the consideration stage and into the decision stage. Each piece of content should address a problem or goal that they’re trying to address.

Think about how a potential buyer would research solutions today. They might spend months reading content before they actually talk to sales. Some people don’t ever want to talk to sales – they want to make the purchase directly from your website.

Check out our guide: Understanding Customer Journeys

Creating Buyer Personas

Your first starting point is to create a buyer persona. You can do that very quickly using MakeMEDIA. With just one or two clicks, you’ll be able to create detailed buyer personas and understand your buyer’s pain points, challenges, what they’re trying to overcome, and recommended messaging that could potentially resonate with them.

Your personas need to reflect real-life behavior.

Here’s an example: A chief technology officer at a mid-sized company might read technical blogs and white papers to make informed decisions about implementation details, data security, and other relevant topics.

On the other hand, you might also need to involve a chief financial officer in a buying decision. They don’t care as much about the implementation details or security. Instead, they focus on the return on investment (ROI), cost analysis, and ensuring their money will be well spent. By understanding these differences, you can create content that answers their specific questions.

Serving Clear Business Goals with Content

Each piece of content should serve a clear business goal. Start with top-of-the-funnel content that creates awareness, such as blog posts or guides focused on answering questions that help prospects clarify and articulate their problems in meaningful ways.

Let’s say your product or solution targets small businesses. Make sure you focus on the specific type of small business you’re going after.

Example: 

Managed service providers (MSPs) often target small companies, and in their marketing, they might write about solutions for small businesses. However, even though an accounting company might be considered a small business and a target of theirs, they don't always look for content addressed to small businesses in general. They'll look for content specifically tailored to accountants. 

If that MSP simply shifted the way they create awareness-stage content to speak directly to accountants using their terminology, they'll get much farther, faster with that market.

Your value proposition can shine through at each stage. If you create how-to articles talking to that accounting company, you can discuss data security for accountants, bookkeepers, and remote access. While the implementation of what you do might apply across many small businesses, simply changing your terminology and the way you talk about your solutions to one niche makes a massive difference in your content marketing strategy.

Additional Components of a Content Marketing Framework

Other valuable components of a content marketing framework include:

• Educational webinars and product webinars where you demonstrate specific features and people can learn more about your solutions before signing up for a conversation with a sales person
• Return on investment (ROI) calculators that help make a business case, especially if you charge a lot for your products and services

Planning Content Distribution Channels

Your content needs to find the right home to reach your audience. Everyone finds content in different ways. Currently, LinkedIn works very well for reaching B2B decision makers. However, LinkedIn is a “rented audience,” meaning if they decided not to promote your content or, worse, not allow you to publish content due to a penalty (which you may get for unknowingly violating their terms), you lose the ability to reach people.

See our AI-Powered LinkedIn Content Strategy

Creating an email newsletter to keep prospects engaged over time is the best approach because it’s an audience you own. You have their emails and can keep them active by sending to them regularly.

Also, post educational content on your company blog. Educational content is not sales content. It can include sales material, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you publish. Talk about the problems people are having and the thoughts they might have along the buyer journey, then write content around that.

The key is to adapt your content for these different channels.

Example of a layered content marketing strategy: 

A technical white paper could become a series of blog posts and social media posts, all offering the white paper as a download, which allows you to capture someone's email address.

Turning Content into Leads

Producing content isn’t enough. To turn that content into leads, make an offer so compelling and irresistible that the reader will want to know more.

Offering a webinar is another great way to get names. When you produce a webinar, you share your knowledge and are perceived as an expert, especially if you show people how to solve their problems. That alone can start building trust.

Solving Customer Problems First

Companies that do very well with content marketing have a common theme: they look to solve customer problems first. They’re not just selling. All the content on their website is not about them. That’s a big mistake many companies make with their content marketing framework – it ends up being all about their products and services, feeling very self-centric.

Poor Content Marketing Strategy:

You can recognize poor content when you visit someone's website. If you only see menu headings like "Our Services," "What We Do," or "Our Clients," those are "me, me, me" terms. 


Good Content Marketing Strategy:

You want something that says "How To" or includes customer-centric content, like ROI calculators, trend analysis, and other useful educational information.

Successful companies focus on solving customer problems. They create content, including series that build on each other and other pieces of content. That requires a structured approach. You can use MakeMEDIA’s content plan making tool to figure out what you should be writing about instead of doing it randomly. If you just post random bits of content without a cohesive strategy behind it, that will not get you very far.

Content marketing is the most effective way I’ve ever seen marketing work. It is an absolute joy to watch people use content marketing to generate lots of business.

Content Marketing Template: Copy/Paste Example

To create a strong content marketing strategy, you need three key components. First, establish clear quality control steps that everyone on your team follows for the content you produce. Develop a content marketing framework that includes a variety of article ideas for each stage of the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and evaluation.

Understanding Customer Journeys

Our article on understanding customer journeys can help you and your team better grasp how to utilize these different stages.

Consistent Publishing Workflow

Second, create a workflow to ensure consistent publishing. Content marketing templates such as MakeMEDIA’ can be incredibly helpful in this regard. Not only can you create a comprehensive content plan aligned with your buyer personas and their journey, but it also provides keyword ideas to help your content get discovered through online searches.

MakeMEDIA’ can subsequently assist in creating that content, including social media posts. It’s having a full content marketing capability at a fraction of the cost of hiring an experienced marketing professional. Many agencies use our tools to amplify their ability to produce more work for their clients faster and cheaper.

Maintaining Consistency with Templates

Third, use templates to maintain consistency. Here are examples of how some teams have used these to increase content production without significantly expanding their staff:

• Start with clear editorial guidelines that define the voice, tone, and style requirements. Consistency helps develop your brand voice, especially if you’re a CEO doing a lot of the marketing yourself.
• As you grow and hire teams or staff to assist, you want the writing to remain consistent. MakeMEDIA helps maintain that style consistency by understanding and training on your voice, then applying it to your future documents.
• Use checklists to review content and ensure it meets all your style guides.

Workflow Management

Manage your workflow by identifying the most important pieces of content for your goals. Ultimately, you want to generate more business from your content marketing efforts, but the path a prospect takes to reach you will vary.

MakeMEDIA’s content plan tool allows you to generate unlimited ideas for specific personas at every stage of the buyer journey. When you find ideas that resonate with your audience, you can click a button and talk for a few minutes through a guided conversation that MakeMEDIA facilitates.

This helps elicit stories, share use cases, and turn them into a polished first draft loaded with SEO keywords to potentially attract more leads.

Consider assigning certain articles to key team members with subject matter expertise. You could:

• Assign technical content to your CTO or a technical team member
• Give content around product use cases to your chief product officer
• Have articles about your user interface design written by the appropriate team member

This helps spread your net as far and wide as possible. With MakeMEDIA, you can produce a high-quality piece of content in just 10 to 15 minutes through a guided conversation. It manages everything from generating ideas and including keywords to providing you with a well-formatted first draft of the article with section headings.

Sample Content Marketing Template

Here’s an example of what a content marketing template in a table format could look like for a managed IT service provider (a.k.a. MSP). This is a solid content plan for the first 8 weeks, which allows the company to create about one article a week.

I generated this plan within 5 minutes using MakeMEDIA. It emphasizes why the article should be written along with the SEO keywords for the MSP to pursue. This way, you have clarify around why the article is relevant to your business and customers. It adds to the alignment in your content plan.

Try MakeMEDIA today and you can get your own custom plan like this content marketing template with unlimited content ideas plus keywords that align with your audience.

Tying It All Together

Ensure your content marketing template ties in your target audience, key messages, and key takeaways in all content. One approach is to create a series on a topic that points to a downloadable guide, capturing email addresses in the process.

On our other site, morebusiness.com, we have a series of sample business plan templates. Although we provide the entire sample business plan for everyone to see, which helps it rank highly and attract significant traffic, we also offer a downloadable version in an editable format like Google Docs or Word.

Dozens of people download this file every day because it makes their job easier. Instead of copying and pasting from the page, which includes Internet formatting that they have to clean up, they can click a button, enter their email address, and get a ready-to-use downloadable version of the exact same content.

Making it easy for people to accomplish a task allows you to create an irresistible offer that encourages them to share their email address, which you can then use for follow-up in your email newsletter.

Sales-Aligned Content Marketing Strategy

A key part of your content marketing strategy is to align it with your sales team. There’s a standard debate that many CEOs have to deal with: the sales and marketing push-pull. Sales teams may say that marketing isn’t delivering quality leads, while marketing might say the sales team doesn’t know how to close. This battle of the ages happens in many companies. To achieve marketing and sales alignment, you need to produce content that your sales team needs to help close more deals while also attracting the right quality candidates.

Leveraging Sales Team Insights

Your sales team is having conversations with prospects all the time. They can understand, just by the questions prospects ask, what kind of content you could produce. They may need that content for sending as follow-up information to stay in touch with someone.

Example of using content marketing in sales: 

A prospect is interested but goes quiet. A salesperson might reach out and say, "Hey, just checking in. Are you still interested? Is this still on your radar?" 

You can only send so many of those before it sounds repetitive. But what if you had rich content that solved a related problem the salesperson heard in a conversation? They can use your piece of content to reach out and say:

"Hey, by the way, we've created this additional guide that you might be interested in. It addresses the three points you mentioned in our last conversation. I'd love to hop on a call to help you think through some of that and find the right solution for you." 

That capability alone, allowing the salesperson to have material for follow-up, can help you gain traction and get more sales.

Streamlining Content Requests

For sales-marketing integration in your content marketing framework, sales teams want an easy way to request new content when they spot gaps. Here are a few ways you can streamline this process:

• Create an online form they fill out that goes to you (a private form only for your company).
• Have a weekly check-in call to ask further questions about what the sales team is hearing. A quick 10-minute check-in to ask, “What kind of questions did you hear this week?” can spark ideas for new content.
• Use Slack channels for quick content requests. Have a channel called “content request” where the marketing, sales, and even customer support teams can participate. Allow them to put content requests there, and respond back. Have someone on your team monitor that channel to put content in the queue and produce it faster.

Addressing Common Customer Questions

Think about the questions customers are asking most often and create content that addresses those questions. If one customer had a specific question, there’s a good chance others would have it too. Your content marketing template should focus on all the different stages of the customer journey.

Review your content plan at least quarterly, if not every six months, to see if there are trending developments in your industry that might require updates. For example, with recent administration changes in the United States, many people are re-evaluating their content to be more in line with what they’re seeing on the news.

Staying tuned into trending developments will impact your content goals, and you’ll want to revise those as you see fit.

Talking to Your Customers

One of the best strategies for producing high-quality content is to talk to your customers. Ask them, “Think about the last time you used our tool. What were you looking to do that day?” Then follow up with, “What other things did you have to do that day that weren’t related to our tool?” This gives you context and helps you understand their typical day and the problems they’re trying to solve.

Example of talking to your customers:

Intuit, the company that makes QuickBooks, excels at this. They regularly visit customers and say, "Can I just follow you around for the morning?" 

They watch what customers are doing throughout the day, including when they get on QuickBooks. They don't provide tutorials but simply observe people using their product. This allows them to see frustrations and the different demands on customers' time.

We often get caught up in showing people how to use our solutions to achieve results, but we lose sight of the fact that we’re only a small part of their day. There are likely many other activities that pull them away. If you can start writing content that helps address some of those activities as well, it can make a difference.

Providing Context for Your Solution

MakeMEDIA helps people create content quickly, build a content plan, and think through what to write about. However, we realize our customers may also be thinking about understanding the implications of regular posts on LinkedIn.

To address this, we write a piece that talks about why and how to post engaging content on LinkedIn through informational interviews with MakeMEDIA. This gives them a better context of their larger goal and how our tool fits in.

Leveraging Unique Customer Stories

The stories you get from talking to your customers can be discussed in your MakeMEDIA interview, which brings your content to life. Only you have these unique stories because they’re from your customers. AI training databases do not have this information, making your content stand out. When you publish it, Google will see it as unique and increase the chances of ranking much higher.

Empowering Your Team

If you have a team deploying content to their LinkedIn posts, you can show how someone on your team is achieving success and use that to train other team members about the value of content marketing. The best companies have many team members posting on LinkedIn, not just one or two from the marketing department. They also try to help team members build a personal brand using these posts. This should be part of a strong content marketing strategy, especially for B2B SaaS companies.

Content Marketing Strategy Playbook

You can likely complete a content marketing strategy playbook within one to two months and see results within 90 days. Here are the steps you should follow in the different phases.

Building a Foundation

First, document specific goals that align with your business objectives. If you want to increase website traffic, for instance, set a target for monthly visitors and potential conversion rates. You can use enterprise SEO ROI calculator to estimate the potential revenue you could generate by producing content and get a financial roadmap.

Next, assign clear roles for your team members based on their strengths. Develop a content marketing plan using a tool like MakeMEDIA, which can generate a strategic playbook in minutes compared to the weeks it would take to create one manually.

The playbook should align with your:

• Buyer personas
• Journey stages
• Products and services your business offers

Content Strategy Development

Your content pillars should reflect your core business expertise and audience needs.

For a software company, your pillars might include:

• Product tutorials
• Industry trends
• Customer stories

Consider including a glossary of terms related to your products, services, or niche. This adds to the content cluster effect of your site.

Your content marketing strategy should focus on creating clusters of different types of content that address the thoughts people have as they progress along your path. The goal is to produce content around a general theme that connects the problems people have to your solutions, positioning you as an authority on the topic.

Choosing Channels

Choose the channels where your audience hangs out. For a B2B audience, focus on LinkedIn and YouTube. B2C brands might target Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook, depending on their audience.

Create an editorial calendar that maps your themes to your business goals and seasonal events. Landmark dates throughout the calendar, such as holidays, can be great opportunities to create news items about your business that relate to what people are thinking about at that time of year.

Content Marketing Plan Implementation

Set up a clear workflow for your content creation, including ideation, writing, editing, and approval stages. MakeMEDIA can help you create and execute a content plan quickly through verbal dialogue, eliminating the need for long writing sessions.

MakeMEDIA will draft a polished article using your words and thoughts, add SEO keywords, format it for easy reading, and create engaging LinkedIn posts to promote your content.

Ensure your blog posts are optimized for search. SEO optimization is a key part of your content marketing strategy playbook. MakeMEDIA builds in keywords and optimizes your content for those keywords, so it is ready to go as soon as you finish talking.

Within a few minutes, you will receive an email indicating your content is ready for review. Add it to your website with a few links and images, and you will have a strong chance of ranking for the identified keywords.

In addition to educational articles, create templates and checklists that people can download and share. These documents can be a quick way to help your audience and speed up your production process.

Measuring Results and Avoiding Pitfalls

Once you start producing content, you should see results within 90 days. If you produce content quickly, you may see an uptick in traffic and searches for your target keywords in as little as two to three weeks.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

Watch out for these common pitfalls:

• Trying to do too much at once, such as being on every social platform. Pick one or two platforms and focus on mastering those. For B2B, LinkedIn is often the best choice.
• Focusing on putting out content just for the sake of it. Instead, prioritize high-quality content with depth, stories, richness, and use cases.

Aim to publish one or two deep, rich, high-quality articles over 2,000 words long each month, rather than a higher quantity of shorter, generic pieces.

As you publish more content, you create a reputation with Google as a subject matter expert on specific topics. This adds to your overall authority, which is a ranking factor for Google and helps your future content rank faster.

One client, a SaaS software company for safety, had thin content with blogs around 300-400 words long. They were not optimized and fairly generic. Using MakeMEDIA, they created two blogs: one on benchmarks related to safety and another on a specific feature for door safety.

Within one week of publishing both pieces, one shot up to the number one search result on Google for the targeted keyword, while the other ranked number three for another keyword.

Content Strategy Implementation Guide

To get started, create a content marketing strategy implementation guide. This is essentially a bullet point list of activities that you want to go through, starting with an overall evaluation of your full content plan.

Setting Content Production Goals

For example, if your goal is to produce one article per week, which is very achievable for almost every size business and a good idea because it keeps you top of mind and shows people that you are a thought leader by publishing educational material, that boils down to 48 pieces in a year. You can break that down into:

• Quarterly goals: Producing 12 pieces of content
• Monthly goals: Producing 4 pieces of content
• Weekly goals: Working on 1 piece of content (4 team members = 1 per team member per month, which is easy to achieve)

From each piece, you can generate two or three LinkedIn posts, which will help elevate your brand presence when added up over the course of a year.

Implementing a Content Marketing Framework

One of our clients implemented their content marketing framework that we had recommended and were able to create lots of high-value content for their prospects that they wished they had but didn’t have time to produce.

With our content marketing template, it gave them an article idea focused on a specific persona. They just talked to that persona and were able to generate the content in a matter of a 10-minute dialogue, then posted it online and started to see traction happening fairly quickly.

Real-World Example: Wealth Engine

When I was running the marketing for Wealth Engine, there was a term that some of our competitors were getting ranked on that we were not. It was called “donor pyramid”.

I had to do some research and found a whole bunch of related keywords: gift pyramid, gift table, donor pyramid, donor table. They’re all synonymous with the same concept.

Essentially, if you’re a nonprofit looking to do a capital campaign to raise money, you create this pyramid where on the bottom, you have people who can donate the smallest amount, your annual donors, maybe $25 a year. Then you add to each layer the number of people that might be able to donate at a higher tier level.

At the very top, you’ve got your biggest donors. When you evaluate all of the numbers, you have a ballpark target of how much you can raise fairly quickly. If you have a bigger goal than what you can raise from that pyramid, you’ll then be able to come up with strategies to reach people in different levels of the pyramid.

Creating Content Around a Keyword Phrase

What we did was write about how to create a donor pyramid. We defined all kinds of terms inside the article and gave strategies. Very quickly, that article shot up to be the number one result anytime someone searched for the term “donor pyramid”, which was a lot of nonprofit organizations.

We addressed questions like:

• How to create a donor pyramid
• What’s the value of a donor pyramid
• How to calculate the numbers in the donor pyramid

As a result, many people started to just contact us because they saw our expertise shine through in that article. We then created more articles around nonprofit fundraising, which was the whole goal of our business. It started to generate many leads without incurring advertising costs because people were finding us through online searches.

Amplifying Your Content

The next stage, of course, is to start sharing these types of stories and examples on your LinkedIn presence throughout your company. Get everybody to start posting, and you will start to see significant traction fairly quickly.

Make a Custom Content Marketing Template

Your content marketing plan needs a clear roadmap and steady implementation to produce measurable outcomes. MakeMEDIA helps B2B companies create a content marketing strategy to reach decision-makers and accelerate revenue growth. Create your content strategy today:

You’ll quickly build an effective content program that attracts qualified prospects. Try it free to begin your content marketing success story.

Raj Khera

Raj Khera is Co-Founder of MakeMEDIA and one of the top ranked SEO coaches in the USA. He is past CEO of several B2B SaaS companies, which he grew using SEO and sold to public firms, and writes daily about leadership, marketing, and SEO on LinkedIn.