B2B content production is the most important activity a company can do to boost their online presence and attract potential clients. But how do you balance content quality vs quantity in B2B marketing? In this article, I’ll outline effective methods for creating high-quality content that speaks to your target audience while optimizing for search engines.
You’ll learn how to implement customer interviews, analyze support tickets, and identify buyer personas. These techniques help you develop content that addresses your clients’ needs and pain points. I’ll also show you how to use AI tools responsibly to streamline your content creation process without compromising quality or authenticity.
Table of Contents
What Is High-Quality B2B Content?
Every marketing company will tell you that you need high-quality content to help you reinforce your brand, expand your reach, and get new customers. That’s certainly what high-quality content can do for you. The question becomes, how much content do you actually need? And how do you balance content quality vs quantity in B2B content production?
Defining Quality Content
There’s the big question of what constitutes quality content. Google defines this through their guidelines called E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. If your content does not have all of these four elements, Google will not advance your rankings. They use lots of signals to determine whether you are actually hitting all of these elements.
3 Easy Tactics That Will Improve Your Content Quality
To add depth to your content and improve its quality, there are several things you can do:
1. Customer Interviews
Talk to your customers and interview them. This enables you to get lots of case studies and share how real-life examples are coming to fruition.I remember talking to one customer who shared their experience using our product. They explained what they were trying to accomplish, the challenges they faced, and how our product ultimately helped them solve those problems. These types of use cases, framed as problems and solutions, can add significant value to your content.
2. Analyze Support Tickets
Take a close look at what your client behavior is like by examining your support tickets. There’s a wealth of hidden information in the support tickets that your customer support team may not even know to pass along to the marketing team. Encourage your support team to ask deeper questions like, “Tell me more about what you’re trying to accomplish.” This can help elicit insights into usage patterns and the intent behind using your product, which might inspire additional case studies that you could write about.
3. Identify Buyer Personas
Identifying your buyer personas is non-negotiable. I’m finding it to be one of the key factors that enables your content’s value to skyrocket. It helps you hone in on the right messaging that will resonate with your prospects, especially within ChatGPT and other AI answer tools.
For example, talking to a user of your product might be a very different conversation compared to talking to their manager or the person who authorizes payment. You can create personas easily with MakeMEDIA’s free AI persona generator. You’ll quickly be able to combine basic demographic and psychographic information, job responsibilities, challenges, pain points, and influences to determine the kind of messaging you should have for a particular persona.
When you put all of these elements together, that really starts to help you create much higher quality content than just sitting down and typing some random information that’s only “how to” content or just a sales pitch. These are some B2B content production strategies that will help you improve the quality of your content and ensure it meets the needs of your target clients.
Content Quality vs Quantity
The content quality vs quantity debate is alive and well when it comes to B2B content marketing. We’ve taken surveys on this and found that most blogs that run between 1,200 to 1,500 words long take between four and six hours to write.
This is to produce a decent quality blog that is also optimized for search, which means it includes a lot of SEO elements, such as keywords, links, images, videos, and other factors that signal to Google information about your content. When you consider what that means in terms of balancing content quality vs quantity, it can be pretty overwhelming. You need sufficient quantity without sacrificing article quality.
Using AI Safely for Content Production
Companies are now starting to use AI, but they need to be mindful about how they use it. In 2023, there was a large movement to generate all kinds of content through AI. There were companies creating hundreds of articles every single month and posting them on sites just to start getting traffic because they could produce content so quickly. They would pepper that content with keywords. This worked – until March 2024.
That’s when Google introduced an update to their algorithm called the Scale Content Abuse Update. Google wants to make sure that you actually have the experience, not just the expertise to write about a particular topic. That’s where the first “E” in their E-E-A-T guideline comes into play. These companies were creating content without actually having the expertise – they were just using AI to generate content. Google has since destroyed their rankings.
The MakeMEDIA Approach
There is now a much safer way to use AI, and that is with MakeMEDIA. Our core product was built around E-E-A-T. We don’t simply use AI to generate content because we know that will not help you get ranked and it won’t help increase your brand awareness. People can often look at AI-generated content and see that it was created by ChatGPT or other tools, and then they start to ignore it.
What we do differently is help you use AI to:
- Come up with specific content ideas that are relevant to your audience
- Create personas
- Develop article outlines
Then, we interview you.
MakeMEDIA creates a full interview with recommended talking points that allows you to just speak in a stream of consciousness way, record your thoughts, and then it will use the keywords that you’re trying to pursue along with other information about your company, your expertise, the persona that you’re trying to reach for the specific article you’re creating, and other factors to generate a first draft.
It’s a very quick and easy process.
Editing and Optimizing
The first draft is very solid out of the box. Just as you would edit a human writer’s work, you probably want to edit the final output of MakeMEDIA’s article, but that doesn’t take much time, maybe 15 minutes, sometimes less. The article draft is already SEO-rich. To further optimize it, add a few links, images, or video clips if you’d like. By doing this, you stand a pretty decent chance of getting ranked on some of your target keywords.
Using AI to produce content quickly enables you to take what was normally a four to six hour project and condense it down into 15 to 30 minutes. That’s how you could actually achieve a higher amount of quality content in your B2B content production strategy.
Balancing SEO and Value in B2B Content
When you use MakeMEDIA to create an article, it gives you recommended ideas to talk about, enabling you to focus on what the article should cover. You can also enter your own keywords. If you know search engine optimization techniques, you can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to analyze keywords and determine which ones have high search volume and low difficulty. Enter those into MakeMEDIA, and it will use those terms as it presents you with article outlines and in the final articles it produces.
Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
I strongly recommend focusing on long-tail keywords. Let’s say you typed in the word “accounting” into Google. Many accountants think they want to be found for that word. However, that’s actually one of the worst words you can pursue. When someone types in “accounting,” you don’t know if they’re looking for:
- Accounting jobs
- An accountant
- Help setting up QuickBooks
- Bookkeeping services
There are many different intents behind that search. In contrast, consider the keyword “DCAA audit accounting for government contractors.” That’s a really long term, but someone who is typing that is looking for something very specific. They have extremely targeted intent. Because it’s such a long term, the keyword difficulty is significantly lower.
Granted, the search volume is lower, but when someone types in something along the lines of that long-tail keyword, there’s a strong chance that your page will pop up much closer to the top of Google and that person will land on your website. It’s about intent and using long-tail keywords which are much easier to rank for.
Implement SEO Best Practices
You should put several other practices into place for all of your B2B content production strategies. See our SEO best practices checklist to go through your article and include things like:
- Using descriptive title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3)
- Incorporating the keywords naturally throughout the content
When you use MakeMEDIA, we automatically incorporate those keywords throughout the content, so there’s very little extra work you have to do to make your article SEO-friendly.
Write Clear, Concise Content
You also want to write in a clear and concise reading style. Using 10th grade English as a benchmark tends to be a good sweet spot for having a very readable article while not sounding too scholarly. That seems to be what Google likes to see as well.
Incorporate Visuals
Another thing Google wants to see is the use of visuals. Even though Google has algorithms and sends bots to read your content, they actually look for visual cues to make your content look and feel much easier to read. Here are some examples:
- Images
- Section headings
- Lists
Google is trying to create a good experience for people doing searches. When they land on your website, you want to keep them there.
How to Keep Visitors Engaged
Getting ranked at the top of Google and getting someone to go to your site is just the first step. What you really want is once they’re on your site, you want to keep them there. The last thing you want is for the visitor to go right back to Google, because then Google will see that the page visit was really short and may reduce your rankings for that particular search.
Balancing content quality vs quantity is important in making sure that you have enough content for a wider variety of SEO keywords so that you increase your chances of getting found by qualified prospects.
MakeMEDIA can help you produce optimized, valuable content at scale while adhering to SEO best practices. This allows you to focus on your overall content strategy and goals rather than getting bogged down in the details of keyword research and content creation.
Scaling Content Production Without Compromising Quality
When it comes to the quality versus quantity content debate for B2B content production strategies, the cost of writing an article often comes up. Ideally, you want to produce at least one high-quality article every single week.
Here's how lawyers can scale content: Content Marketing for Law Firms
In an ideal scenario, you would want two per week at a minimum. If it takes between four to six hours to write a good piece of content, that oftentimes translates to anywhere between $400 to $1,200 per 1,500-word article, which can get expensive.
Reducing Content Production Costs
This is where MakeMEDIA can dramatically reduce your costs to produce content without sacrificing quality. Our process involves interviewing you or people on your team who are subject matter experts on the topics they will be discussing.
All you have to do is simply talk, which makes the entire content production process a lot cheaper and faster. Your writers can then just do the polishing touches, enabling you to produce much more content in less time.
MakeMEDIA will produce a very high-quality first draft for you. The polishing touches along with the SEO mentioned in the last section will help you start getting ranked a lot faster.
Leveraging Team Members’ Expertise
If you are part of a company, chances are you have other team members with subject matter expertise in different areas. With MakeMEDIA, you can assign people on your team to be the expert for various topics.
This enables you to create a much wider breadth of topics, forming what are called content clusters. As Google starts to see multiple articles about related topics, it begins to recognize your site as an authority, which is the A in their E-E-A-T guideline.
Having a roster of people you can rely on will enable you to create lots of content quickly. Take this example: if you have a team of two or three people and everyone takes one article a month, you can easily produce three or four articles every single month. That is more than what your competitors are currently producing. By using MakeMEDIA, your content will be of high quality because it takes the thoughts in your head and uses interviews to help bring all those ideas to your audience.
Get Both: Content Quality and Quantity
MakeMEDIA empowers you to create lots of high quality content fast, so you get the best of both words: content quality AND quantity. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, attract qualified leads and generate more inbound business, you will need a larger volume of helpful content.
Rather than getting stuck because of the traditional workload of B2B content production or using AI to generate all of your content (which can devastate your rankings), use MakeMEDIA’s approach of combining your human thoughts, experience and expertise with AI’s speed of converting your words into high quality articles. It’s a safe approach to SEO and B2B marketing.
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