The Ultimate B2B Content Marketing Strategy for Lead Gen

Over the years, I’ve tried and tested loads of B2B content marketing strategies. Some of these worked better than others. I found that content marketing strategies that delivered the most value to our business focused on fast lead generation.

Developing quality B2B content takes a lot of time and resources. Especially content such as whitepapers, case studies, analyst reports, and ebooks. You create these resources with a goal: lead generation.

So today, I have something special for you. A proven B2B content marketing strategy that will generate leads fast. 

The model that we will be using is the hub and spoke model. With the hub and spoke model, you have two types of content.

1. Hub content
2. Spoke content

Your hub content is your pillar content. This content is gated, meaning that this content will result in leads.

Spoke content is the supporting content. Spoke content has the main role to drive traffic to your hub content. Spoke content can be created months before you release your hub content. This way, you have time to build up organic website traffic through SEO.

Let’s dive right into it. Watch the video, or continue reading below.

Video Transcript

Hey, this is Ricky Wolff, and welcome to this video. Many people have asked me how to promote newly developed content effectively. How can I generate leads from my B2B content?

So, in this video, I will provide you a B2B content marketing strategy that will generate qualified leads for your company.

For the people new to this channel: welcome! We post videos about B2B marketing tips so that you can grow in your career and business. So if you’re into that, consider subscribing to this channel. I would really appreciate it.

So today, I will show you a content marketing model that:

• Generates Qualified Leads
• Results in instant downloads of new content
• Improves your conversion rates
• Generates warmer leads for your sales team

Sounds good? Well, let’s dive right into it.

The model that I’m talking about is the Hub and Spoke model. So what exactly is the Hub and Spoke model?

The hub and spoke model consist of two parts. Namely Hub content and Spoke content.

Hub content example for your B2B content marketing strategy

Let’s first focus on the Hub content. Typical examples of hub content are: 

• Research reports
• Analyst reports
• Large company-hosted events
• Key webinars
• Whitepapers
• ROI Studies
• Ebooks

These pieces of content are gated. This means that people have to fill in a form to access the content.

Hub content must be of high-quality content and it will generally take a good amount of time and resources to produce.

This is your pillar content and this is the content that will drive leads for your company.

B2B Spoke Content Examples

And then you have the Spoke content. The goal of spoke content in your B2B content marketing strategy is to drive qualified traffic to your hub content.

So in your spoke content, you will link to your hub content.

Typical examples of spoke content are:

• Blogs
• Infographics
• Videos
• Smaller webinars
• Case studies
• Off-site articles

So for every piece of hub content, you want to create multiple pieces of spoke content.

Of course, the spoke content must be relevant to the hub content. Otherwise, this content marketing strategy is not going to work.

So this is what the hub and spoke model would look like visually.

You have hub content, this is your key gated content such as an analyst report, and then you have spoke content.

Let’s say that you will develop case studies, blogs, videos, and off-site articles as spoke content.

Of course, these pieces of spoke content will have a promotional strategy. You can promote spoke content through ads, SEO, and chatbots (such as Drift) to name a few examples.

When people enjoy your spoke content and click through to your hub content, this means that the traffic arriving at your hub content will be more qualified. Qualified traffic means that your conversion rate will improve.

This means that your sales team will be following up on warmer leads.

So why is this B2B content marketing strategy so powerful? 

The pieces of spoke content will be published before the hub content is launched. So let’s say that your hub content will launch on a certain date.

2 months before launching your hub content, you can publish a blog post related to your hub content. In these two months, your blog post will start gaining traction from search engines. As you know, SEO takes time, so launching a blog post in advance means that it has time to ramp-up.

One month before launching your hub content, you can publish another blog post. 3 weeks before, you can publish a video, and a couple of days prior to launching your hub content, you can host a webinar.

After publishing your hub content, you can go back to those earlier published pieces of content and place links to your hub content.

That’s how you’re going to drive organic traffic to your hub content. It’s a scalable way to generate consistent leads. Better yet, qualified leads. And in my opinion, that is what a successful B2B content marketing strategy should achieve.

The benefits of the Hub and Spoke model

• That you generate instant qualified traffic to HUB content once it has been published
• You create an effective content funnel
• You will have higher conversion rates
•  And Your sales team benefits from warmer leads

So that’s the basic version of the hub and spoke model as a content marketing strategy.

How do you take it to the next level?

Well, B2B sales cycles are complex and they can take many months to complete.

You can take it to the next level by developing hub content depending on stages in the buyers’ journey. This way you create a content marketing funnel.

Let’s say someone follows your content marketing funnel and downloads a piece of hub content that’s designed for early-stage prospects. You now need to have a very effective marketing nurture program to make your early-stage prospects download or consume content designed for the next sales stage.

So essentially, you need to have early, mid, and late-stage hubs, and your marketing nurture programs should guide your prospects to the next stage.

If you implement this correctly, you will make the life of your sales team much easier and they will love you for it. 

You need to have an excellent understanding of your buyers’ journey in order to do this effectively. It’s a great exercise to go through with your team.

That’s the content marketing model that we use to generate high-quality leads and it’s been very effective for us.

If this video was helpful for you, hit that like button and consider subscribing to this channel. I’d appreciate it if you did.

Thanks a lot, and I’ll see you in the next video!

Continue reading: 7 Essentials Tips for a Successful content marketing strategy.