You can’t create a content strategy without data. In this video I talk about how to build a B2B Content Marketing Strategy . Enjoy the video and subscribe to my Youtube channel to be the notified when new videos are added.

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So for the last 2 months we’ve been talking about influencers – from planing, identification, analytics and execution.

We’re going to shift to taking about audiences but many of the same principles apply.

And the question you have to ask yourself is … who is my B2B audience?  Seems like a pretty basic question but it’s more complex than you think.

It goes back to the concept of brand relevance and  supply and demand. Is your supply of  content meeting the demand of your audience?

So before we get into the data I feel like I need to level set and talk about what content really means, contextualize it  and make it relevant to today’s conversation.

So the easiest way to break it down is through the lens of PESO –  not the currency. It’s paid, earned, shared and owned media.

Quickly, from a paid perspective, it’s display ads, out of home, paid search ads, it’s the creative, the videos on social,  language you use on digital assets. And the great thing is that you have full control of your narrative and positioning. Its expensive but you have control.

From an earned standpoint, you have much less control but if you have good relationships with the media you can directionally guide them to align their stories to your narrative. Nothing is ever promised when building a B2B Content Marketing Strategy.

Shared media is another way of saying social media. It’s the B2B Content Marketing Strategy you post in status updates, videos, live streams, groups you name it.  You have full control but its a shared space, so when you put something out there, you have to be prepared to defend it.

And lastly we have owned media. This is the old school of content. It’s your website, mobile site, support community, the meta data, blogs and your storytelling hub or newsroom.

Now again. For the most part you have control over the content which means can use data and insights to inform the messages you put into the market  place.

So back to audience. Again, seems like a basic question but it’s a good one to ask.

So depending on what group you work in internally, if you are in PR your audience might be traditional media, journalist or analyst. Or it could be non-media influencers.

If you work in marketing, your B2B audience may also be influencers but also your actual customer.

So for the purposes is this video we are going to examine the software developer audience.

There are several different ways to build B2B audiences. In this case, we used bio searches with self-identifying key phrases like developer, programmer and software engineer.

From there we found 9 sub-audiences or segments and you can see here on the right how large or small these segments are. For this purposes of this video, we are only going to look at one of these segments – the audience titled Python/Machine learning.

And this is what I would refer to a data-informed persona. Now again, this data does not consider all developers, in fact, it’s not until you compare one segment to another that you realize how different they are.

So, we use a platform called Audiense which uses AI and Machine Learning to segment audiences and find the interests and characteristics that make the unique. They also have a pretty tight integration with IBM Watson which produces some pretty amazing insights.

So I am not going to talk to each data point on this slide but I will cover a few that I believe are 100% actionable to your B2B Content Marketing Strategy. Now this data is based on follower relationships and then calculated against a general population. It’s not conversational data. We’ll talk about that next week.

1. Buying mindset: What this tells me is that the top 2 characteristics that drive purchase are the utility of a product and word of mouth. Product utility can help you formulate a narrative that positions how useful your product is to the software development process. The second point tells me that if your customers are python developers, it might make sense to formalize an influencer and/or advocacy program.
2. Top channels is pretty self explanatory
3. Influencers: These are not topical based influencers. These are people who are extremely influential to the Python developers in this audience.
4. Top Communities & Conferences: This is less important to a content strategy but can certainly be used by your event marketing team or your developer ambassador program leads if you have one.
5. The unique media affinities tells us which technology publications are most followed by this audience. This data here is all about your distribution strategy. PR should be using this data to inform their media relations, and your digital marketing team can potential buy media on these publications through the Google Display Network and/or through a direct media buy or sponsorship

Hope you enjoyed this post and that it will help you build your B2B audience content strategy.