How to Build a B2B Content Strategy  That Gets You Discovered

(0:00) Craig: Most companies don't really consider the individual channels and what the mechanics are of those channels.

(0:07) Craig: You produce a piece of content, then you decide how to distribute it.

(0:10) Craig: The challenge of working on platforms that are massively saturated and controlled almost now by AI having the human visible at the heart of your content is where the opportunity sits.

(0:20) James: What is the alternative?

(0:21) Craig: The alternative is to, is to get no reach, get no engagement, and have a, to be honest, a poorly performing marketing function.

(0:29) Craig: So today we're gonna talk about how to develop a channel first content strategy.

(0:33) Craig: We're gonna look at the problems of the more traditional conventional approach to content and we're gonna get into some of the specific channels in terms of what works and what doesn't, where the greatest opportunities are, and then we'll wrap up with some key takeaways.

(0:46) Craig: So if we start with the main problem.

(0:48) Craig: Most organizations that are investing in content will start with the content itself, that could be a webinar, podcast, a guide, a report.

(0:59) Craig: The next step is to typically, Look at how they can distribute the content across the conventional channels, whilst that repurposing approach makes kind of logical sense, most companies don't really consider the individual channels and what the mechanics are of those channels.

(1:17) Craig: You produce a piece of content, then you decide how to distribute it.

(1:21) Craig: And to a degree that that used to work back when, when I started my career, for example, you could produce a webinar and publish it on your website, on LinkedIn and via a newsletter and.

(1:31) James: You you get the response that you wanted, but these days those channels have become so much more specialist in nature, haven't they, you know, ultimately to be successful on LinkedIn now you need to.

(1:41) James: You need to produce content specifically for LinkedIn that meets its own algorithm.

(1:45) James: It's the same with YouTube as well though isn't it, you know they they have an algorithm which, previously you might have done all right, you know, by dumping your webinar information in there or your webinar recordings in there and that might get you a certain amount of traction.

(1:58) James: Email's another one, previously, you didn't necessarily have to think too heavily in in the world of B2B anyway about.

(2:05) James: Your email strategy specifically, because as long as you had a decent list, as long as it was clean and you had verified email addresses, you're promoting something that was relevant, you'd get, you'd get the level of traction that you needed.

(2:16) James: These days that's also changed massively, so I think that that that's the reason why it's just way less effective now those platforms have become more specialist.

(2:25) James: There's more content being generated by AI now than there is by humans.

(2:29) James: Everyone's using AI to generate content for.

(2:33) James: Things like posts on LinkedIn and it's become a very low bar now, those sorts of channels, so, that's just increased the saturation, we, we went through a content shock period, probably 1015 years ago, it's always been a problem, but now it's just at an extreme level.

(2:50) James: So there are still ways you can cut through on LinkedIn as we'll get into, but there may be other channels that are.

(2:58) James: Harder to make use of but as a result are less competitive and therefore, increasingly open up opportunities if you can get it right.

(3:07) Craig: So let's look at the sort of three step framework that you should consider when you're thinking about any channel.

(3:14) Craig: So the first step in that framework is to think about the outcomes that you want to achieve.

(3:17) Craig: Each channel will serve different purposes.

(3:20) Craig: There may be certain channels that give you better reach and discoverability, there may be other channels that provide better conversion.

(3:26) Craig: So, so the, the very first step is to think about overall what are you trying to achieve in your funnel, your content funnel, and there's still whilst there's a lot of debate around.

(3:36) Craig: Whether funnels exist from a demand generation perspective because things are, are, are never really linear, I think there's still, from a content perspective, you're still trying to move people through a content funnel, you're trying to, Increase awareness, you're trying to increase discoverability, you're trying to then get connection, familiarity, and ultimately you're trying to convert that interest into some form of engagement that can be followed upon.

(3:59) Craig: But the second part of the framework is to then think about the audience for each channel.

(4:05) Craig: Every channel will have different types of audiences and, as a, as a viewer or as a consumer of each channel, you probably go to them for different purposes.

(4:16) Craig: LinkedIn.

(4:17) You'll go to for very different reasons and you may go to YouTube or Spotify or use your LLMs or the final part of the framework is the mechanics of each channel.

(4:29) Craig: All the social platforms will have their own algorithms, each work differently as we'll get into.

(4:34) Craig: The way I think about those mechanics is effectively the rules that you have to play by in order to get any form of engagement, particularly on LinkedIn.

(4:42) Craig: If your, if your aim with LinkedIn is to get a lot of inbound traffic to your website and, and result in conversions, then your strategy's probably a little bit off.

(4:51) Craig: Let's take each channel one by one, I think it's important to say from the outset that we're looking at this from, A demand generation perspective, we're looking at how content supports the demand generation.

(5:03) Craig: Process and programs, we're not suggesting that we're experts in YouTube, to the point where we would help a content creator create a, a YouTube channel that generates 100,000 subscribers and would generate a, a, a significant, you know, multi-million pound income, that that's not what we're talking about.

(5:24) Craig: If you're watching this on YouTube, there'll be plenty of videos that will give you that kind of insight.

(5:29) Craig: So we're looking at this very much from a B2B demand generation perspective and thinking about how, how can you.

(5:36) Craig: Shape your content by focusing on the key channels, not just the content itself, to make sure that distribution is the, is the main thing that you're thinking about.

(5:46) Craig: So let's start with LinkedIn, so I think the main outcome from LinkedIn really is discoverability and building authority, so.

(5:57) Craig: The algorithm change that occurred at the sort of end of last year, early this year, 2026, was called 360 Brew and the, the, the main reasons for the change were that a, a lot of people were, were gaming the system.

(6:14) Craig: Stop the use of engagement pods, stop the use of automation through AI assisted comments, stop the, the, the fake followers, so.

(6:26) Craig: The algorithm now to.

(6:29) Craig: Assess whether a post is worth sharing and, and worth extending across the, the, the wider network beyond your immediate first degree connections.

(6:37) Craig: It's not looking so much now at likes and comments, it's much more about dwell time and, it, it, it's very centralized now and it will focus very much on your profile as a starting point.

(6:50) Craig: So obviously with, with AI it can aggregate a huge amount of information very quickly.

(6:54) Craig: It'll look at your area of expertise, that's not just in terms of your your biography or the about section, it's the history and experience you've had, the skills that you put in there, you also look at previous posts that you've engaged with yourself, so when you're putting together a post to distribute on LinkedIn, all of that needs to be factored and everything needs to be consistent, you really need to be focusing on a niche if you're gonna cut through, And the more specific you can be, the more effective you'll be if your content is aligned with that.

(7:24) James: Been some other changes though, haven't we on LinkedIn that have been happening for a longer even longer period of time, and the demise of the, the company page, for example, these days.

(7:35) James: You get very little engagement, if any, on a post from the company page so.

(7:40) James: You know, this is what we mean by Channel first I suppose, isn't it, that you've first got to establish what works on that channel, so getting a group of people internally that are are are influential, maybe the leaders of the business that are happy to post is a, is a first step to, because ultimately if you're posting through the company page, you're just not gonna get any reach at all.

(8:01) James: You've got to get your founders, your experts really bought into.

(8:05) James: LinkedIn and maybe position it, not as a social media platform but more as a content distribution network and that's really what it is today.

(8:13) Craig: The types of content now that work really well on LinkedIn, that, that we would say there's probably 4 types of content, and again this is another change as a result of the algorithm.

(8:23) Craig: So the, the first type of content that's gonna really give you reach is when you jump on the back of a, a new piece of news or, Something significant that a well-known brand or influencer has been talking about, it's a good tactic to try and look at other channels that might give you that insight ahead of anyone else on LinkedIn.

(8:44) Craig: LinkedIn is often late to the party with news.

(8:48) Craig: so if you've got feeds from maybe analysts or if you're maybe tracking X, you might get some breaking news that you can jump on quickly.

(8:56) Craig: That's reach content, so that's the first type of content on LinkedIn.

(9:00) Craig: The second is authority content, and this is really where you wanna be sharing your expertise and your unique perspective on.

(9:09) Craig: A particular topic, whatever that is, obviously related to the, the, the core area of interest for you as, as a business, as an individual, so authority content is a maybe a contrarian view, maybe it's backed up by some research that you've done that's unique to you, but that is, is all about building on the news jacking approach and then just really trying to reinforce your expertise and authority and and and building that credibility over time.

(9:37) Craig: Third is conversion content, and that's really a lot more difficult now with LinkedIn because obviously LinkedIn is suppressing any external links to other websites, etc.

(9:50) Craig: so conversion content might often reside on your personal profile, but you, you can find ways to insert it into posts in, in clever ways, whether that's asking people to, add a comment, requesting a particular, Framework.

(10:06) Craig: You can, you can achieve the same thing in terms of conversion just by asking people to say, me please, basically in the comments.

(10:12) Craig: Another common one with LinkedIn is newsletters, as well, that's another good way of.

(10:18) Craig: Diversifying away from the platform and finding another way to engage with people, but starting that discovery process on LinkedIn.

(10:25) Craig: Yeah, and then the, the, the 4th and which has probably been the most prominent.

(10:30) Craig: Approach for a lot of people, you know, before this algorithm change was to focus heavily on personality or personal content, the cringy posts with pictures of yourself in a restaurant in Spain or whatever that has no bearing on, the actual content of the post.

(10:49) Craig: The algorithm used to reward likes and comments, didn't it, and those kind of posts.

(10:55) Craig: for some at least, like it or not, did generate likes, comments, etc.

(10:59) Craig: because they're, you know, they're, they're personal things which people want to engage with in the way that they would on Facebook.

(11:05) Craig: That's still very much a, a key part of the process because, you do have to get your personality across, but I think trying to do that in a non-cringey way in a B2B environment is, is a, is an art in itself.

(11:18) James: Well it's things like, you know, if you've been to a, a customer dinner, if you've been to an event and you've, You, you see them all the time, don't you, people that have met up there playing, I don't know, playing mini golf, whatever it may be that that is a little bit less serious, a little bit less.

(11:35) James: kind of authority content driven.

(11:37) James: There are particular types of format because of the algorithm that you just talked through.

(11:42) James: That perform well, carousels for example, perform well because people scroll through them, it increases dwell time which then pleases the algorithm.

(11:50) James: Video is the same.

(11:52) James: Video for a long time has always been more effective on LinkedIn than than other than other kind of types of posts, but it's for the same reason, you know, that, that it encourages dwell time cos people have to sit and watch that and therefore please use the algorithm.

(12:07) James: So there are again another type is the kind of infographic type content that we see a lot these days that's embedded directly within LinkedIn.

(12:17) James: A, it's not kind of trying to get people away from LinkedIn as a platform, but it, it also has enough detail that people need to and want to analyze it, learn from it, and therefore again, dwell time is increased, please use the algorithm.

(12:30) James: So there there is also format discussions or format decisions to be made when we're thinking about LinkedIn as a platform.

(12:38) Craig: Yeah, absolutely.

(12:39) Craig: Let's turn our attention to YouTube.

(12:41) Craig: For many B2B companies that are investing in content.

(12:45) Craig: YouTube's almost seen as an afterthought, it's often a dumping ground for video content.

(12:50) Craig: The channel itself and how it works is never really considered.

(12:53) Craig: It's all disjointed, it, it has no kind of structure, there's no understanding of what the channel is about and, and that's what audiences and viewers on YouTube are looking for, they, they, if they go to a channel that they're gonna subscribe to, they need to have a clear idea of what that's about, that each channel has to have its own value proposition and I think if you're, If you're using YouTube in the right way, you're almost thinking about your, your company or yourself as a, as a media company, obviously the bar is very high on YouTube, it's very high quality production, most of the videos that are successful for most of the content creators that are really successful on YouTube, but that's not to say that you can't be, Really leveraged from a B2B perspective because the bar is so high.

(13:41) Craig: It creates an opportunity because there's much less competition than there will be on LinkedIn where LinkedIn, the bar is much lower and it's quite easy to leverage AI to churn out a load of crappy content, so, We really think that not only because of the opportunity there, I think the the fact that increasingly your audiences and your, your targets will be more interested in human centric content.

(14:05) Craig: That's content that the human at the heart of it is very visible, that's gonna come through podcasts and through videos.

(14:12) Craig: The reason that just chucking a webinar up there doesn't work is because it's not designed for that platform and, and what, what does work on YouTube is, is snippets of things, so what we're not saying here is that you should completely, not repurpose it or reuse a webinar recording for example, but editing it in a way that might work well for YouTube shorts for example, with, you know, a shorter snippet of a piece of video, that maybe has subtitles on it, can work really well in shorts, for example, but there are other ways, aren't there, that, that we can optimize YouTube as a, as a platform.

(14:48) James: Yeah, so if you think about the outcomes that you want from YouTube if say you're doing a podcast like this.

(14:54) James: You'll no doubt have a presence on Spotify, on Apple and probably other less prominent podcast sites, but where your podcast will really get discovered is through YouTube, and that's typically you through like you say snippets and and short form content.

(15:11) James: and to an extent it's the same on LinkedIn.

(15:13) James: The beauty of YouTube is though that you can have long form content.

(15:17) James: If they're gonna spend more time consuming a, a, a 30 minute podcast or an, an hour long video, they're gonna really get to know you and really understand your expertise and the trust will start to build.

(15:30) James: It's what Grace Andrews, who was the brains behind the diary of a CEO, she refers to short form video as the forgettable seconds and the long form as the memorable minutes.

(15:39) James: So you, you've really gotta have a combination of both.

(15:41) James: But, but really to drive people towards more engagement and conversion, the more time they spend with you, the more likely they're gonna build that familiarity and trust.

(15:51) James: but from a consistency perspective, of course people are gonna subscribe to your channel if they can feel that they're gonna receive the next insightful piece of content, whether it's a, you know, a webinar style or something other, week after week after week after week.

(16:06) James: And if you, if you're not encouraging that subscription process to happen, then of course YouTube's gonna look at how many subscribers you've got and if it's low, you're not gonna, you're not gonna get that reach that you're looking for.

(16:17) James: So simply uploading the odd webinar every 2 or 3 months in a, a corporate video you did in 2016 is not gonna encourage people to subscribe because.

(16:28) James: They're they're not therefore reliably gonna get the next piece of content, and that is gonna limit your reach.

(16:34) James: With YouTube, it is about being consistent.

(16:36) James: The algorithm rewards consistency if you are posting regularly.

(16:40) James: I think the way the YouTube algorithm works is it, it, it is very much about almost how LinkedIn used to work, the, the first.

(16:48) James: Few people that engage.

(16:50) The algorithm will look at the view time and if it's positive it will take it to the next level and then the next level and it's various levels until you, you, you reach that wider audience and you go, go viral.

(17:04) Craig: Yeah, and I think another, another thing that people kind of neglect to think about when it comes to YouTube as a channel, because as we, as this podcast is about, they're thinking about the content first, not the channel, is that YouTube is effectively a search engine at the end of the day to.

(17:18) Craig: It's a video search engine, but it's a search engine like Google or any other, so I think often people neglect that optimization piece as well, the optimization of the, the description of the video, the optimization of the, the channel page itself, and all of that seems to not be considered in the same way that SEO would be despite the fact that it is a, a search engine in its own right.

(17:38) Craig: Yeah, your thumbnail on the title, how that works together is, is, is critical, the hook, and then obviously the content itself, you know, the quality of the presenters.

(17:47) Craig: maybe the visuals that go alongside that, it, it all comes into play, if you want to be successful on YouTube, but I think, going back to the earlier point, it really is a missed opportunity for many B2B brands, and I think, Over time, because of the, the challenge of working on platforms that are massively saturated and controlled almost now by AI having the human visible at the heart of your content is where the opportunity sits and, and that naturally lends itself to a focus on YouTube.

(18:16) James: Look, we're we're not gonna ignore the barriers to entry, are we, they are there, they do exist.

(18:21) James: how many conversations have we had with, with leaders of businesses that say no chance, no chance that you're gonna get me behind the camera, but, The what is the alternative?

(18:30) James: The alternative is to, is to get no reach, get no engagement and have a, to be honest, a poorly performing marketing function.

(18:37) James: So that it's now a non-negotiable thing in our view, or certainly in mine, to have some form of video content for multiple channels as you said, LinkedIn and YouTube, so I suppose it's about doing what you can to make it happen.

(18:50) Craig: Talking about declining channels, I think email's probably the next one to focus on.

(18:54) Craig: An an email I think is slightly different when we're talking about channel first.

(18:58) Craig: because what we've talked about until now is, is, is thinking about how you produce content for the channel.

(19:06) Craig: When, when we talk about email, the, the reason that it needs to be channel first is because the world of email is changing in that it's now much, much harder to get into someone's inbox than it was before.

(19:17) Craig: You, we've got things like privacy filters, spambots are becoming more sophisticated, it's just.

(19:22) Craig: People, people's fatigue when it comes to email and thousands of emails in their inbox has also obviously grown over a long period of time, but it boils down to the fact that it's very, very difficult now to get your email in someone's inbox in a way that they, they want to read it.

(19:37) Craig: Therefore, when we talk channel first from an email perspective, we're talking not about what content you create for that channel, although there is an element to that, but also thinking about how you've you optimize that channel before you use it.

(19:48) Craig: And the reason, the reason for that is because ultimately if you have a poorly optimized email channel, then you could put the best content in the world through it and no one's gonna see it.

(19:58) Craig: So it's things like trying to optimize your email health, your sender score, your lists, etc.

(20:05) Craig: in order to ensure that the effort that you put into producing fantastic content is rewarded by the fact that people are actually gonna read it through email.

(20:15) James: So that's the first thing.

(20:16) But I think there are things aren't there that from an email perspective that that also matter from a content point of view.

(20:25) James: and we were literally yesterday having a conversation with a client that that's point blank said if an email looks like a marketing email I will, I will just scan over it.

(20:35) James: And so there there are methods there to, to avoid that, you know we've seen a simpler plainer looking email with a lot of content baked into it.

(20:44) Craig: Is it is more effective than the traditional multiple links and loads of images and things like that, this comes down to what we talked about at the beginning, if conversion is your, your aim with email and it is for many understandably cos it is one of the, One of the few routes directly to your website that still exist, the sort of best ways of leveraging email are through something like a newsletter, which is a subscriber based newsletter, so you're only really distributing to subscribers, a, a newsletter that comes from, The founder or the the the experts that are also prevalent on LinkedIn and on YouTube etc.

(21:23) Craig: the email content itself can be a lot more personalized coming from the author.

(21:28) Craig: but can go into a lot more detail and that's where you can start to embed certain offers and, and other more conversion based content within the body of that email.

(21:36) Craig: Obviously the other channel that's emerged in the last couple of years is, is the LLMs, and of course people naturally will produce content like blogs and publish that on their website, but doing so without optimization of course for the LLMs is unlikely to mean that you, you then perform better on that channel.

(21:57) Craig: put simply, when, when you're gonna publish written content on your website like blogs, like guides, etc.

(22:03) Craig: there should be a level of optimization for the LLMs if you want to feature in that channel, and of course we highly recommend that you do.

(22:12) Craig: When we're thinking about how you do that, there's loads of tools out there.

(22:15) Craig: Searchable is one that we've looked at, there's there's many others, it's now baked into HubSpot as well with the recent announcement around AEO being introduced into their platform.

(22:24) Craig: But effectively if you're gonna publish content on your website, you need to be using one of those to, to optimize it for the LLMs if that is a channel that you want to use.

(22:33) James: So you've gotta consider the myriad questions that people could ask.

(22:36) James: Now previously SEO was about looking at keywords and factoring those into your content so that you'd feature for those searches that happen through Google.

(22:45) James: Now the obvious difference is that the way people search in LLMs is much more question based than you would previously have done in in Google.

(22:53) James: If you think about the impact that that has that that you know the, the, the number of keywords is obviously can be quite large for an organization, but the myriad ways in which someone could ask a question is even, you know, greater than that.

(23:06) James: So it's all about trying to understand the kind of prompts people may be using to find the kind of things that you're publishing.

(23:14) James: using a tool like Searchable or others, to track those prompts and understand how well you're, currently performing against them, and then to optimize for them.

(23:24) James: How you optimize for AO is a, is a podcast in its own right, we're not gonna go into loads of detail on that now.

(23:29) Craig: Just add one thing to, to this which really is something that can be leveraged across all the channels we've talked about, but it's the, the use of research.

(23:39) Craig: So as we're moving into a world where.

(23:42) Craig: The human is at the heart of content or certainly should be.

(23:47) Craig: And AI is eating many of the different channels in its, in its own, unique way.

(23:55) Craig: Having an opinion now doesn't really count like it used to.

(24:00) Craig: Everyone's sort of advised to have a contrarian opinion on a particular topic, but when you've got 30 or 40 different contrarian opinions, it's very hard for someone to understand what's right or wrong.

(24:11) Craig: You need your opinions, your arguments to be backed up.

(24:15) Craig: As much as possible by some credible research, some research is unique to you, we expect there's gonna be a lot more focus on unique research.

(24:24) Craig: So obviously we've talked about what we would consider the main four channels that B2B companies should be thinking about through the move to more of a channel first content strategy.

(24:36) Craig: There are obviously others, we're not gonna go through those in detail, but they give you things like Sub stack or Reddit.

(24:42) Craig: so there's 5 key takeaways from this, so if we start with number 1, that really is to think about the 3 step framework that we talked about earlier.

(24:50) Craig: What are the outcomes that you wanna get from the channel.

(24:53) Craig: What is the audience looking for from that particular channel and what are the various mechanics, the algorithms, the dynamics that are unique to that particular channel.

(25:04) Craig: Think about all those things before you start thinking about the content you're gonna create.

(25:09) James: Yeah, and number 2 is that the channels with the highest barrier to entry are typically where the highest opportunity is.

(25:16) James: So despite some of the challenges we've talked about in this podcast, we'd highly recommend that you focus on those.

(25:22) James: YouTube specifically.

(25:24) Craig: Third is that people, not brands, are the face now of your content.

(25:29) Craig: Your experts need to be the face of your content, and in turn, your company brand will get the halo effect.

(25:34) Craig: Ultimately your individuals are the, are the real asset.

(25:37) Craig: Fourth is that original research is the last true differentiator in B2B content.

(25:44) Craig: So if you've got opportunity to make sure you invest in original research to support your content program.

(25:49) James: So the final point is that we've talked a lot today about several different channels and we fully understand that not every marketing function is going to be able to be specialist and dedicate a lot of time, energy, resource and finance to be successful in all of them.

(26:03) James: If you feel that that's the case for you, then focus on one, maybe two and do those one or two really well instead of trying to spread yourself too thinly.

(26:13) Craig: So thanks for listening and watching, if you got some value from this episode then please check out our other content on our channels.

(26:19) Craig: We'd absolutely love it if you became a subscriber, that would really help us out and we'll see you next time.