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The B2B Content MarketingStack

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MARCH 31, 2015 WILL LAM

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As a content-focused organization your main priority should be on moving the

meter to produce valuable content that your audience cares about in order to

bolster your inbound marketing efforts and generate leads.

It’s easy to get bogged down while running a content marketing team, but

when you don’t know about the bottlenecks or inefficiencies your team has,

any optimization will have a compounding effect downstream .

Less valuable content at a slower pace means fewer qualified leads, which

means lower sales and so on.

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Whatever tools and processes you have in place should enhance your

marketing team’s efforts to justify its existence (and greater investment) based

on the ROI your team produces. Hopefully, you’re bringing in more revenue

than what you’re spending to create content and fuel your marketing engine.

The challenge

The number of marketing technology companies has nearly doubled between

January 2014 and 2015 from 947 to 1,876. Unfortunately, there isn’t any one

tool that helps you get a handle on content marketing in one fell swoop.

It’s overwhelming to stay on top of the sheer number of marketing tools out

there, in addition to whatever “stack” or suite of tools you’ve adopted so far.

Unfortunately, it’s tough to arrive at a general consensus about what makes

the "perfect content marketing stack".

But much like how David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”), co-founder of

Basecamp, and creator of Ruby on Rails web development stack, succinctly

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puts it: “Ruby on Rails is Omakase”.

A team of chefs picked out the ingredients, designed the APIs, and

arranged the order of consumption on your behalf according to their

idea of what would make for a tasty full-stack framework.

Much like how David has come up with the “Rails Way” when it comes to web

development, I’d like to think that we as content marketers at Uberflip,

marketing to marketers, know a thing or two about creating an airtight

framework for content marketing teams to run like a well-oiled machine.

The prescription

Keep in mind that this is geared towards B2B companies that are invested in

content and have a team dedicated to consistently producing valuable content.

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Now that we have that out of the way, what we need is a framework that takes

into account the entire content marketing process and to plug that into the

greater marketing organization’s purpose - a prescription, if you will, that’s

broad and robust enough to meet B2B marketers’ expectations and address

their unique challenges.

The problem lies in the sea of marketing technology products when trying to

understand the full picture of a lead’s life cycle from top of the funnel all the

way down to the close, while making better-informed decisions and being

more productive.

When you look at the touchpoints of marketing, you have to consider lead

capture, contact management, email marketing, social media, SEO, content

marketing, analytics, and so on when building your marketing ecosystem.

The Stack

The entire B2B Content Marketing Stack should be set up in a way that focuses

your efforts with an end-to-end holistic approach.

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The stack I am prescribing helps streamline our efforts at Uberflip, from

creating content, organizing content via an editorial calendar, managing

content with our CMS, generating leads and distributing content, all the way to

automating your marketing efforts to bubble up hot leads for your sales team

to take action on. And finally it enables you to have the analytics to learn,

measure and improve your content marketing efforts.

Content Creation: Google Docs

Google Docs is a no-brainer in terms of writing and collaborating. It helps the

content creation process by providing a canvas for your team to edit, comment,

highlight and get the most out of your team’s writing efforts.

Editorial Calendar: Google Sheets

We stick to our own in-house spreadsheet and share it via Google Sheets to

host our editorial calendar, content ideas, as well as a list our previously

created content so we’re not duplicating efforts. It doesn’t have to be fancy or

sophisticated to be effective.

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Content Management System (CMS): Uberflip

We use our own platform as our CMS to manage, organize, and automate all of

our content—blog articles, social media posts, videos, eBooks—in our content

hub. Since Uberflip is built for B2B Content Marketers, we also manage lead

generation within our content through contextual CTA placements to capture

contacts and gate our premium content. Since our CMS integrates with your

marketing automation, it fits into your content marketing and B2B lead

generation efforts, we have all those bases covered.

Distribution: Buffer

Buffer offers an easy way to share content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and

Google+. You’re able to schedule when your content is shared as well as get a

host of analytics around what content has been performing the best in terms of

engagement and sharing.

Marketing Automation (includes email marketing): HubSpot

Probably the most flexible marketing platform in existence, as it starts from a

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reasonable $800 / month for its Professional package and scales up from

there, HubSpot will cover all bases that let you grow into their Enterprise

package, assuming your revenue grows just as fast as your needs. They offer a

world class marketing automation suite, excellent UX and design, and

integrates perfectly with Uberflip’s Hubs and CTAs.

If you’re already on another marketing automation platform, you might be

better served sticking to it unless you’re fully committed to switching to

something like HubSpot.

CRM: HubSpot CRM (substitute Salesforce if you already have it)

Though a relatively new entrant to the CRM market that HubSpot has made

entirely free, it integrates perfectly with HubSpot’s Marketing Automation

software. If you’re already using another CRM like Salesforce and your entire

organization has bought into it, it’s better to stick to it rather than switch to

something else.

Analytics: Google Analytics

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Pretty much the standard set of Analytics that you really need. Google

Analytics covers everything you need from standard web analytics, event-

driven analytics, powerful segmentation, Mobile Analytics and even cohort

analysis.

Extras

While the above tools comprise the core of our B2B content marketing stack,

here are some other tools to consider based on your unique needs.

Lead capture: SumoMe

SumoMe is a free lightweight tool to capture leads with their fly-out List

Builder, Smart Bar, and a host of other free analytics tools such as heatmaps.

You can’t really beat free when it comes to their tight integrations with

services such as MailChimp, Aweber, MadMimi or Constant Contact for your

email marketing.

Video: Wistia

If video is part of your content marketing strategy, Wistia is affordable and its

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analytics give you insight into viewing trends, heatmaps and its lead

generation feature integrates perfectly into what we’ve previously mentioned.

SEO: Moz

If your organization is heavily focused on SEO, Moz is a tool that will give you

strategic insight into your content marketing efforts and how you rank

compared to competitors as well as a host of other products, which include

FollowerWonk for social, and Fresh Web Explorer and their industry leading

Keyword difficulty tracker and Moz Analytics.

Conclusion

The tools mentioned above create a tight stack that’s interwoven to help you

see the big picture—"the forest from the trees”—all the way down to seeing the

individual leaves of those trees, taking into account analytics on individual

contacts.

What’s in your content marketing stack? What do you think belongs or doesn’t

belong?

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Go beyond the content marketing stack in our webinar, How To 10xYour Content Team's Productivity.

About the Author

Will is a Product Marketing Manager at Uberflip. Outside of Uberflip,

he likes lifting heavy things and putting them down, is horrible at Ruby

on Rails and iOS development, and prides himself on being a coffee

snob.

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