A Content Marketing Strategy for B2B that gets results

What Is The GR8 Framework?

The GR8 Framework is our operating system & approach for B2B companies that want to leverage content marketing. Not only does the GR8 Framework help businesses plan, create, distribute, measure and market content with purpose and confidence, but it also provides marketers with a clear advantage to building awareness, earning trust, creating & capturing demand, and turning B2B Content Marketing into a growth channel.

There are 8 detailed and powerful pillars within the framework; each builds on the last, guiding teams through a complete content marketing lifecycle. It is thorough, yet straightforward to understand.

1. Audit
   • What’s your current situation? (audit your whole process, not just content)
   • What are your business goals and how can content marketing  help?
2. Intelligence
   • Who are you targeting?
   • What are their pain points?
   • Competitive analysis
   • Keyword Research
   • Intent signals
3. Strategy
   • Content Belief system/philosophy
   • Compete on Generosity
   • Buyer psychology
   • Types of content to create
   • Why create it
   • Authority signals
   • Answer & empower your audience
4. Creation & Production
   • What specific content to produce
   • The workflow involved
   • The different formats of content to produce
   • Length of content
   • Buyer journey mapping
   • Retool & Repurpose
   • Planning of content production
5. Optimization & Structure
   • Follow Google’s Helpful Content and E-E-A-T guidelines
   • Structure the hierarchy of pages and content for better discoverability
   • Optimize for on-page SEO (Title tags, H1-H6, meta descriptions, urls, image alt text, navigation, schema)
   • Topical Authority structure
   • User satisfaction & conversion optimization
   • Internal linking strategy
   • Focus on Off-page SEO (quality backlinks & social proof signals/reviews)
   • Optimize for video content
6. Distribution
   • Distribute your content through different channels (Social, email, communities, etc)
   • Audienceship – Focus heavily on building more of an audience that you control (owned media, instead of renting attention)
7. Performance
   • Track content performance through software (google search console, analytics, heat maps, etc)
   • Determine attribution of content leads/sales
   • Overall Content Marketing ROI 
8. Operations
   • Focuses on operational effectiveness
   • Building the the right systems
   • Effective use of Software tools
   • Ai usage
   • Departmental involvement
   • Leadership involvement
   • Governance

Why the GR8 Framework works

Most companies create content, few leverage it into consistent growth. The GR8 Framework helps companies go beyond “doing content” by building the structure, accountability, and vision required to build a growth channel that is dependable. 

When these eight pillars are followed with intention, businesses don’t just win short-term attention, they create the conditions for long-term customer growth.

Audit

Start with clarity. Audit your current content marketing situation and performance to uncover what’s working, what’s not, and how aligned your content efforts are with business goals. This diagnostic step lays the foundation for focused improvement.

You must be able to answer these basic questions:

• Are search engines discovering your content?
• Are the keywords you are targeting driving enough traffic?
• Are you even targeting the right keywords?
• Do you believe your pages are optimized & structured following SEO best practices?
• Does your content signal that you have Topical Authority?
• Do you have mechanisms on your site or social media to capture interest and engagement from your audience?
• Is your content working to generate enough leads?

The need for ongoing evaluation or audit of your content SEO and content strategy and creation techniques is vital to ensure content remains effective and aligned with goals

Buyer & Market Intelligence

Most content strategy is lost right here! In fact, about 96% of all content gets little or no traffic at all.

Even with the ease of Ai content production and SEO analysis, Google or any search engine isn’t here to help you with free traffic; you are not owed traffic. They exist to serve themselves and the public that is searching on their platform. If sending traffic to your content serves their or their audience’s purpose, then you benefit.

An effective content marketing strategy starts with a deep understanding of your audience and how to outmaneuver your competitors.

This pillar combines deep audience insight with market research to form the strategic foundation for content that performs. It goes beyond surface-level personas or keyword lists; helping you identify not just what your audience wants, but how to position your content to win against competitors and in search.

Includes:

• Buyer Intelligence: Define who your buyers are, (personas) what drives their decisions, how they search, their pain points, their vendor selection process, and their pre-sales questions

• Market Intelligence: Analyze competitors you’re up against, their content strengths, topic weaknesses, and positioning in the SERPs

• Keyword Discovery: Identify content opportunities tied to intent, pain points, and buyer questions

• Keyword Selection Criteria: Score and prioritize keywords using relevance, search intent, competition, click potential, and value — not just volume

• SERP Analysis: Evaluate what currently ranks to understand format expectations, content depth, and topical coverage

• Content Format Preferences: Identify which formats your audience engages with most (e.g., comparison pages, tutorials, templates, calculators)

• Industry Insight: Analyze industry nuances that reflect the way your buyers may think or act

• Positioning Opportunities: Spot whitespace in messaging, expertise, or delivery that your brand can own

Strategy

Content Strategy is much more than just creating or publishing content. It’s about strategically planning how to engage your audience, through content, for long-term success.

A strong Content Strategy ensures that what you publish supports your audience at every stage of their journey, fuels real engagement, captures emerging demand, and positions your business as an indispensable resource.

An effective Content Strategy typically includes:

1. Philosophy or Doctrine: Do you have an overarching philosophy about the content you wish to provide your audience? (this belief or philosophy will dictate how you approach content marketing)

2. The Age of Ai Strategy: If everyone uses Ai to produce SEO-optimized, content rich topics at scale, then how exactly will Google and other search engines or Ai engines decide to send your business traffic? What differentiates your content from everyone else’s? You need a strategy of the factors that Google, other search engines and Ai will use to determine who ranks and who does not. 

3. Topical Authority or Domination: Design pillar-cluster page structures, including CTAs for Topical Authority

4. Map content to intent stages (awareness, consideration, and decision). Aligning content with audience intent and search behavior is crucial.

5. Determine Content formats to prioritize trust and engagement (articles, whitepapers, quizzes, eGuides, etc)

6. Consider competing on generosity. By freely offering ideas, insights, and expertise you  demonstrate leadership and outshine AI-generated or surface-level content.

We guide our clients through a full, practical, repeatable Content Strategy process that helps turn your B2B content marketing efforts into a consistent, measurable source of engagement and qualified leads.

Rooted in what today’s buyers actually respond to—help before hype.

Creation & Production

This is where strategy meets execution. Content & Production focuses on aligning your content with audience intent, delivering meaningful value, and producing assets with consistency, clarity, and purpose.

Considerations:

-Selecting formats (blog, video, tools, guides, etc.) to enhance engagement and reach

-Defining content types (educational, comparison, conversion)

–Uniqueness of content compared to generic Ai and competition

-Building editorial calendars and production workflows

–Writing Quality: write for clarity, stick to relevance, cover the topic in full, match writing to intent of keyword, use NLP. Producing superior content ensures your content stands out in comparison to your competition that is ranking for the same keywords/terms

–Repurposing content across multiple channels and formats

–Brand voice, tone, and editorial guidelines

-Aligning content with requirements of sales team

-Content lifecycle (refresh, archive, sunset)

Optimization & Structure

Even great content fails if it isn’t structured to perform. This pillar is all about how your content functions, how it’s structured, linked, and experienced. Optimization makes content more discoverable by search engines, easier to navigate for users, and more effective at guiding visitors toward action.

Key elements include:

• On-Page SEO: Optimizing headlines, meta tags, headings, image alt text, schema markup, and overall content structure.

• Internal Linking: Building smart content pathways that connect related topics and help both users and crawlers navigate your expertise.

• Content Structure & Page Layout: Using readable formatting, clear hierarchies, and scannable sections to improve engagement.

• Topical Clusters & Pillar Pages: Organizing content into structured themes to improve topical authority and SEO performance.

• Semantic SEO is the process of optimizing your content for a topic rather than a single keyword or phrase. It looks into user intent, user experience, and the relationships between related entities and concepts

• User Experience (UX) Flow: Ensuring the site’s visual and navigational experience helps users stay longer and find what they need.

• Conversion Pathways: Strategically placing CTAs, forms, offers, and lead magnets based on page intent and user journey.

• Backlink Support: Acquiring quality backlinks that reinforce content authority and drive external traffic.

When done right, optimization turns your content ecosystem into a high-performance engine, amplifying what you’ve created and making sure it’s seen, understood, and acted upon.

Distribution

If content isn’t seen, it doesn’t matter. This pillar ensures your best ideas are amplified across the right channels and helps you build long-term reach through owned and earned strategies.

Includes:

• Multi-channel distribution (social, LinkedIN, Facebook, Reddit, email, search, communities)

• Paid and organic content promotion

• Repurposing content

• Audienceship: building direct, owned access to your audience instead of only counting on rented channels

Performance

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Track results and prove what’s working. This pillar brings measurement and accountability to your content program. It helps you understand what’s driving impact, and where to optimize further.

Includes:

• Content KPIs and funnel performance

• Attribution and ROI tracking

• Performance reporting

• Insight to inform strategy and planning

Operations

Align your people, tools, and processes. To scale content marketing effectively, you need operational excellence. This pillar ensures that leadership, departments, and technology all work together to support consistent execution.

Considerations:

• Executive buy-in and leadership support

• Departmental Participation (sales, product, etc.)

• Tech stack: CMS, AI, and content marketing tools

• SOPs, training, and onboarding documentation

• Governance (approval processes, brand voice, compliance)