Content strategy is your single most important tool for bringing your company's unique value into every buyer and customer interaction. But most companies do not do content strategy well.

Consider the following:

• Although 8 in 10 B2B companies use content marketing, less than 4 in 10 enterprises have and use a buyer journey.
• A full 71% of decision-makers say less than half of the thought-leadership content they read or watch gives them any sort of valuable insights, the 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found.
• Most marketing-generated content never gets used by sales or customer success teams; estimates of unused content vary between 60 and 90%.

Why is something as important as content strategy so hard to get right?

Many marketing teams make one simple but grave mistake: They treat content as standalone assets rather than as a pathway of assets that tells a story about buyer and customer value.

Fixing that one mistake can shift your content strategy and accelerate revenue growth in your business.

Here are four actions you can take to make that shift.

1. Start with buyer value

Marketing departments often organize their content road map around content categories, listing out plans for blog posts, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, infographics, etc. Instead, marketing departments should start with a focus on how each content asset aligns to buyer value. Fully 68% of B2B buyers want to see vendors organize content by issue/pain point, according to the 2019 Demand Gen Report.

Your company's product or service may help your customers increase revenue, reduce costs, drive processes' efficiencies, improve business insights, optimize staff productivity, increase asset productivity, create higher user persistence, support faster teams, or a variety of other outcomes.

Your content should be clearly organized around and tagged according to those buyer outcomes. You can tag website content to one or more areas of buyer value. You can create a highlight box in your blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, or infographics to explicitly share the specific use cases addressed by that content piece.

Connecting content to a specific buyer's goals creates a content pathway that helps tell a story about buyer value. It will lead to much higher content engagement both by your buyers and by your sales teams.

2. Prioritize your customer stories

Customer stories and case studies are perhaps the most important content type, but they are often underused. Case studies rank only fourth out of the six top content types, a recent study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute found. They should be No. 1 for any marketing team.

Customer stories are important because they create a subtle but powerful shift in a buyer conversation: They shift the conversation from "me and you" to "we." Rather than holding a vendor at arm's length, customer stories turn you into a peer, collaborator, and trusted adviser. You, both, are looking for solutions to a shared problem.

Customer stories also make it a lot easier for sales and customer success teams to resist product-pitching. Stories put a company's product or service capabilities directly into the context of a specific customer and show how your product or service capabilities solve that customer's problem. The customer becomes the hero of the story, not the company and the company's product.

Customer stories are neglected often because they are harder to create than other types of content. You have to find time to spend with your customers, capture their stories, iterate, and revise. But, the differential impact of customer stories makes them worth the work.

3. Optimize content for the buyer journey

Many companies and marketing teams think of content as just for marketing purposes, particularly lead generation. However, a content strategy has its maximum impact on a company's revenue growth when content pathways linked to buyer value also support sales and customer success conversations.