Content Strategy for B2B: Insights from a Fractional CMO's Journey
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In a recent episode of Landa Talks, we had the opportunity to speak with Arnaud Thierry, a Fractional CMO who specializes in B2B content strategy. With a background that spans psychology, finance, and entrepreneurship, Arnaud offers a unique perspective on how startups and established businesses alike can leverage content marketing to drive growth.
His journey from a finance professional to a digital nomad to a startup founder and eventually to a fractional marketing expert showcases the versatility that many professionals seek in today's ever-evolving business landscape. Through his experiences working with VCs and startups across Latin America, Arnaud has developed a pragmatic approach to content marketing that focuses on quality, strategic execution, and tangible results.
This article dives into his insights on effective B2B content strategy, the reality of inbound marketing, platform diversification, and how to structure fractional engagements for maximum impact:
The Reality of B2B Content Marketing: Quality Over Quantity
One of the most persistent myths in content marketing is that creating high-quality content automatically generates inbound leads. Arnaud challenges this notion, emphasizing that content should be viewed as the primary asset of an acquisition strategy rather than a passive lead generator.
"A big mistake that people make, and I was mistaken for a long time when I started creating content, is that if you create content, good content, you're going to get a lot of inbound. And you just need to create content, and the client is going to come to you, and it's going to be 100% inbound," he explains.
However, the reality is far more complex. Content creation is just the beginning—you must actively leverage that content through outreach, use it to educate potential clients, and incorporate it into your follow-up strategies. This active approach to content utilization makes it a powerful tool in the B2B marketing arsenal. When potential clients visit your profile, they typically check your most recent posts—usually just the last two or three—to evaluate your expertise.
As Arnaud notes, "You can lose them with one bad post. They come and your last post is not good. They're going to be like, no, I don't want to talk with that person." This underscores the critical importance of quality over quantity. A consistent publishing schedule is important, but never at the expense of quality. For B2B service providers, especially fractional executives, the benchmark should be a minimum of two high-quality LinkedIn posts per week and one long-form content piece (such as a newsletter, blog post, or podcast episode) per month.
This approach focuses on creating content that converts rather than merely attracts, which is particularly vital in the B2B space where credibility and trust are paramount. Unlike B2C marketing that often prioritizes reach and engagement metrics, B2B content marketing success is measured by its ability to establish authority and facilitate meaningful business relationships.
Execution Over Strategy: Creating Early Wins for Clients
In the fractional consulting world, clients often come seeking immediate results, not lengthy strategic frameworks. Arnaud's approach to this reality is refreshingly pragmatic. What he realized is that clients don't really want too much of the strategy and they want more execution.
"Usually I try not to emphasize too much of strategy. I try to kind of hide it. We're gonna do it anyway, like we're gonna do the audit and we're gonna do the strategy calls, but I put more emphasis on the execution."
This execution-first mindset helps fractional consultants achieve early wins that cement the client relationship. By focusing conversations on tangible deliverables and outcomes rather than abstract strategic concepts, advisors can more effectively demonstrate their value proposition. Arnaud recommends spending as little time as possible on upfront strategy work and moving quickly to execution, noting that strategy works better with data. So as soon as you start building or working, the better data you have to build a better strategy.
This approach creates a virtuous cycle: early execution generates data, which informs a more effective strategy, which guides more targeted execution. For advisors and fractional executives, this means structuring engagements to deliver visible results within the first few weeks, even while conducting necessary strategic analysis in the background. Tools like Notion can facilitate this approach by creating transparency and allowing clients to see progress in real-time without constant status updates. Arnaud emphasizes the importance of maintaining flexibility rather than rigid processes, noting that "the value of being fractional is like you're selling your time and your expertise. So clients are looking more for customized on-demand [work]." This client-centric mindset, combined with a bias toward action, creates the "aha moments" that transform a tentative engagement into a long-term advisory relationship.
Platform Diversification: Mitigating Risk While Maximizing Reach
The landscape of digital platforms continues to evolve, and with it comes increasing "platform risk"—the danger of building your entire content presence on a single channel. Arnaud warns against over-reliance on any one platform, noting that "the platform risk is huge. So I think a few years ago, you could build an audience just on one platform and unless you are very big, the platform risk was not that big." However, recent events have demonstrated how quickly this can change, with platforms banning accounts more aggressively than before and some facing regulatory challenges in certain regions.
Arnaud's solution is straightforward: diversify across multiple platforms while adapting content to each platform's unique characteristics. Rather than simply cross-posting identical content, he recommends maintaining the core idea or expertise angle while adjusting the format to suit each platform's culture and audience expectations. This diversification strategy serves a dual purpose—it reduces the risk of losing your entire audience overnight while also expanding your reach to different segments of your target market.
A common recommendation is to build an email list as an "owned" channel, but Arnaud cautions that this approach has limitations: "It's very hard to convert people from LinkedIn or from Instagram to your email list. And also you need a strategy because you add people to your email list and then what? You need a newsletter strategy." Without a clear plan for engaging subscribers, simply collecting email addresses provides little value. Instead, he suggests that being active on at least two major platforms creates natural redundancy—if followers lose access to you on one platform, they can find you on another.
Another misconception Arnaud challenges is the notion that certain platforms are exclusively for specific types of content or audiences. "LinkedIn is B2B, right? But also B2B are everywhere because B2B are people," he explains. Decision-makers consume content across multiple platforms, from LinkedIn and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube. The most effective approach is to start with the platform you personally enjoy most, as authentic engagement is more likely when you genuinely like participating in that community.
Personal Brand vs. Business Identity: Strategic Considerations for Founders
The question of whether founders should build personal accounts or business accounts is perennial in marketing discussions. Arnaud takes a pragmatic stance on this issue, particularly for early-stage businesses: "If it's early stage, you should focus just on the personal one and have the business one just to be like, hey, we exist, like we are real." The business account serves primarily as verification—a place prospects can visit to confirm legitimacy after discovering the founder through their personal content. For startup founders especially, Arnaud challenges the notion that there's a meaningful separation between personal and business identity:
"I'm not talking about personal brand anymore with founders. I'm just talking about creating content. It's called content marketing, it's part of marketing. You like it or not, you choose to be a founder, you have to do everything."
This integrated approach recognizes that effective founder content, when done properly, naturally promotes the business mission rather than personal celebrity. As Arnaud notes, even if you do personal content, if you do it right, people will remember your startup and your mission more than your name. This perspective shifts the conversation from building a personal brand to creating content as a fundamental marketing activity—no different from other essential business functions.
For those concerned about future exit potential, Arnaud recommends focusing on immediate business needs rather than hypothetical future scenarios:
"First, make money. And then in 10 years, you can build your strategy, marketing strategy with the team."
This grounded approach prioritizes generating revenue and establishing market presence before optimizing for acquisition scenarios. The integration of personal and business content is particularly effective for fractional executives and advisors whose personal expertise directly reflects their service offering. By positioning themselves as visible thought leaders within their niche, they create both credibility and discoverability while maintaining flexibility to evolve their service offerings over time.
With these insights from Arnaud Thierry's experience as a Fractional CMO, it becomes clear that successful B2B content strategy requires a pragmatic approach that balances quality content creation with active outreach, prioritizes execution while building strategy, diversifies across platforms while adapting to each one's unique characteristics, and leverages personal content to build business credibility. By adopting these principles, both founders and fractional advisors can create content that not only showcases their expertise but actively contributes to business growth objectives.
