No matter how extensive your company’s marketing strategies are, they are useless when you don’t utilize the right content. As a brand owner and a team member, always remember that content matters. It’s how you can establish a positive brand image and boost your visibility.
61% of B2B buyers revealed reading three to seven content pieces before trusting a brand, according to the 2022 Demand Gen Report. Let’s talk about why B2B content marketing strategies matter, explore content ideas, and cover some of tips you need to get started.
What you will learn
- What a B2B content marketing strategy is and why it matters
- The differences between a B2B and a B2C content marketing strategy
- Useful tips to develop a successful B2B content marketing strategy for your brand
What is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
B2B content marketing is utilizing various strategies to create content pieces that will resonate and expand your audience. It boosts traffic, sales, and leads for B2B companies to strengthen your brand affinity to attract fellow business companies into probable collaboration in the future.
The most common types of B2B content strategies include email newsletters, blogging, infographics, and podcasting. These tactics are innovative tools to target potential customers directly, maximizing a business’s overall revenue and reach in the most cost-effective way possible.
An effective B2B content marketing strategy looks like the following:
- There’s a complete alignment between your content’s existing customers and potential customers, or target customers.
- Your strategies involve collaborating with your product team, senior leaders, and sales team.
- You involve your target audiences by asking for feedback through focus groups, content engagement measurements, comments, and surveys.
- Tracking of your KPIs regularly
Why Setting a B2B Content Marketing Strategy is Important
A B2B content strategy serves as your company’s blueprint or roadmap. It helps you get from one goal to another, ensuring you will not lose sight of your objectives. Otherwise, you risk experiencing confusion and difficulty getting back on the right track.
Having an effective B2B content strategy helps you create the best content pieces in a suitable amount of time to reach your audiences as quickly as possible. It’s how you can stay ahead of your competitors and establish a positive brand image in the market.
Moreover, if you’re targeting businesses, any type of content won’t make it. You need to publish authoritative content pieces to sway your target companies and win them over. Your pieces must provide actionable and valuable information to prove that your brand can help them grow their organizations.
Drive Web Traffic
Publishing authoritative and engaging content for potential companies can increase your brand’s organic traffic. But there are several factors you must take into consideration, like:
- Creating an efficient content calendar
- Knowing who your target audiences or companies are and their search intent
- Getting all the information you need about your competitors and their rank in certain keywords
- Determining exactly what keywords you plan on targeting
These factors can help you rank higher on search engines, allowing more people to locate and view your brand and potentially transforming them to become your target market. Plus, this can also help businesses know more about what your brand offers to determine whether your services or products can drive value to theirs.
Obtain More Leads
With the right content promotion, you can deliver the benefits of your brand’s services and products to the right customers and businesses. And this can help with increasing your lead generation.
One of the best ways to generate more leads is to ensure your content strategy is backed by evidence-based research. You must gain your audience’s trust, which is essential in increasing your client’s lifetime value. And the only way you can achieve this is by relying on facts, data, and proven pieces of information to create valuable content.
As a content marketer, you’ll want to include statistics or relevant sources that can support the primary goal of your content. This adds to your credibility, driving trust and loyalty to your business. Additionally, keep in mind that leads can become potential sales, increasing your brand’s overall revenue and profitability.
Establishes A Structure
Even when you have all the right content to publish and attract businesses, they will not be effective without a well-planned and organized structure. As a content marketer, you need to work closely with your content team to come up with a schedule for your postings, meetings, and evaluation.
Planning your content marketing strategies adds structure to your brand, which can make you look better in the eyes of your target audience.
More importantly, establishing a structure in your B2B content marketing strategy helps nurture your audiences to keep them on top of your mind. Remember that these strategies work differently from B2C tactics because they involve more decision-makers.
Remember that business to business purchasing decisions take longer, about six months or more. This is because the cycle involves more people, with each individual wanting to review the purchase before giving the go signal.
Moreover, B2B buyers are more deliberate because higher money and investments are at stake.
B2B Content Marketing vs. B2C Content Marketing Strategies
The main difference between strategies in B2B and B2C content marketing is the audience each one is going for.
B2B companies involve different individuals as the decisions maker and end users. This means that you must be convincing to the decision maker so he sees your product or service as an intelligent business call. Moreover, the decision maker realizes the benefits of what you offer in the business of the end users.
You must also consider that B2B content marketing strategies are far more complex than B2C companies. It involves persuading various decision-makers and team members before a buy-in is done.
On the other hand, the decision maker and end users in a B2C company are the same individuals. Your products or services are meant to persuade the end user that they can be beneficial and won’t waste what they pay for. As long as you can convince the buyer to purchase anything from your brand, expect good results.
Decision Makers
B2B and B2C companies differ in their decision makers, which are also critical factors when establishing content writing strategies. When we’re talking about B2C content marketing, decision-makers are the individual buyers, so the need to tap into their logic is not as crucial as in B2B companies.
Compare buying a coffee with purchasing a SaaS product that can make or break your company. If you hate the cup you bought, it’s enough to simply avoid the brand that sold it to you in the future.
On the contrary, when the SaaS product you purchased for your company fails to drive the revenue you want, you’re putting your business on the line.
This is precisely the reason why you must establish deeper connections with the decision-makers from a B2B perspective. You must guide your prospect during the entire purchase cycle, which also involves delivering long-form, high-quality content. Don’t forget that ROI matters to most businesses, so this aspect must be included when creating content.
Challenges
Both B2B and B2C content marketing strategies involve challenges that must be overcome, but there are still differences.
For instance, one of the most challenging struggles to overcome in B2B marketing is creating content that the audience will love. Otherwise, what you publish is useless and leads to zero sales.
Moreover, you don’t always have a hefty amount of budget to generate the best content as a B2B company. That’s considering you plan on hiring professional copywriters with an outstanding experience.
But if you are fully aware of how to repurpose your content, driving leads from a single piece of content can be a piece of cake. Plus, the following content syndication techniques should help you:
- Breaking your listicles into several individual blog posts
- Including a visually-appealing infographic using your content’s main points
- Creating a presentation out of your blog
Last-minute changes are also challenges to B2B companies, especially for content writers in the team. Because there are more people involved, multiple feedback introduced by stakeholders at a later period can delay the schedule.
On the other hand, the challenges are different in B2C companies. Your first struggle is building personal connections with your customer and enticing them to check out your brand’s products and services.
Additionally, your customers’ changing behaviors should also be considered. Buyers are significantly affected by technology and other innovative tools, which also means their expectations have increased. This also means you must keep them engaged with your brand and hand over personalized content that will attract them even more.
Budgets
Business owners should propose higher marketing budgets for B2B strategies than B2C. This is because several factors are in consideration for a B2B transaction to push through, which will also involve more people. Plus, we’ve also all agreed that you could expect more decision-makers in B2B.
While in B2C, the business must only convince individual buyers without the need to overcome several hoops for purchase to push through. This also means you don’t need an expensive budget for B2C marketing to be successful.
The Buying Cycle
The buying cycle for B2B is a longer process because potential buyers consider factors like the product’s long-term impact, price, and overall value before deciding. You must also consider the relationship between your business and the B2B buyer.
Establishing trust is important over time, and you can achieve this by nurturing your leads throughout the entire sales journey. Remember that B2B buyers prefer brands or vendors they know they can trust and stay loyal to them.
The buying cycle for B2B also commonly involves more than a single person, including the production manager, the CFO, and the CEO. This means more feedback, responses, and last-minute changes.
It’s the complete opposite of a B2C purchasing journey. Buyers are normally more straightforward with what they want, which leads to a more instantaneous buying cycle. When your product drives value to the customer, fewer decisions are made, which leads to faster sales.
Content Types
Content types in B2C and B2B content marketing differ in messaging and the channel utilized. For instance, not all social medial channels are relevant for B2B. LinkedIn provides outstanding opportunities to attract new business leads, especially its sponsored content feature.
This feature lets your business place your content on a potential customer’s news feed. The same customer showed an interest in your industry by checking out content from your competitors.
Moreover, LinkedIn helps with thought leadership. This significant aspect allows B2B buyers to make more informed purchasing decisions. The most common types of content effective for B2B include blog posts, Ebooks, and white papers:
- Blog posts – economical and provide updates about your business
- White papers – longer than blog posts but can provide solutions to the current industry problems
- Ebooks – include tables and graphic illustrations that can serve as educational insights.
Let’s talk about B2C content. If your company loves scrolling through social media to generate current trends in the market, why not utilize this as a way to drive leads for your marketing?
Social media is a way for B2C to promote and advertise products and services while also establishing interactions. It’s also a nice channel to learn about your customer’s buying habits is also a nice channel.
How to Build a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
There’s no “one size fits all” marketing strategy for all B2B businesses. Each business is unique, and your content marketing campaign should be designed to benefit your company.
Consider starting with your well-defined goals. Plus, understanding your long-term goals can also help. It can be intimidating, but it gets easier once you know where and how to start. Here’s how to successfully build an effective B2B content marketing strategy.
1. Define content marketing goals
Defining and understanding your brand’s content marketing goals are crucial to your strategies’ success. Remember that B2B content marketing helps build brand awareness, acquire demo requests, generate MQLs or marketing-qualified leads, customer retention, and acquisition.
This is why your marketing goals should be clear and well-established. What are your objectives in publishing content, and why do you want to achieve those? It’s also important that you set and rely on several key performance indicators to measure your strategy’s performance.
Monitoring your progress also helps assess whether your company’s content marketing strategy is a success or a failure. It can also help with identifying gaps to know how to optimize your marketing strategies better.
More importantly, consider the SMART goal setting when establishing content marketing objectives: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Let’s look at the most common content marketing goals established by most B2B companies:
Increase Search Visibility
For businesses to see your company, you need to stay visible on search engines. Utilizing this as one of your content marketing goals can help you win over your competitors and rank high online.
Moreover, increasing your brand’s search visibility can potentially boost the website’s organic traffic, which can also increase the chance of driving more sales. The following are valuable KPIs to measure your search visibility:
- Impressions
- SERP positions
- Traffic
- CTR
Drive Leads and Conversions
Driving leads and conversions are also common marketing objectives to boost your sales and expand your target audience. Knowing how to nurture your leads strengthens your content and increases the number of people who trust your business. Key performance indicators relevant to this goal involve conversion rate, revenue, and leads generated.
Establish Authority and Trust
And finally, the content you publish is useless when you don’t establish your brand’s authority. You need search engines to believe what you post to rank higher online. Plus, it’s also how your target audience will develop trust in your products and services. Measure engagement, content depth, and backlinks, which are essential to building trust and loyalty.
2. Research Your Audience
Your audience might be the most important factor to consider next to your marketing goals. Researching your user base helps identify what content can generate leads and boost your overall sales.
Moreover, publishing content not resonating with your target audience will stagnate your sales funnel. You need to know the following information about your audiences:
- What they need and what interests them
- Understanding the challenges they face and current solutions they are looking for
- The communities and online forums where they hang out in
But how do you identify your target audience? Here are helpful tips:
- Create buyer personas.
- Establish audience segmentation based on various factors such as buyer behavior
- Decide whether there’s a need to target all segments or whether you can focus on specific subgroups.
- Tailor and personalize your content to meet your audiences’ demands.
Develop Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are more than one-dimensional customer profiles. They involve a deeper understanding of your audiences’ behaviors, habits, attitudes, criteria, and other concerns. All these aspects are relevant so your B2B company can persuade them to trust your brand and purchase from you.
You can also create buyer personas based on demographic information. Audience segmentation is also relevant in determining which products or services best cater to their needs and concerns.
The following are other ways developing buyer personas can help your brand:
- Understand your audience’s buying journey
- Create content based on the current requirements of your prospects, strengthening client relationships
- Identify the best way to communicate with your audience and distribute content
- Promotes consistency in outgoing business communications
- Attract the right leads to help you prioritize ideal customers
Customer Engagement
Regularly engaging with your customers helps you get to know them in a deeper way. This is how you can learn more about their pain points so that you can promote products and services that can help them in the best way possible.
Some of the most common ways to drive customer engagement are by talking directly to the users or distributing surveys, feedback forms, and polls. Always remember that engaging with your customers can help establish a personal connection, which leads to trust and loyalty to your brand.
Learning from Sales and Support Teams
Researching your audience also means working with your support and sales teams. Because they have firsthand interactions with your brand’s buyer personas, they better understand your audiences’ challenges and pain points.
3. Analyze Your Competition
Having several competitors is common in B2B companies. We understand that beating them and staying on top are two of your top priorities. But did you know your competitors can also help establish a better content marketing strategy?
Analyze your competition by looking at its success. Identify their products and services and determine how to set your business apart from your competitors. Remember that having a USP or a unique selling point is essential in drawing more customers.
This also means determining how you can be better than your competition by highlighting what makes your brand unique. The following are helpful tips:
- Know your competitors
- Determine each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
- Build your USP based on your strengths and clarify your brand’s authenticity.
Moreover, checking out your competition makes even more sense if you're new in the industry. You need substantial information about the industry’s current condition and loopholes, which you can find in your competitors’ content.
Your competitions help you uncover successful content ideas as well as locate content gaps you can use to your advantage. Moreover, you can learn from your competitors’ mistakes and improve your content pieces.
Consider what you learned from your competition and use their insights to generate more authoritative and traffic-leading content for your business.
Another way you can analyze your competition is by keyword analysis. Doing this can help you uncover the top-ranking keywords from your competitors you can use on your website. This method’s main advantage is saving time for extensive keyword research.
Analyzing your competition’s keywords can help you find the keywords you must include in your content to boost traffic and generate leads. It’s straightforward and quick; every B2B company should consider this strategy.
4. Choose Marketing Channels and Content Formats
The next strategy can work hand-in-hand with analyzing your competition. While monitoring your competitors’ performance, you can also see various marketing channels they leverage and those they don’t utilize with their maximum efforts.
Choosing the proper marketing channels can help you diversify your B2B marketing portfolio. This also helps reach your target companies. If you don’t base your marketing channel choice on your target audience, don’t expect boosted organic traffic and high rankings on search engines.
Identifying suitable content formats is also a smart marketing strategy like marketing channels. You must publish content that speaks to your audience based on their preferences. Moreover, your content formats should be effective for your brand's products or services.
When looking for the best content format, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are your target audience already aware of your brand? Or is it essential to create content that can help boost brand awareness?
- Will tutorials or in-depth guides help your audience get to know and understand what your business offers better?
- Do you need to publish bottom-of-the-funnel content to help finalize deals?
Researching content types that your audiences engage with can also help. For instance, short blog posts, infographics, and short videos resonate better with busy professionals. On the other hand, some businesses prefer case studies that provide content pieces with more in-depth guides.
Regardless of whether you’re choosing the best marketing channel or content format, you must always consider your company’s available resources, budget, and realistic workflow.
5. Build a Content Creation Process
Content creation is a long process, so you must establish a workflow to boost your efficiency. Moreover, a proper content creation process is essential in helping you scale a proper set of content output.
One of the factors you must decide on is whether your in-house content is enough or whether there’s a need to outsource for more. Most B2B companies prefer achieving a balance between the two depending on their availability of resources and priorities.
In-house content also means creating well-defined steps that your content will go through before publishing. Having a robust workflow helps promote consistency and organization within your internal content team.
An effective content creation workflow should work like this:
- Choose a niche and a topic.
- Perform effective keyword research and establish SEO that works.
- Create your first draft.
- Assign the draft to your team’s proofreaders for editing and revisions.
- Approve and publish.
- Start distributing content.
More importantly, you need all the right tips to help you establish an effective content creation process. These include having proper style guides and SOPs, relying on a content calendar, assigning proper roles and accountability, and utilizing the right content marketing tools.
6. Create High-Quality Content for Each Consumer Stage
A Hubspot study revealed eight critical touch points that can make or break a sale in B2B companies. This means a user should be familiar with your product or service before deciding.
With the study in place, targeting people in the decision stage is not smart. Doing this will make you leave out more than 90% of the remaining businesses in the market, which can help drive more brand success.
Instead, you should have content pieces made for each consumer stage:
- Awareness – buyers who are looking for solutions to their problems, blog posts and how-to videos suit them best
- Consideration – educate buyers by presenting them the pros and cons of the product or service you offer
- Decision – during this time, the buyer has already decided what to purchase, it’s now your chance to prove your brand is better than your competitor
7. Select Keywords with Business Value
If your goal is to attract buyers or businesses in the decision stage, you need blog posts with high commercial content. Your content must possess keywords that will drive business value to your brand.
Buyers in the decision stage have already confirmed the solutions they need, and your content should be the first thing that shows up on search engines. This is why you must be smart enough to use only high-intent keywords that will drive traffic and lead to your website.
What exactly are high-intent keywords? These are search terms your target audiences type in search engines with a higher likelihood that an actionable purchase will be made. These keywords will normally result in a transaction.
High-intent keywords have three common types:
- Informational: the goal of acquiring information
- Transactional: to buy
- Navigational: to reach a website’s particular page
Aside from transactional keywords, businesses should also consider using long-tail keywords. These phrases help maintain a smooth organic search strategy for better traffic to your website.
Even when long-tail keywords have an overall low search volume, they are more specific and can help users express precisely what they want and need.
8. Choose Your Promotional Strategy
No matter how well-defined and exceptional your content pieces are, they are useless when you don’t promote and distribute them enough. As a B2B company, you must generate strategies to maximize your content reach.
This is where choosing between paid or organic strategy becomes handy. Both strategies have different benefits and features, so knowing what suits your business better is essential.
Organic Strategy
The organic strategy means implementing ways for your content to appear in search engines. Utilizing newsletters and email marketing are also efficient in reaching your subscribers.
Utilizing organic strategies also means driving traffic to your website by entailing SEO. You can achieve this by using the right keywords from your competitor analysis.
Paid Strategy
On the other hand, paid strategies work best for content types in promotional campaigns on Youtube and social media feeds. These can also come in the form of collaborations and sponsorships by hiring social media influencers.
9. Measure your progress
Finally, the only way to assess whether your strategy works is by measuring your progress. You won’t know if your business is achieving your established SMART goals without tracking your results and monitoring your company’s performance.
Effective tools like Google Search Console or Google Analytics are what you can use to measure your content marketing efforts. Remember that tracking your KPIs is key to knowing what strategies work for your business and what don’t.
Key Takeaways
- An effective B2B content marketing strategy consists of methods you can use to drive traffic to your website and find potential leads.
- Always remember that B2B and B2C marketing strategies differ mainly in the target audience, buying cycle, budget, content types, and decision-makers.
- Your competitors can be helpful in establishing an effective content marketing strategy by analyzing their loopholes and the keywords they use.
- Always research your audiences. They are major determinants of how effective your marketing strategies are.
- The only way to know whether you’ve achieved your marketing goals is by tracking your progress and monitoring your performance.
Conclusion
A robust B2B content marketing strategy is all it takes to become an industry leader. It helps you stay on top of your competitors while generating the leads and website traffic you need to boost your business.
Always remember that a B2B content marketing strategy will serve as your roadmap to achieving your overall business goals. By measuring valuable KPIs, it’s easier to assess whether your strategies are working or if there’s a need to switch them up a bit.
