B2B content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain your audience. Unlike B2C content marketing, B2B content creation targets other businesses, and if done correctly, it can yield profitable business action. In this blog, we’ll discuss what B2B content marketing is, why companies should develop a content strategy, and how they can use it to their advantage. Let’s get started.
What is B2B Content Marketing?
Generally speaking, content marketing is a marketing technique that consists of publishing content that your audience wants to consume. Specifically, B2B content marketing is the art of using content to expand your business’s audience, strengthen and develop brand loyalty, and drive leads and sales from other companies.
The key theme behind all content marketing is “value.” In your content marketing efforts, you should be aiming to provide value to your audience (in this case, other businesses). If the consumer isn’t able to apply your content to their work, you haven’t been successful.
Striving for the content marketing trifecta – useful, engaging, and high-quality – will help funnel in new people and continually bring those who love engaging with it. Examples of content include (but are not limited to) educational articles, blog posts, infographics, webpages, podcasts, e-books, videos, social media, white papers, webinars, newsletters, etc.
Why Should You Develop a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?
One factor that impacts your audience’s decision-making more than any other is consistent, high-quality, and engaging content. Your goal is to help prospective customers understand what you can do for their business. Perhaps you can provide the information they’re lacking or give a solution to make them more efficient. Whatever it may be, developing a content strategy will push your company’s information out in front of your audience and help your brand become successful. Here are just some of the benefits.
1. Increasing audience retention
Content marketing takes a break from the traditional advertising routine of “I want to sell you something.” While conventional advertising pushes marketing messages out in front of people regardless of whether or not they’re interested, content marketing creates content that gets people interested. And once people are interested? They naturally want to come back.
B2B content marketing speaks explicitly to businesses that need help with a problem or are seeking information on a topic. By providing this, you become a trusted source of knowledge and have the opportunity to convey a consistent message.
2. Communicating effectively with your buyers
There are so many ways to connect through B2B marketing – educational articles, blog posts, infographics, webpages, podcasts, e-books, videos, social media, white papers, webinars, newsletters, etc. However, the most effective are e-books and white papers (50%), case studies (47%), and social media posts (41%).
Because 89% of B2B buyers conduct research online before making a business purchase, it’s crucial to have information out there that they can engage with. Social media has also made it increasingly easy to engage with B2B clients and even more essential since 75% of B2B buyers use social media for purchasing.
Based on these statistics, it’s clear that developing a content strategy helps you connect and communicate with your customers.
3. Generating leads
Content is the perfect way to guide users to a landing page. While all or most content in a content strategy is free, you’ll still be able to provide a call-to-action button on the same page. Did you know that small businesses with a content marketing strategy (i.e. blogs) get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without one?
Once your user is on your page, a call-to-action button allows them to learn more and get to know your business. Your content helps guide a user to you and will allow you to grow your brand and experience higher profitability in the long-term.
4. Building brand authority
When you create quality content online, you build your brand’s authority. By establishing your business as a place to get reliable information, you become a brand authority and become more likely to rank on search engines.
This is beneficial for two reasons. For one, you’ll be easy to find online (brand authority is excellent for SEO efforts), which naturally means more customers. Additionally, if you’re seen as an “expert” in your niche of content creation, once a business has found you, they’re more likely to trust you.
How to Use a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Are you ready to implement B2B content marketing for your company? The first step is creating a content roadmap that helps you draw out exactly how you want to generate real results. You’ll use it to align your team around the objectives you set out.
There’s no universal outline or template of a content roadmap. You should develop it based on what you think will work for your organization. However, to give you some reference, here are some features that a content roadmap typically includes:
Goals: What do you want to achieve? Specific content marketing goals include increased website traffic or leads.
Initiatives: What will you do to achieve your goals? For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, your initiative will write a series of related case studies.
Schedules: When will your goals be achieved? Your roadmap should include some timeline or calendar that details when you’ll create your deliverables.
Activities: What will each piece of content (each “activity”) entail? This should include the topic, audience, and delivery channel.
Status: How will you know the status of each activity? You should be able to look at your roadmap and tell instantly.
Creating a content roadmap will allow you and your team to strategize, prioritize decision-making, visualize progress, remain in sync, and inform other units of your needs. This will enable you to use it to your advantage and begin to connect with new consumers as soon as possible.
Marketing isn’t effective unless you know your customers. B2B content marketing seeks explicitly to provide your audience with useful, engaging, and high-quality content that will bring them back again and again. By following your content roadmap, you’ll use your content strategy to advance and build brand authority in no time at all.