8 B2B Content Marketing Practices that Work
Content marketing takes an essential role for both B2C and B2B businesses. The spike in content marketing proves that more and more companies invest in content marketing. According to Statista, 66% of B2B businesses want to boost their content marketing budget in 2022.
However, there is a difference between B2C and B2B companies you should use to create and promote content. For B2B businesses, content marketing gives the basis of their customer acquisition strategy, and it will be a significant growth engine when you have an effective strategy at hand.
This article will learn more about B2B strategies marketers can use to drive business growth with content marketing.
What is B2B Content Marketing?
B2B content marketing is the art of using content (video, audio, text, or other formats) to promote your product or service online to different businesses. A great example of B2B content marketing would be a software company like SE Ranking using its YouTube channels to promote its tool to potential customers.
The main thing about B2B content is to inform other businesses about your products or services and how they can help them. The ultimate goal is to generate leads and increase sales.
What is the difference between B2B and B2C Content Marketing?
B2B content marketing refers to businesses. Its purchase funnel is more complicated and could take months or longer to nurture a prospect toward the sale. That’s why the content creation process will be a little bit different.
A B2B content strategy is oriented toward increasing brand awareness, and you need to provide actionable tips to show other companies how you can solve their problems. Then B2C content is designed to create content for entertainment, and you need to keep your audience engaged.
In brief, B2B buyers mostly rely on logic and data to take action, while B2C customers are driven by their needs and desires. One thing remains confident that your need to produce excellent content to attract potential clients and customers and use this to increase your sales and conversions.
How to Create a Solid B2B Content Marketing Strategy
B2B content marketing success lies in having a solid strategy, and it will prevent you from making one of the biggest content marketing mistakes to work blind. It is crucial to get your direction, prove the investment, and develop an effective action plan.
Here are some valuable things to consider for your B2B content marketing strategy:
1. Know Your Customers
Identifying your ideal client is the first step you should follow for the right strategy. Once you build a detailed picture of your customer profile, it will help you better understand what content needs to meet their expectations.
While collecting data, pay attention to the details. Learn more about their motivations, buying preferences, what they value in a brand, kind of communications, and more. For B2B marketing, you can define such buyer personas for your target companies.
2. Define Your Brand Positioning
Before selling something, you should define what exactly you want your target audience to think about your brand. Figure out what problems you can solve for them and why they should select your product or service among other rivals.
Brand positioning includes a precise formulation of your unique offers and acts as a rallying call to your customers.
3. Focus on Your Customer Value
It is vital to help customers win with your product or service. Try to focus on serving customers. It can be a great source to generate great content ideas and satisfy customers. Interviewing them will help you build a content marketing pipeline and repurpose content for six months.
4. Experiment With Different Content
Make your content research to find content ideas for your B2B strategy. Keep an eye on your competitors, what keywords they use to find their best content, and what content formats perform the best.
You can use BuzzSumo, Quora, or Google Trends to find what’s trending in your industry. You can look at the published content differently and generate new ideas. Make sure to consider user intent.
5. Set Clear Business Goals
As a B2B marketer, you need to create content with a particular purpose. You need to set clear business goals for every piece of content you produce. If you aren’t precise about your goals, your plan will meet with no success.
It is essential to focus on a clear business goal whenever possible. Setting realistic and quantifiable objectives for your B2B content campaign would be better. For example, the number of leads you want to generate in 4 months, the number of quality links to earn, or website rankings on SERPs.
8 Effective B2B Content Marketing Practices
As you know, the marketing landscape is fast-paced. So, if you are creating a solid content strategy for B2B companies, you can consider these eight valuable content practices to achieve the best results.
1. Use SEO Practices
SEO is an integral part of B2B content marketing that will help drive organic traffic and rank highly on search engines for target search terms. As you know, SEO teams up with backlinks, and your B2B marketing strategy needs to build links to get better results.
For generating content ideas, you can use B2B SEO tools to find suitable keyword suggestions and variants that will improve your B2B content. Moreover, you can figure out what search queries your audience use to look for information.
To dive deeper into the content, you can conduct a competitor analysis to see what type of content your rivals have created on your topic and find pain points you can use for your content.
It would be better to follow your SEO content template to help you think deeper about your users and improve your rankings when writing content. And finally, make sure that your copy is SEO-friendly and follows your best-practice recommendations. Check it for plagiarism, grammar mistakes, and readability.
2. Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful channels for B2B marketers that will help control your whole audience and add a personal approach to email content. If you use emails as a promotion tactic, you need to create your email list to have a database of people you want to send. Use email marketing tools to simplify and automate this task.
Here are some tips to consider:
- Show a newsletter signup form on all pages of your website.
- Integrate a newsletter signup box into your pieces of content to attract the audience’s attention.
- Collect email addresses through content assets such as checklists, ebooks, and tools.
3. Craft Multi-Layered Content
If you want to make your B2B content marketing engaging, focus on creating multi-layered content. You should include different aspects like text, images, and video, and it’s only a pocket of categories B2B companies used to experience.
When it comes to images, you can create anything from screenshots and infographics to diagrams and illustrations. Moreover, you can use relevant data and stats, turn them into a custom-made infographic, and add it to your text-based content. It is essential to break up the monotony of large blocks of text.
Another category you can use is to create compelling videos for your business, making your B2B content more persuasive and engaging. You can also run informative webinars with industry experts, and the main thing is to create a strong visual media element for your content.
4. Choose The Right Channel
It is essential to experiment with different channels. When choosing the right channel, focus on data but don’t follow the crowd blindly. For a start, you can select one or two marketing channels, acclimate them, and move to new ones.
Here are the best channels to consider for your B2B content marketing strategy:
If you want to get the most out of your channels, you should improve B2B content marketing in ways that your competitors aren’t. For example, you can use LinkedIn as a primary B2B social platform to deliver your content to your target audience (opinions, insights, images, video, whitepaper, etc.).
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are other great platforms with a solid audience you can use to promote your B2B content and stand out from the crowd. They are slightly different from LinkedIn, but they can be great for expanding your audience reach.
5. Use Cross-Pollination
When creating content, there are a lot of valuable tools available on the market that will help you promote your content. Cross-pollination is a good way for your business to showcase your content in front of your audience and develop your online presence.
I want to talk about one undervalued source – guest posting. It is one of the most effective ways to promote your brand and improve authority in your industry. You can drive traffic to your website, get your content exposure, and create content around your business on relevant, high-quality websites. It is a win-win deal for your B2B business.
Another form of guest posting you should consider is expert roundup posts. You can invite different industry leaders to express their opinions and talk about your product offerings or services in your post. Once you show high-quality content, including industry experts, your audience will clearly understand what’s valuable and will trust your business.
6. Audit Your Existing Content
You have to be mindful and analyze your existing content. It is crucial to determine how it ranks in search results, how well it resonates with your audience, which kinds of content work well, and whether you need to refresh content.
You will see not only your strengths and weaknesses, but you can evaluate whether your strategy produces good results. Moreover, it will help you focus on more successful channels as necessary. You can use Google Analytics to monitor your content marketing efforts.
Tracking your content performance lets you avoid the same mistakes in the future and build a strong marketing strategy based on your data and audience’s needs. Once you identify what is working well for your business and focus on those things, you will reap higher results on your investment.
7. Deliver Personalized Experience
As you know, your target audience always appreciates any effort to deliver a personalized experience. In B2B marketing, it is doubly important to focus on personalized content to make your customer feel special and satisfied.
You can use relevant audience data to increase your B2B content marketing. You can collect customers’ personal data and categorize content based on the stages of the sales funnel they are, segments (demographics, industry, purchase behavior, etc.), and personas.
Delivering personalized content will help people define how your products or services can solve customers’ problems and highlights their pain points. It is a challenging task that will help you stand out from the crowd and establish good relationships with your audience.
8. Get More Out of Your Paid Ads
When we think of B2B content marketing, we often think of it as an organic marketing channel. But there is another effective channel to give your content to new audiences. Paid advertising will allow you to attract new customers, increase brand awareness, and grow your business.
LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for B2B marketers to promote their content and get good results to leverage paid promotion. Another ad platform you shouldn’t ignore is Facebook Ads. You can create ads for specific groups and engage with these communities interested in B2B content.
Consider other paid promotion channels like Twitter Ads, Instagram, and YouTube. With targeting options, you can even make profits on Reddit or Quora to deliver your content to your target customers.
Conclusion
B2B content marketing includes many benefits to get massive success for many business campaigns. You have a list of valuable tips to build a solid B2B content marketing strategy, and the question is how well you can engrain them into your existing campaign.
You have an excellent chance to connect all the dots of your B2B content marketing and create something truly compelling. Take some time and effort to understand how you can properly do it for targeted customers using different types of content.
Inner Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!
Featured Image Credit: by Charlotte May; Pexels; Thank you!
The post 8 B2B Content Marketing Practices that Work appeared first on ReadWrite.
(54)
