Content marketing is essential to any B2B company's digital strategy. It helps you get your message in front of potential customers and provides a platform to build thought leadership in your industry. This crash course will give you all the basics of B2B content marketing in about eight minutes. We'll cover best practices for creating high-quality content that will help you grow your business and what type of content to produce for B2B audiences. We'll also share some best practices for content creators and resources to help you be a better B2B marketer.
Why Content Marketing Is Important for B2B
Content marketing is important for B2B businesses because it helps you reach your target audience and increase revenue. It allows companies to share their knowledge and expertise with potential customers in an engaging way that builds trust and loyalty. If done correctly, your content marketing efforts can lead to more leads, increased sales opportunities, improved SEO rankings, and higher customer retention rates.
Relevant content helps build trust among potential customers by providing valuable information about products or services. Engaging content increases brand awareness when shared on social media platforms as blog posts or video content. Educational content boosts company credibility through articles on industry trends or best practices. Helpful content drives traffic to your website, which in turn improves search engine optimization. All these content marketing activities create opportunities to convert your target audience into visitors, visitors into leads, and leads into customers through the use of calls-to-action.
Components of a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
In its simplest form, a B2B content marketing strategy has six components: audience, goals, topics, creation, distribution, and measurement. These elements work together to provide context around why you're producing content, what it should be, where to share it, and how you will measure its effectiveness. Here's an overview of the six big questions your strategy must address:
1. Who Is Your Brand’s Ideal Audience?
It's essential to know whom you're trying to reach when planning your content strategy. Whom do you want reading, listening to, or watching your content? Who is your ideal prospect? Which companies do you want to reach? What size are they? Are they local, regional, or global? How do their industries intersect with your products or services?
Beyond just knowing who they are, understanding your audience will help you create an effective strategy. Create a buyer persona for each segment. What problems does this person have? How will they benefit from the time invested in consuming your content? Knowing your audience gives you insight into what types of content will resonate well with them. Remember that even though you're selling to companies, B2B buyers are humans, and it's essential to uncover what they want.
2. What Are Your Company’s Content Marketing Goals?
Once you know your target audience and understand their desires, it's time to choose which goals you want your content marketing to achieve. Do you want to increase sales? Improve brand recognition? Build trust and loyalty? Drive traffic to a new product or service? Build an email list?
Targeting all of these goals at once is too much for one campaign. Decide what's most important to your business and choose one objective per campaign.
3. What Topics Are Relevant to Your Ideal Customers and Their Businesses?
Once you've decided which goals your B2B content marketing will achieve, it's time to find suitable topics. At this point, you've already researched your target audience to find out what they are interested in and what their needs are. Next, it's time for topic research.
Find out what your company's competitors are doing. Conduct keyword research to uncover what people are seeking online. Keep an eye on trade publications for new developments in your field. Use all this research to help identify gaps that your brand can fill. B2B customers are always looking for new and better ways to do things, which means they're constantly in need of fresh information.
4. How Will You Approach Content Creation?
Once you've chosen your audience, goals, and topics for a b2b content marketing campaign, it's time to plan how you will create the actual content. There are many content formats to choose from when you're executing a b2b marketing campaign. You can write long-form content or create email newsletters that offer insights and establish thought leadership in your industry or snackable content for social media channels.
Be sure to include case studies with compelling storylines about customers who have found success with your products. This type of storytelling helps make the content more shareable on social media platforms. Additionally, many people prefer visual elements such as infographics or video content instead of only text-based posts.
5. How Will You Use Content Promotion and Distribution To Reach Your Target Audience?
After your B2B company creates valuable content, it's time to get the word out. You can choose from various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to reach your audience. Take the time to write thoughtful, engaging messages that will grab the attention of your target audience.
6. How Will You Measure the ROI of Content Marketing?
Once you've promoted your b2b content marketing campaigns, it's crucial to track its results. How many leads did it generate? Did it drive traffic to your website? What was the conversion rate from visitors to leads or leads into customers? Did you achieve your content marketing goals? Track these essential metrics and compare them with previous campaigns. Tracking will help you get more out of each b2b content marketing campaign.
Content analytics is critical to measuring content performance and the ROI of content marketing. With analytics information, you can figure out what resonates with your audience, how different segments interact with your content, and which assets create subscribers, leads, and customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who Does It Take To Make a Robust B2B Content Marketing Team?
Depending on company size, a content marketing team could be a single B2B marketer or hundreds of people. Typically, a multi-person team consists of:
- A leader sets direction and is ultimately responsible for meeting business goals and managing the overall budget - they could be a manager, director, or VP.
- A strategist who creates and guides the content strategy is the big picture thinker and keeps an eye on how all the different pieces fit together to achieve objectives.
- A writer/editor who creates blog posts or other written content formats - this person is responsible for the quality of writing in all types of content.
- Creatives, including one or more designers, videographers, and video editors, are responsible for the look and feel of each piece of content.
- An SEO expert guides and measures content performance in search rankings and is responsible for helping you appear in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- An analytics expert tracks and measures email, websites, social platforms, and other distribution channels to measure all content types and compare results to benchmarks and goals.
The content team members often collaborate with other parts of the organization, including the sales team, subject matter experts, and decision-makers from other departments. In smaller companies, the business owners or founders may be involved.
When Should You Work With a B2B Content Marketing Agency?
Augmenting your in-house team with an agency is an excellent choice when you want fresh ideas or need experts with knowledge beyond what may be available within your organization. Growing companies that don't have enough team members often retain an agency to help develop and execute their strategy. At EPIC B2B, we help companies of all sizes develop their content marketing strategy, create the right content, and get it in front of their target audience.
How Does Content Strategy Fit Into Your B2B Marketing Funnel or Sales Funnel?
B2B buyers are looking for new information that can help them make decisions throughout their buyer journey. Your funnel content should be part of this process, as it becomes their critical tool to understand your solution and the steps they need to take next.
Content mapping is the practice of taking your sales funnel and mapping it to the content you need to create to move people through the funnel. Top of funnel content will first attract attention and build awareness of your brand. As people move down the funnel, they are looking for education on your products, services, or industry that applies to their business so they can make informed decisions. The bottom of funnel content should answer potential customers' questions as they get closer to a purchase decision and may include detailed comparisons to competitors.
At every stage of your funnels, content is a tool for generating leads and boosting sales.
What Is a Content Audit, and When Do You Need One?
A content audit is a process of evaluating an organization's content to ensure it addresses its objectives and achieves its desired outcomes. The audit will identify gaps in your current resources by identifying topics that are not adequately addressed and what additional resources you need to fill in these gaps. An audit helps you determine what's working, what isn't and provides content ideas and actionable takeaways for improving your content performance moving forward. Best practice suggests performing an audit quarterly.
What Best Practices Should B2B Content Marketers Follow?
Following best practices can help you stay ahead of the competition. Here are some tried and true tips that are certain to boost your B2B content marketing efforts.
Know your audience and what problems they struggle with
- Focus on the benefits of your product or service
- Provide information that is relevant to your target customer's needs
- Create content that is interactive, engaging, and entertaining
- Use storytelling to connect with customers
- Engage with your audience by asking questions and responding to their comments
- Provide valuable insights into the latest trends in your industry
- Use high-quality design and visuals to make your message more appealing
- Optimize for search engines and address search queries related to your industry or niche
- Remember that quality and relevance always trumps quantity
What Are the Differences Between B2B and B2C Content Marketing?
B2B brands tend to have a longer customer journey than B2C brands. In B2B, there are complex selling and decision-making processes with multiple people involved, including gatekeepers, influencers, teams, and economic buyers. B2B content creation requires more data because potential prospects have a greater need for case studies and proof to guide them along the buyer journey. Alternatively, in B2C content marketing, emotions may play more because of simpler buying decisions made by individuals rather than groups or teams.
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