Ignore the B2B Stats Behind Content Marketing at Your Own Risk
Creating any Business to Business (B2B) strategy requires a deep understanding of your customers, as they’re also businesses with a bottom line to worry about. How you build your content marketing strategy to reach them is no different in this regard.
Thankfully, you can get a head start by using publicly available data and statistics to dominate the field — it’s simply a case of knuckling down to do the research so you can apply your findings to your strategy.
Today, we’ll dive into three important B2B content marketing statistics. Once we’re finished, you’ll understand how they can help you to stay ahead of the game. Let’s get cracking!
Only 32% of B2B Marketers Have a Documented Content Marketing Plan
Of the 88% of B2B marketers that use content marketing, only 32% have a well documented plan. Research shows those who track their strategy see high rates of success, and it just so happens that the process of documenting and preparing a plan is the key.
Yes, plans are just elaborate guesses. However, they play a valuable role — that of a guidance tool, and a way for us to make informed decisions later down the line.
Documenting your goals helps you to anticipate and deal with potential issues proactively, by focusing on the overarching benefits rather than getting caught up in unimportant details. This is especially true in the marketing world, where vanity metrics run wild and you need to stay on target.
Your content marketing plan will always be a work in progress, and you won’t know what works or not until you put it into action and adjust as necessary. What’s important is to create a plan in the first place. Because only 32% of marketers have a plan, it means most B2B marketers out there are just winging it — and you can easily get ahead of the game simply by creating an intentional strategy.
It’s a fun exercise to try to find the content marketing plan behind other business’ blogs. Let’s have a look at FreshBooks’ blog for example:
Their clear categories show us exactly what kind of clientele they’re targeting:
- How to Start a Small Business
- Grow Your Business
- Freelancing
- Tax Help
These topics are all very specific to their business clients, who would have a lot of related questions. A quick review of their recent posts shows they publish fresh content every 1–4 days, cycling through each of their categories to ensure their entire audience gets new catered content every week.
They also write for specific industries, such as:
- Creatives
- Business Consulting and Legal
- Marketing and Events
- IT and Web Development
- Health and Wellness
- Trades, Construction and Home Services
By creating an intersection of these two category lists, they are constantly pushing out a fresh perspective about each topic for each target industry. This is no coincidence, and it clearly took some careful planning.
So, how can you adapt this to your own target audience?
How Create Your Content Marketing Plan
Kickstart your plan by checking out your competitors and review their content marketing strategy in full. This gives you specific insight as to what will work best for your own company.
Once you’ve discovered what works for similar businesses, lay the foundation for your strategy — review our previous article on the elements every B2B content marketing plan needs, then analyze your site to track how well your rankings improve.
87% of B2B Marketers Rank Sales Lead Quality as the Most Important Metric
B2B marketers often quote website traffic as their most often used metric. However, when asked to rank their metrics by importance, 87% reported that sales lead quality was the most important.
In other words, you may hear a lot about impressive sounding web traffic because those are sexy numbers. In reality, it’s the quality of sales leads that counts — again, don’t get hung up on those vanity metrics. It’s essentially the same principle as long-tail keywords, where you look to cast a wide net of topics designed for your well defined target client.
Combined with your plan from earlier, you can make small intentional adjustments, and every new piece of information coming in will help you optimize for the highest quality leads.
How to Improve Your Lead Quality
Whether a blog post gets 100,000 views in a day is unimportant if no sales leads come from it. Make sure to focus on the type of leads a content piece will generate, rather than how many views it might get.
There are two elements to this:
- Attracting traffic that’s more likely to be interested in your product in the first place.
- Retaining and educating your visitors, no matter who they are. By cultivating a connection with them, they may eventually become a sales lead.
Either way, it means taking your visitors more seriously as potential leads. In both scenarios, you benefit by creating an ongoing nurturing program for any visitor willing to give you their email.
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