B2B Content Marketing That Should Be Followed
Picking the right content marketing strategy is critical for a business to succeed. The right choice can amplify the traffic to your website, elevate brand recognition, and propel sales in the right direction.
Irrespective of the size of your business, the content marketing approach remains the same. To attract the audience and drive engagement, you need to come up regularly with blogs, case studies, videos, e-books, podcasts, market research, etc.
However, there is a stark difference between B2C and B2B content marketing strategies. The target audience for B2B is small and focused, whereas B2C will have a wider audience. The content for B2B always has a professional tone, while B2C follows an entertaining and personal tone.
The basic principles of target-oriented B2B content marketing strategy
Here are some basic steps that your B2B business should follow to ace your content marketing strategy -
1. Create multiple customer personas
The first step for any business is to understand its target audience. Your entire content marketing strategy will revolve around these people. To build a perfect customer persona, you need to get into the customer’s shoes. Once you start thinking like a customer, you will start understanding their needs and expectations, their frustrations, and how your product can offer solutions to those problems. Having 3–4 customer personas will be an excellent base for crafting your content marketing strategy.
2. Have a clear schedule for digital marketing
Decide beforehand what type of content you will be posting. Do market research and keyword research to help you come up with new ideas. Then assign respective people to post those content types regularly on the different platforms.
It’s also a good idea to have 2–3 members for scheduling content. They would be responsible for getting the content on time from the writers and posting it at a pre-determined time. In short, they will be building and managing the content calendar.
3. Monitor Your Competitors
Most companies do competitor research and analysis once and let it go. That shouldn’t be the case. Your competitors are also great teachers. By regularly monitoring your competitors, you can understand what strategy worked and didn’t work for them and plan your content accordingly. Keeping an eye on your competitor will help your company grow and give you various insights on the type of content and platform to concentrate on for gaining more leads.
4. Have the right metrics to compare your performance
It is necessary to do a performance review for the content you put out. It is also essential to set your goals initially and have the KPIs that you are going to use to measure the performance of this content. Content marketing for B2B is an ever-changing process. So do re-visit, re-evaluate, and make changes to your KPIs and content marketing strategy regularly.
5. Document your B2B content strategy
This document should have all the information and steps the organization has chosen for its content marketing strategy. This will make it easy for checking the progress and makes the strategy more reliable. It also helps to monitor the results produced in every step of the process. Did you know that according to a study, only 43% of B2B content marketers had documented their content marketing strategy?
Tips to bolstering your Content Marketing for B2B
Here let us discuss a few tips that can do wonders for your content marketing for B2B business -
#1 Employ the art of storytelling
Many B2C marketers use storytelling to attract leads to their product/service, but this is not very common in a B2B landscape. The company can convey its roadmap as a story that ensures that the customers experience an emotional touch and understand you better. Apart from that, you could also leverage customer stories — For example, how your product helped customers succeed.
#2 Keep your audience engaged
The main aim of most B2B companies is to have a long-term relationship with their customer. And the best way to retain a customer is by keeping them engaged with fruitful content and regular updates on new tools and features you added to your product/service.
However, don’t stick to one format of posts. If blogs, videos, and stories are working for you, don’t dwell on them forever. Try more formats as well. You can develop an exciting ebook, schedule webinars with industry experts, or even post infographics. The more you experiment, the more you will grow. Soon you will see remarkable results and set new marketing standards.
#3 Promote your brand
Most content marketers promote their business using clickbaity taglines and images for lead generation. This might work for a B2C business, but a B2B company must always show some value to their customers. Your promotions should be subtle, and they should focus on awareness rather than marketing.
Your customers will feel more comfortable dealing with you by having the right content and running genuine and subtle promotional campaigns.
#4 Use LinkedIn effectively
LinkedIn is an excellent social media platform. Most of us would have used it to expand our professional network/ But LinkedIn is also an excellent marketing channel. It has high-value customers and has a more professional ecosystem than an entertaining one. Many B2B businesses use LinkedIn to directly get in contact with the right business and generate leads.
It is also a vital platform for B2B businesses. Many of them do their research on LinkedIn and try connecting with top executives directly via LinkedIn. Linkedin advertising, groups, and pages are great marketing channels for B2B businesses to grow.
#5 Collaborate and expand
Collaboration is also an undervalued marketing technique. It can help you get traction from a new user base, and importantly, all these users are in some way or the other connected with the product/service you provide. Don’t miss out on collaborating with brands that share a similar audience base as your business. This way, you would gain more reputation and new leads. These new leads will become your subscribers and slowly convert into your customers.
#6 Experiment and play with paid ads
There are ads everywhere on digital platforms today. These ads work wonders to the B2B market if used right. The most beautiful thing about ads on digital platforms is that the targeting audience is well-curated, and it acts as an advantage to both the seller and the buyer.
Run ads on different social platforms. Try and experiment with multiple available campaigns. Do A/B testing to find what works well and build your ad on top of it. All these will boost your business by bringing in quality leads. You will get back the amount you spent on paid ads by gaining just a few leads from the ads. Targeting the right audience and using the right content will bring you positive results on paid ads.
Conclusion
Content marketing has proven itself time and again as one of the powerful tools to generate leads for your B2B business. Content marketing for B2B businesses can be tricky, but using the right strategies can help you immensely. Ensure that the strategy you choose fits your brand, and don’t forget to document it.
There is no right or wrong content marketing strategy for your business, but experimenting and running A/B tests will help you pick the one that works best for you. Many B2B companies also outsource their content marketing to 3rd party experts like Scalenut, thus making the process less tedious and more efficient.
