If you are new to the business world or in digital marketing, it can be overwhelming to learn about B2B content marketing. That is why in this guide, we try to make it as simple yet as helpful as possible for beginners like you.
What the B2B model means
B2B simply means “business to business”. If you are a B2B company, it means you are offering a product or service that is geared toward other businesses and not end consumers. Your offer is meant to help other businesses operate, grow, and earn.
Examples of products offered in this business model are raw materials, parts, and equipment needed by other companies to create their products or fulfill their services. They can also be payroll processors, software, and consultations that help companies operate and grow.
What is content marketing
Content marketing involves the creation and sharing of online materials that are intended to increase your website’s traffic and ultimately grow your business. The types of content marketing materials include infographics, videos, newsletters, blog posts, and social media posts, among others.
Just to be clear, content marketing does not involve direct selling. That job is for traditional advertising. While both have a common goal, which is to turn your audience into paying customers, content marketing attracts your target audience using relevant, timely, and useful information related to your product or service offering instead of throwing a direct sales pitch.
Why you need content marketing
Content marketing offers a lot of benefits that will help your business grow. Here are some of the reasons why you need content marketing for your B2B company:
- Lead generation. Sharing content online through blogs can help generate more leads for your business. It offers an opportunity for your target audience to learn more about your business. These leads can turn into prospects, and ultimately, customers.
- Competitive advantage. Compared to other B2B companies who are not into content marketing, you have a competitive advantage of being discovered and preferred by prospective customers. This is because of your visibility as well as the quality content you consistently provide your audience.
- Positive brand image and trust. Consistently providing reliable content to your audience can help build trust. You could become your audience’s go-to resource for their information needs. Your audience might also just share your content or your website to others in your industry, helping enhance your brand image.
- Wider reach. One great thing about content marketing is that you can publish your content in a variety of channels like blogs or social media where you can easily reach your audience and your audience can easily reach you. Online content marketing also allows for the shareability of content that can further widen your reach. Finally, content marketing does not limit your reach to the local audience. You can easily reach out to inter-regional or international prospective customers.
- Efficiency. Since you will be catering to businesses, expect a lot of inquiries and information-sharing about your product or service offering, about your past and present customers, and more. With content marketing, you can prepare materials like infographics, product demos, white papers, webinars, and case studies that you can easily share with your prospective customers anytime you need to. This will make your business operations a lot more efficient and time-saving.
- Community-building. Consistently creating reliable and up-to-date content makes your blog a place for your audience to find relevant information. Your social media channels will also have more audience when you have great content. With a lot of followers, your channels can become hubs for target businesses in your industry to gather and interact, creating a community where they can learn and share.
B2B content marketing strategies
So how can you successfully implement B2B content marketing?
B2B content marketing is just like any other content marketing, but your content must appeal to other businesses and not the end consumers. The following are some B2B content marketing strategies and tips that will help you grow your business.
#1 Always keep in mind your target audience
You know that your target audience comprises of businesses. Never let that drift during the entire content marketing process or you’ll miss the whole point of content marketing. When you generate your content topics, decide on the channels you use, schedule the time you share your content, and more, you should always remember that you are addressing to businesses in your industry.
#2 Identify the informational needs of your audience
Your content must focus on topics and information related to your product or service offering. You also need to provide your audience “timely and relevant” information.
What does timely and relevant information mean? How can you identify the informational needs of your audience?
There is no need to do surveys if that is what you are thinking. You can use any content marketing tool available on the internet that will provide you with important information, like trendy topics in social media and the most searched keywords in search engines.
#3 Know your audience more
Learning more about your audience can help you strategize your content marketing. Know where they are present so you can decide on the right online channels to focus on distributing your content. You also need to know when (day and time) they are usually active so you can schedule your posts better. Also, knowing about the demographics of your audience, such as their location, can help you generate more specific and more relevant topics for your content marketing.
#4 Deliver only fact-checked and relevant content
There is no question that any content anybody shares must be relevant and factual regardless of who they are targeted to. But when it comes to B2B content marketing, relevant and factual content is very important to earn the trust of your audience. Eventually, that trust can improve your brand image and increase your chance of being preferred over your competitors.
When citing statistics in your content for instance, you would want to make sure your sources are reliable and that the data are up-to-date. You would also want to make sure that those statistics are relevant to your audience in the first place; otherwise, you will lose your audience. Readers do not want to waste their time on matters that are not useful to them.
#5 Promote your content
You can promote your content in different ways. You can utilize SEM or search engine marketing for your blog. You can promote your content using social media, which can also be organically done or paid. You may also share it using your newsletter marketing, affiliate marketing, or influencer marketing.
#6 Evaluate your content
Keeping track of your content can help you determine what topics are doing well and what types of B2B content marketing materials are more effective to use. This will help ensure that you are utilizing the right content and content types for your B2B company so that you don’t waste your time, energy, and money.
In your social media channels and in your blog, for instance, see which contents have more views, likes, reactions, shares, and comments. When it comes to content types, see which ones are popular with your audience, prospective customers, and loyal customers. Are they infographics, videos, webinars, or white papers?
Other important things you need to keep in mind when doing B2B content marketing are setting clear objectives for your content marketing, creating a calendar for your posts in different channels, and continuously improving your strategies after evaluation.
Tips on how B2B companies can build a successful content strategy and write good content in 2023
- Connect with your customers emotionally, and not just about your company or what you offer.
- Choose a channel where your customers can connect with you, and not just you sharing your content with them.
- Create SEO-focused content that conveys your expertise.
- Present case studies that show potential customers how they will benefit from a relationship with your company.
- Incorporate video into your marketing, considering both emotions and benefits.
Source: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/10/28/how-create-stunningly-successful-b2b-content-strategy-2023