What is B2B content marketing?
B2B content marketing is the creation of content that attracts, engages, and resonates with your key audiences. A vital part of any effective B2B marketing strategy, useful and insightful content is a great way to help your business stand out from competitors and encourage your audience to engage and interact with you. Content marketing can take many forms, including blogs, newsletters, case studies, infographics, e-guides, or whitepapers. Consider a range of different formats and ideas to give your audience variety and find out what works best for you.
Why should I do B2B content marketing?
An effective B2B content marketing strategy can help you meet some of your key marketing and wider business goals, including:
- Raising brand awareness.
- Positioning your business and spokespeople as knowledgeable, thought leaders, making your audience more likely to turn to you for consultation, services, or products.
- Increasing web traffic and engagement.
- Boosting your SEO, increasing your chances of being discovered and selected in search results.
- Driving prospects further through the sales funnel.
- Generating leads and conversions.
Best practice tips for B2B content marketing
- Know your audience – learning who makes up your audience can help you to create highly relevant content that engages and resonates with them. Take time to understand the different job titles, sectors and personas you’re trying to appeal to.
- Content should be genuinely useful – make sure that you’re covering topics that are relevant to your business and audience, and offer the reader insights, useful information, or advice. Give your readers a reason to want to read your content.
- Think more broadly and creatively – although you want your content to be somewhat connected to your business, don’t be afraid to explore new and different topics. You could consider hooking your content on topical industry news or highlight great new ideas or examples of best practice from others.
- Don’t be overly promotional – avoid the hard sell! That’s a sure-fire way to turn your audience off.
- Think wider than words – can you share or create any picture, videos, diagrams, or infographics to bring your content to life?
- Signpost readers to other relevant information and resources. Link out to relevant pages on your website and from third parties (although make sure these sites have a high domain authority and set them to open in a new tab so not to direct your readers away from your content!).
- Create a calendar – plan your B2B content marketing strategy in advance so you have clear direction and can ensure that your content complements and integrates with the rest of your marketing activity. A schedule can also help momentum and ensure you’re creating new content regularly that covers a good range of topics and messages to appeal to the different levels of the sales funnel.
- Include a call to action – what do you want your readers to do next? Spell it out and point them in the right direction.
- Don’t forget to share your content far and wide – include it in your newsletter and share it via your social channels to help reach a wider audience.