The Ultimate Content Marketing Guide for B2B Professionals
In a crowded marketplace, audience time and attention are at a premium. With 51% of businesses publishing new content daily, the marketplace is crowded with companies all competing for one scarce commodity -- the attention of their audience.
According to Data Never Sleeps 7.0., 4,500,000 YouTube videos are watched, 511,200 tweets are posted, and 188,000,000 emails are sent every minute. Not to mention the 4.4 million blog posts published every day on WordPress alone.
This might have you wondering: Is content marketing still effective? And if so, what steps do you need to take to beat the odds and make your content strategy a success.
Join us as we examine why we believe you should invest in B2B content marketing and learn how to stand out in today’s attention economy by using content and automation to create a holistic customer experience.
What Is Content Marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Unlike the top-down messaging of a direct sales pitch, content marketing uses indirect persuasion to engage customers. Rather than focusing solely on transactions, content marketing focuses on relationships. It’s about understanding your target audience, addressing their needs, and establishing trust. It is a long-term strategy rooted in customer service and value.
By consistently creating and distributing valuable content, your organisation will improve its reputation and build a receptive audience. You’ll be communicating with engaged prospects rather than wasting resources on unqualified leads. Eventually, when these prospects make a purchase decision, you’ll already have won their loyalty.
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What Is B2B Content Marketing?
You’ll find a lot of information online that, in our opinion, overly emphasise differences between B2B and B2C content marketing. In reality, there are a lot of similarities between the two spheres. Regardless if it’s targeting a consumer or business audience, the point of content marketing is to engage with people.
As a B2B marketer, your focus in on connecting with influencers and decision-makers within an organisation. This requires creating a wide range of content to not only suit people at different stages in the buyer journey. You also need to speak to people in different roles in the business, facing different problems and needing different answers. From basic awareness-raising social posts to more in-depth white papers, you need to be addressing a decision making team.
Avoid the trap of thinking that business buyers only care about facts. Instead, connect with your audience on both a logical and emotional level. Your content should exist in the context of providing a great experience and helping prospects complete their assigned purchase task.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, there are three key ways content marketing can benefit your business. These help to make the case for including content marketing in your B2B digital marketing strategy.
Increased sales. According to research, content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent, compared to paid search. (Content Marketing Institute, 2017).
Cost savings. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing while driving stronger results (Entrepreneur, 2018).
Better, more loyal customers. 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content. 61% say they are more likely to buy from a company that delivers custom content. (Content Marketing Institute, 2015).
Traditional marketing largely consists of sending promotional messages that tell consumers how great a product or service is. However, people no longer respond as readily to impersonal, product-pushing ads. They want a conversation, not a speech. They want to feel a deeper connection with your brand – on an emotional level, around shared values and purpose.
This is why content marketing is proving to be so much more effective. It allows you to tell your story, to show what you represent and are passionate about. Indeed, storytelling is one of the most powerful ways that humans interact with each other. By telling great stories, you nurture stronger relationships and develop an audience of engaged prospects who want to hear from your business.
Furthermore, social media, SEO, PPC, and email marketing all require a consistent and constant supply of quality content to succeed. A strong content marketing strategy is the foundation that the rest of your digital marketing strategy rests upon. It ensures that you have all the material you need, no matter the context.
What Are the Problems with Content Marketing?
Businesses run into problems when they dive into content production without a strategy. For instance:
No set goals, meaning their content lacks purpose.
No buyer personas, meaning they don’t know how their content provides value for their target audience.
No KPIs or measurements, meaning they don’t understand how their content is performing.
No promotional activity, meaning their content lacks visibility.
As author and content strategist Arjun Basu famously said: “Content without strategy is just stuff.”
Another common failing is not thinking about the stage your reader is at in the customer journey.
It’s important to realise that not every piece of content is designed to immediately convert. Not every piece has to contain the information a buyer needs to make a final decision. Doing so can come across as heavy-handed and decrease engagement. Content strategists need to match the customer's need at each stage of the buying journey to the value they can provide.
How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
Let's start by saying that we can not stress enough the importance of documenting your strategy.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 78% of organisations in the UK said they had a content marketing strategy. However, of those respondents, 40% said that it was a “verbal only”.
This leaves them in a vulnerable position. For instance, should key team members leave, these businesses will have to spend time and resources rebuilding their entire content plan.
Documenting your strategy will ultimately lead to better, more sustainable results than an ad hoc approach. All of your team members will be on the same page. By knowing the who, what, and why, they’ll also stay on track and produce consistent content. You’ll also have an easier time onboarding new team members, as well as outsourcing content production.
It's important to realise that your content strategy isn’t a static document. It should evolve as your team regularly updates it, noting what does and doesn’t work for your business.
So, what steps should you take to have a robust and documented content marketing strategy in place?
Setting Goals for Content Marketing
Ask yourself, your team, and key stakeholders what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts. What are your organisation's business goals? In that context, what does success for your content look like?
Establishing clear goals helps you create a plan and determine which tools and tactics to utilise for your content strategy. It helps you spot when your team starts to go astray over time. It also gives you something against which to measure each piece of content you produce, helping maximise your ROI. Each piece of content you produce should move your team towards meeting its objectives.
Deciding What You Want to Be Known For
Consider what you want to be known for - your values and expertise - and also what you want to be found for in searches (SEO). Determine how search trends intersect with your business offerings and content goals. This will allow you to build content pillars with firm foundations in your SEO strategy and that support your wider digital marketing.
Well-researched, optimised content improves your page ranking, increasing the likelihood that people will visit your site. Search engines score your pages both on the quality of its content and its relevance to user search terms. In turn, readers are more likely to share and link to quality content, helping increase your authority and further bolstering your SEO.
Your core content should help to give your website structure and make it easy for people to find the information they need. Search engines recognise and reward sites that follow this human-centric approach.
More importantly, it improves your customer experience — which should be the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy.
Defining Your Brand Voice
Think about the personality of your brand. For example, if your brand was an actual person, how would you describe their personality?
This will help you develop a unique voice for your business, to connect on a human level. It will also help create consistency across different points of engagement.
Part of developing your brand voice is deciding which platforms you’ll use to tell your story. The channels you use will influence how people perceive your organisation — for instance, is your brand more at home on LinkedIn or TikTok?
Defining What Differentiates You from the Competition
Think about what makes you stand out from competitors offering a similar product or service.
Competitor analysis will help you to understand what your competition is doing - the topics they cover, the search terms they rank for, which platforms work for them. Having defined your own voice, this will help you to carve out a distinctive niche in the marketplace.
Understanding Your Buyer(s)
Good marketing is good customer service. People, even business buyers, want to know that you genuinely understand and care about their needs and motivations. That you want to connect with them, beyond what’s necessary to achieve a sale.
Content can’t only be about getting your point of view out in the world. It has to be relevant to your buyers and play a role in building a relationship.
Instead of using marketing to bolster your ego, ask yourself what your audience needs from you. What questions are they asking that you can answer with your content?
Start by constructing personas for each target audience. Include details such as their personal information (name, age, education level, etc), profession, job skills, management level in the organisation, and business objectives.
We suggest including a photograph to help humanise your personae. Also, consider their main values, biggest challenges, and how they define success.
In addition to prospect backgrounds, it’s important to think about their information preferences:
How do they prefer to communicate (phone, in-person, email, social)?
What sources do they trust for industry news?
Where can you find them, both on and offline?
By understanding these preferences, you’re able to position your content more effectively.
Clarifying Your Customer Journey
Use your buyer personas to develop your content strategy around your customer journey. This will allow you to understand and create appropriate material for different stages. Initially content will attract potential customers and draw them into engaging with your company. As you nurture your relationship you'll provide content that educates on the nature of the problem they need to solve, through helping them determine that you're the right supplier for the job and rounding off the customer experience with excellent customer service pieces.
You'll also need to consider how you'll manage content delivery and frequency. The goal is to keep your organisation top of mind without being overwhelming.
Your strategy should weave together the different parts of your narrative to create a seamless customer experience.
Using Content Pillars and Topic Clusters as SEO and Information Architecture
Figuring out your content pillars is an important part of developing an effective content marketing strategy.
Your content pillars are the key themes or topic clusters you're going to explore, defined by the work you've already done on understanding:
Your area of expertise
What you want your brand to be known for
Who your audience is
What information they need from you
Selecting themes where these factors overlap will help you develop a consistent supply of high-quality, engaging content and on-brand messaging across all of your channels.
Over time, your audience will turn to you as a trusted source of information on these topics. This will further build recognition and authority for your brand and improve your SEO.
Pillar content needs to be well researched, both regarding the subject matter and the keywords people are using to search around the topic. It should give a comprehensive overview of your topic, with links to supporting pieces for specific elements. This allows your reader to immediately get more in-depth knowledge on aspects of the subject that interest them.
Creating a pillar page requires you to think about all of the existing content you can link to, helping to build internal links on your website. It also helps you to identify gaps in your exploration of the topic, indicating future content development opportunities.
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Deciding How to Measure Content Marketing Performance
The final component of an effective content marketing strategy is defining what you need to measure and how you can analyse your impact. This means understanding the critical key performance indicators (KPIs) supporting your goals. For instance:
Cost per lead
Lifetime value of a customer relationship
Campaign bounce rate
Lead to customer conversion
Collecting and calculating the necessary KPI measurement data helps you see if you are on target to achieve your goals.
This involves tracking every interaction every prospect has with every piece of content over time. As you can imagine, without a system in place, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose control of your strategy.
This is where an automation platform, such as Sharpspring, comes into play. It provides a central location for all of your campaign tracking and statistics. Its advance analysis and reporting capabilities mean you can easily access the information you need to make more informed decisions.
By knowing how you’ll track and measure performance, you’ll be able to decide if you have succeeded in meeting your goals.
How to Get Started with Content Marketing
As part of your initial planning phase, you considered your goals, brand voice, your audience’s needs, and performance measurements.
Now it's time to get into the nuts and bolts of how you bring your strategy to life.
Generating Ideas for Content Marketing
Say that you’ve developed your pillar content and exhausted your initial bank of ideas. How do you maintain a flow of high-quality content to keep your business top of mind?
Here’s a hint: good output requires good input.
Top up your inputs. Everything from industry news to current events to a meme can be a catalyst. Videos and podcasts are a rich source of inspiration, as well as reading.
Listen to what topics people are talking about. Use customer support, social media, and keyword research tools to discover what your audience is currently talking about.
Use what you know. Life experiences can be a great source for fueling your creativity. Thinking about your own triumphs and challenges will also help you create content with a more empathetic, human voice.
Perhaps most importantly, make time for creativity. We recommend scheduling a regular content brainstorming session with your team. Make these sessions both playful and physically active. Also, involve people from across the organisation, not just the marketing department, to get a more diverse range of perspectives.
The goal is to generate a large pool of ideas you can then sift through. This lets you filter for ones that are exactly right for your prospect's needs and your brand's voice.
Repurposing Content
Do a little digging in your organisation's filing cabinets and old shared drives. You’ll be surprised by the amount of content you can unearth.
Use a content audit to identify which pieces to repurpose in line with your current content marketing strategy. For instance, existing newsletters can be a valuable source for blog post ideas. Old recordings of presentations and training sessions can be mined for audio-visual content.
This will help you make the most out of everything you’ve produced in the past.
Types of Content Marketing
Your content marketing plan should provide plenty of content diversity to increase your opportunity for connection. According to Smart Insights, top-performing B2B content assets include:
Long-form content
Videos
White papers
Case studies
Resource pages
Each content type has different strengths, and how, when and where you use them will affect overall performance. For example, a long-form video is appropriate for a platform like YouTube or LinkedIn — less so for Instagram.
Sometimes B2B content makers overlook things like quizzes, polls, or surveys. However, these interactive components can augment your customer experience and set you apart from the competition. When someone actively participates with a piece of content, they become more invested in it.
Formats like podcasts and webinars are another way you can extend your content beyond the limits of a business blog.
Depending on your industry, you might consider experimenting with live streaming on social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. For instance, you can field questions via live-streamed comments. This element of immediacy can be an effective tactic for keeping your audience alert and engaged.
How to Plan Your Content
An editorial calendar, clear content briefs and editorial guidelines help you develop consistent content to schedule, and to sequence and track the progress of campaigns.
More than just a list of posting dates, they also clarify details such as:
Who is responsible for writing or producing a piece.
Where you source images and media, and what aesthetics conform to your brand standards.
Editorial guidelines to ensure writers conform to your brand's voice.
Which stage of the customer journey and/or a particular campaign a piece relates to.
SEO keywords and phrases your piece needs to include and be structured around.
Figuring out these details upfront will save you a lot of time and confusion further down the road.
Creating a content marketing calendar is one area, in particular, that’s ripe for automation. Using a tool to handle routine tasks, such as scheduling and posting, makes it much easier to manage the constant stream of content.
Promoting Your Content
Competition in the attention economy is intense, so your content won’t be going anywhere unless you promote it. People will find it by searching eventually, but it will take longer to get the results you need.
Instead, utilise automation technology and industry influencers to amplify content and extend your reach – fast.
Our 1827 Amplify service uses a suite of automation tools to make sure each piece of content is fully utilised, maximising ROI. It makes it easy to create and schedule optimised campaigns which are syndicated and promoted across your social channels. This means you show your content to the right people in the right place and at the right moment.
In addition to social media, you can also promote your content with the judicious use of paid advertising. In particular, use audience retargeting ads to help get your content in front of people who have expressed an interest in the past.
When done correctly, a content promotion campaign can create a flywheel effect. This is a positive feedback loop, where the incremental promotion results in your piece getting shared. This grows your audience, generating even more shares, getting more awareness, etc.
Once your promotion campaigns are done, your content will have enough SEO “heft” to keep people coming via organic traffic.
Content Marketing vs Social Marketing
There is plenty of overlap between content marketing and social marketing. Content marketing uses social media to channel attention back to individual pieces on your website. In turn, a good content strategy keeps the social media machine well fed.
With social media, the focus of the marketing activity is located within the social networks themselves, but social networks are only one part of a wider strategy to create a relationship with prospects across multiple channels.
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Content Marketing vs Email Marketing
Email marketing is the strategy of using direct communication delivery to help develop relationships. It allows businesses to send personalised messages and offers to enhance their relationship with current or previous customers.
Content marketing supports email marketing in a number of ways. Firstly, offering valuable, engaging content is the best way to win email subscribers and build your email list.
However, when compelling content is combined with automation tools, such as behavioural triggers, workflows, lead scoring and audience segmentation, email becomes a powerful engine in nurturing and qualifying your leads.
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Content Marketing Trends
The needs of your audience are constantly evolving. You must stay alert so you can continue to create and distribute content they’ll value.
An analysis of content marketing trends from Entrepreneur predicts that “essential” content types will expand to encompass:
Live-streaming
Voice search-optimised content
Augmented Reality (AR) experiences
One-to-one conversations (through tools like Facebook Messenger).
Personalised content (e.g. adapts based on location, online behaviour, demographic data, etc).
Information and communication technology is changing so rapidly that the scope of content marketing is virtually limitless. What remains the same is the focus on customer experience, telling your brand’s story, and developing trust.
What Are the Most Effective Content Marketing Tactics?
Here are three top B2B content marketing best practices to incorporate into your content marketing strategy to enhance its effectiveness.
Use Marketing Automation (but do so with a Human Focus)
A marketing automation platform helps you combine your marketing experience and technology to effectively manage, track and optimise strategies.
With repetitive tasks taken care of, your team will have more time to be creative and engage with your audience on a personal, human level. For example, our 1827 Amplify tools include features such as the ability to “read” your content. It can then pull out key quotes and images to create eye-catching posts. Even better, it offers hashtag suggestions to reach a wider audience.
Automation also simplifies integrated campaign planning and scheduling to create a satisfying experience for your customers. As a result, you become an authoritative and trusted source.
Automation also helps you maximise and attribute the ROI from each piece of content.
When centred around providing an amazing customer experience, automation technology can be a key component for running a successful content strategy.
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Create Clear, Fresh and Interesting Content
Prospects want to know that you are a brand they can trust. Help build this trust by providing a clear point of view and be authentic in the tone of your content. Most importantly, seek to be engaging.
People don’t value content that causes them to fall asleep.
Instead of focusing solely on features and industry jargon, seek to build an emotional connection with your audience. Use storytelling to bring your brand to life and delight your prospects. Interweave themes selling your business within that context.
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Don't Forget to Cater for Your Existing Customers
You have a much higher likelihood of reconverting existing clients. Furthermore, according to Bain & Company, raising customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
For these reasons, your B2B marketing strategy must include content designed for this audience.
Focus on deepening your relationship by demonstrating the importance your brand places on existing customers. It’s an opportunity to provide a superior experience and outshine the competition.
Your B2B Content Marketing Agency
1827 Marketing provides expert B2B content marketing services and tools to help you build strong relationships with your target audiences.
With our integrated marketing automation solutions, you’ll save time, track results and maximise your content marketing ROI.
Ever wonder why some B2B content spreads like wildfire while other pieces fall flat? The secret lies in understanding the mind of your audience and why people share. We look at the psychological drivers behind sharing and provide actionable strategies to engineer your content for virality.