Content marketing aims to build valuable, informative, and relevant content to build an impression of your brand. It’s no more restricted to business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. B2B content marketing helps move the needle by promoting the right kind of content to the right people at the right time.
In the marketing world for business-to-business (B2B), it’s a popular opinion that it’s relatively easier to attract new clients through word-of-mouth, cold-calling, direct mailing, or advertising on your preferred website.
But the reality is you achieve more success by putting in the same effort. When searching online for answers to your problems or discovering something new related to your products and services, you come across helpful content. The quality content solved your queries, and you proceeded further to contact the website and sign a deal.
This is how an effective content strategy builds a bridge between you and your customers. To reach your marketing goals, quality content will help to solve customers’ problems and boost brand awareness.
“We struggle with content marketing because we haven’t started with Why? Customers don’t care about your vanity metrics. Ask them, ‘How can I help?'”
Content marketing is one of the cost-effective methods to raise brand value. With the help of informative and well-researched content, you can aim at your targeted customer to learn more about your products and services. Thereby, content matters.
Let’s delve further to learn how B2B content marketing can be a gamechanger for your marketing strategy and will help you in reaching out to valuable business leads and prospects
- What Is B2B?
- B2B Company Types?
- What Is B2B Content Marketing?
- Difference Between B2B Content Marketing and B2C Content Marketing?
- Benefits of B2B Content Marketing?
- Types of B2B Content?
- How to develop a B2B content marketing strategy?
What Is B2B?
The B2B model refers to a business situation where the transaction of goods, services, and information is conducted between two businesses. Here, one business creates or sells products/services to another business.
In contrast to B2B, B2C (business to consumer) refers to a business transaction where goods and services are delivered directly from business to customers.
B2B company types
There are different types of B2B companies, from start-ups to large enterprises. They are broadly divided into the following categories:
- Product B2Bs – Such companies produce and sell physical products to their customers, another business entity. An example is an FMCG manufacturer selling its products to its retailers.
- Service B2Bs – Companies in this space offer services to their customers. Examples include a strategy advisory company offering consulting services to its clients.
- SaaS B2Bs – These companies build software products that are then consumed by businesses for their purposes. A classic example of B2B SaaS companies is those into cloud-based ERP and CRM solutions businesses use.
What Is B2B Content Marketing?
B2B content marketing uses content to expand your business’s audience, strengthen your brand affinity, and ultimately drive sales by appealing to other target businesses.
As per this Google trends graphic, B2B content marketing is gaining traction and helping brands become thought leaders. Content Marketing Institute reported that 78% of B2B marketers were able to build customer loyalty, 64% nurtured leads with content, and 57% generated revenue.
Difference Between B2B Content Marketing and B2C Content Marketing
Although content is the common thread that ties both the B2B and B2C content marketing that is where all the difference lies.
B2C content marketing is consumer specific, focusing on a short purchase cycle, and the target audience is a single consumer. It majorly focuses on boosting the sales process and expediating conversion rates.
In the case of B2B content marketing, it has a longer sales cycle and targets a specific set of audiences. Here, the B2B content creation material doesn’t require popular social media platforms and targets to create a relationship by building an audience persona.
There are distinct differences when designing the message tone for B2B and B2C buyers. Rational communication underpinning services and trust is used in the case of B2B. While in B2C, the focus shifts to the emotional and pricing aspects.
The content for the B2B marketing campaign consists of blogs, whitepapers, and case studies. The content must carry a professional tone, market-appropriate language, and actionable solutions that address the pain point of the customers.
Whereas B2C marketing campaign revolves around user-generated content that promotes brand loyalty and enhances customer experience. The content strategy has a conversational tone that is imaginative and witty.
Despite the contrasting difference between the B2B and B2C segments, there is a reasonable amount of convergence in both. For example, Microsoft is providing differentiated value propositions to both organizations and individual buyers. This line is increasingly getting blurred as the focus is shifting towards the customers’ journey, even if there is no direct involvement.
Developing and implementing a content marketing campaign has come down to fulfilling customers’ needs and expectations by becoming more agile and offering the right content through the right channel and at the right time.
Benefits of B2B Content Marketing
To thrive in today’s competitive environment understanding marketing dynamics is crucial. B2B buyers are increasingly relying more on digital channels. Now is the right time to highlight the real benefits of B2B content marketing and take a closer look at the modern business strategy.
Describing products & services
Content is the best way to capitalize on your unique products and services. It reflects your in-depth knowledge about your business which helps in establishing trust. You can further race your business by presenting your products and services using different content formats. For example, you can make a short video explaining what your business does and how it can solve the prospective buyers’ pain points.
Increases chance of conversion rate
The effective road to increasing conversion is to nurture your leads through engaging content. Content marketing facilitates achieving your desired conversion in multiple ways. For example, you can use behavior and personalized marketing automation tools to stay informed about what your customers want. By creating customized content for your targeted contacts, you can increase your response rate and have more opportunities for yourself.
Also, you can use retargeting, remarketing, and lead enrichment services to appear precisely when your desired prospects need them.
Improves Return on Investment
The buyer’s plate is full of customers competing to showcase their products and services. You can cut down on the content’ noise’ by building valuable content material and offering detailed awareness to your potential customers.
For example, a compelling case study will help you stand out, generate higher engagement with real customers, and optimize results.
Sustainability
In the long run, content marketing has the full potential for sustainable business growth. With distinctive content strategies like eBooks, webinars, and white papers, you can play it right by educating your customers and expanding your reach.
Compared with traditional marketing techniques B2B, content marketing is more effective as it generates 3x more sales leads and boosts profits. Here, you can repurpose your content in multiple formats and distribute it across various channels in a cost-efficient way.
For example, a blog post can be utilized in more than one way. It can be used for newsletters or broken down into multiple posts. By occasionally updating the content, you can keep the engagement going.
Drives online traffic
Landing pages must be kept simple, crisp, and straight to the point to build a conversation around your products and services. It will help you to cut through the clutter and serves as the fundamental content to bring in more clients.
More than 70% of B2B buyers are going online to find business solutions or information, so your business needs to appear on the search engine’s result page. Using search engine optimization (SEO) and competitive keywords to publish your business content can fend off competitors.
The more traffic you generate, the more likely it catches the attention of business leaders. Such valuable content will earn more attention and be cited with high-quality information.
Types of B2B Content
Content is the fuel that runs your marketing campaign. Whether field marketing or demand generation, content is critical in transforming your business’s success.
Different types of content can be used to meet the eye and are easily digestible. According to the B2B content marketing report, virtual events, webinars, and online courses were in the spotlight during the pandemic. It gained more traction and accelerated digital engagement by improving sales.
To make a more positive impact on the B2B clients, you can get with this kind of marketing content:
Blog articles
Blogs are the go-to content type for many marketers, particularly in the B2B space. You can use blogs in the marketing funnel’s awareness, education, and consideration stages. Blogs may not directly generate leads but goes a long way in establishing your thought leadership and increasing website traffic.
A study by Backlinko shows that long-form blog posts help generate more backlinks than short-form blogs. So, go into as much detail as the topic warrants.
LinkedIn Posts
A study shows that 81% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn. There is a solid reason for that. Most of your B2B customers are on LinkedIn. It also provides more organic reach to your intended audience than most social media platforms.
LinkedIn Posts
Webinars are the best way to leverage your brand reach to put your business expertise at the front.
Webinars reduce the effort spent on the one-on-one sales call by effectively imparting knowledge to a larger audience and simultaneously building brand awareness. The underrated content types are scalable, informative with market trends, and generate quality leads.
You must know where your target audience is by spreading the word intuitively on Slack, LinkedIn, and Facebook groups. You can grab more attention and effectively promote your business by collaborating with other businesses with similar target customers.
White Papers & Case Studies
The key to standing out and catering to actual business has white papers that state facts and describe the brand in a positive tone. It provides solutions to complex problems by presenting the information using visual elements.
It speeds up sales by presenting unique business viewpoints and data-driven insights. It beats short format blog posts, making it more shareable among business leaders.
According to the Demand Gen report, 78% of buyers use case studies for researching products and services and it is the highest-rated content type that helps in lead conversion.
For creating great content, you must have case studies that help build effective brand trust and display previous customers’ viewpoints. Rather than text-heavy case studies, you can produce podcasts by interviewing your earlier customers about how the initial pain point was mitigated with an effective solution.
Email marketing has been the staple for marketers to increase customer outreach, but it comes with a little twist when targeting a B2B audience.
Here, you must focus on developing content based on trend reports, webinar recordings, and product demos. This will lead to client engagement and improve your profitability.
Email newsletters are used by 83% of B2B businesses. Rather than spamming the inbox with redundant information, creating curated emails will pique customers’ interest and make them look forward to informative content. This is how you capture the curiosity and retain the attention by ultimately converting the lead.
How to develop a b2B content marketing strategy
Analyze your buyer persona
Understanding buyer persona is a must-have tool in the marketer’s kit. The B2B buyer persona focuses mainly on the client’s characteristics to understand whom to market and avoid.
By offering clarity on the customer journey, you can interact with the different personas accordingly by interesting them with content like blog posts, eBooks, case studies and explainer videos.
Your marketing team must keep the conversation flowing as your target audience’s habits change while adapting to your business.
Define strategic objectives
Your gated assets must target the clearly defined outlines to scale conversion rates. After the buyer’s persona is decided, you need to examine the big picture and have a mission statement outlining the reason behind your content strategy.
SMART goals will immensely cut down delusion-based marketing and provides direction based on your objectives. For example, suppose you are selling business management software like an ERP solution to a small business to leverage their productivity. In that case, you must focus on the content journey mapping and the persona.
Address the pain points
Integrating your unique business solutions to the B2B buyer’s pain points is the right way of initiating the interactions. To position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, you must select the proper channels to educate your audience and build brand authority.
To stay ahead of the curve, develop a wealth of gated resources of original and well-informed content that compels your customers to learn more about it.
Creating the right content is just the start of the B2B content strategy. The content’s success lies in promoting high-quality content assets across relevant channels where your target audiences will find them.
Make good use of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Email marketing, Influencer marketing, and social media marketing (primarily on LinkedIn and Twitter)
Success measures
Though the appropriate metrics you must track will depend on your marketing goals, some important KPIs to follow would be:
- Organic traffic growth
- Email subscribers growth rate, CTR, Unsubscribes
- Website page views, form submissions,
- Backlinks from authoritative sources
- Performance of influencer
- Form completion rates
Get the Neekan Experience
Much work goes into building an effective B2B content marketing strategy. As there is no shortcut to success, the content marketing strategies and tactics will not show results overnight.
Accelerating B2B content marketing for your business growth will take time and patience. With years of expertise, we can help you to streamline your team’s effort and communication strategy. You can ditch excel sheets and manage your marketing campaign all in one place.
We are here to shorten your amount of time to onboard a content marketing team for effective results. We guide you through creating real-time insightful content that optimizes ROI and makes a maximum impact on your business and customers.
Get the conversation started with a free consultation.