An important aspect of B2B marketing is the planning and implementation of a systematic B2B content marketing strategy. In essence, it’s the overarching practice of bringing content into play for:
Expanding the target audience base of your business
Developing affinity towards your brand
Propelling sales by attracting other businesses
It’s the exclusive utilization of content for businesses by businesses which is the key differentiating factor from other forms of content marketing.
Nevertheless, B2B content marketing can lead to lots of challenges. The scenario is expected to be more formidable in the future years. As per the latest survey even though nearly 82 percent of B2B marketing companies make use of content marketing they’re unsuccessful in understanding the basic distinction between B2C and B2B content marketing. This is one of the key reasons as to why a number of B2B content marketing strategies flunk in making the grade.
Read on to learn 5 vital tips that you can put into practice for producing continuous traffic, building trust and brand awareness, and driving more conversions.
1. Communicate better with engrossing narratives
When it comes to B2B content marketing, a thoroughly professional approach is often given a thought for making an impression on your SMB customers/clients. Even though it’s helpful to an extent, you’re certainly not to be too enthusiastic with the professional approach. Make sure your content can be understood easily and you avoid using unwanted jargons which might confuse your prospects. So the bottom line is to be concurrently professional as well as customer-friendly.
A decent way to catch the attention of your target audience with your content is to concentrate on putting interesting stories in the picture. This is because a good story or a narrative improves the marketing part and simplifies the overall process. Thus focus on coming up with highly engaging and inspiring content as part of your B2B content marketing effort.
In order to set up and sustain brand loyalty brands have need of developing an emotional connect with their audience. Hence, a compelling narrative centering on the brand is pivotal to build this emotional connect. This will come to your succor in generating brand awareness and making your business highly conspicuous.
2. Look beyond the bounds of blogging
The creation of a moneymaking B2B content marketing strategy primarily hinges on the diversification of your efforts. Undoubtedly, contributions in the form of blogs, infographics, and social media strengthen your strategy. However, although, blogging happens to be a widely prevalent content marketing technique, it simply isn’t enough.
If you need to outshine your competitors you have to be sharp-witted at tracking down original, innovative ways to sell to your audience base. Certainly, B2B blogging is very effective and does generate favorable results. But, you need to go beyond a regular blog if you want to garner a higher return on your investment. Your B2B content marketing tactics should appeal to your customers by making the most of uniquely created content that promotes your product/service in a simple yet relevant manner.
3. Take maximal advantage of your staff
Every so often, finding means of creating content can become quite a daunting task for B2B content marketing strategy makers, especially when it comes to SMEs. However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. By leveraging the vast reserve of knowledge and experience of your staff you can effortlessly and effectively produce content. Also, keep in mind, you can tweak your blog posts into various other forms of content such as a whitepaper, or guide, or infographics.
Here are a few important staff members you should contemplate putting to advantage as far as a B2B content creation and B2B content marketing are concerned.
CEO
You can cash in on your CEO’s knowledge and experience to showcase your company culture and industry expertise.
Sales team
You can make the most of your sales team to interact with your prospects and existing customers, listen to their pain points, and address their areas of concern through engaging blog topics and posts.
Product development team
You can also significantly benefit from your product development and management team by generating content driven by technology or blog posts focused on products.
In the event, you launch a new product release software updates, your blog posts can be re-purposed to bring new features and benefits to the fore and shared accordingly with prospects and existing customers.
4. Keep a track of your data and metrics
With the intent of developing a sound B2B content marketing strategy, start gathering the relevant data, tracking your metrics, and grasping on ways to improve your content. A few of the appropriate metric includes parameters such as:
Leads
Traffic
Sales
Social media engagement
By monitoring their performance and keeping an eye on the measure of success or failure of your content marketing you can determine how to accomplish two vital goals namely:
Avoid committing the same mistakes over and over again
Develop a content strategy that connects to your target audience
As you progress ahead, you’ll be in a position to understand your metrics in a better way and devise strategies beneficial to the growth of your business. At first, the metrics may not signify much insight. But the subtle adjustments you make will go a long way in enhancing your B2B content marketing campaigns. Also, the key to obtaining consistent results lies in identifying the factors that work or don’t work.
5. Put emphasis on personalization
As a matter of fact, your target audience will, at all times, recognize the value of personalizing the user experience irrespective of the specific niche you’re working on. By and large, people are averse to the idea of being pigeonholed into a general category. Everyone wants to feel special and exclusive through efforts intended at personalization.
Therefore, with a view to making the most out of your B2B content marketing endeavors, it’s imperative that you lay extreme focus on personalization. Not only will it make your brand distinctive but also will sow the seeds of building and fostering a long-term relationship with your target audience.
Furthermore, personalization of B2B content marketing strategy when done thoughtfully can help develop content that evokes interest and gets to the bottom of a problem by coming close to the pain points among sundry groups. What’s more, you can elevate your customer targeting efforts to newer heights with the effective use of data collected from your intended audience base.
