That’s where a B2B content marketing strategy comes into play. This vital step acts as a foundation for all your content going forward, mapping out how you plan to brainstorm, write, publish, and promote written assets for your target audience.
Continue reading to learn why a B2B advertising plan is important and how to implement your own, no matter whether you’re a content marketing novice or simply need a refresher on what it takes to design a successful strategy.
Why Is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy Important?
If you’ve ever tried to take a trip without a roadmap, you’ll understand the importance of having solid direction to guide you. It’s the same for B2B content marketing: While the destination is certainly the shining star of the whole undertaking, arriving there will be difficult without a clear sense of purpose or targeted milestones to light your way.
Writing is meant to be a creative outlet where ideas flow freely and words abound, but a lack of clarity on why you’re creating content in the first place (and for whom) can make your B2B organization lose sight of your business goals altogether. That’s why a B2B content marketing strategy is a practical and necessary step before actually writing any content.
Know Who To Target
By doing market research and establishing who’s most likely to benefit from your product or service, you’ll be better able to write messaging with that prospect in mind. Not all content will be interesting to every reader or benefit every person who stumbles on your written assets.
While it may seem like casting a wide net will result in more customer engagement, it may actually have the reverse effect. Keeping your B2B audience vast can water-down your message or keep information vague, causing the people who are actually interested in your B2B brand to receive very little helpful insight. This may lead to them jumping ship from your blog post or switching to a competitor’s website.
Understand Your Business Goals
You’ve heard the phrase “if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it everytime.” Well, without a strategy leading you in your marketing efforts, you won’t know how to define success. A good content strategy will include business goals that your content can aim to meet. This ensures that everyone on your team is on the same page and understands what they’re writing for. But, this isn’t the case for every company. According to Semrush, only 54% of organizations measure content marketing ROI, which could stem from people not knowing what to look for.
By writing down your goals and what you hope to achieve through content creation, you can determine when you’re moving in the right direction and get actionable insight into your content’s performance. Without this, you might write the highest-quality content and receive nothing in return except an internal pat on the back.
Recognize the Best Marketing Approach To Take
Knowing your target audience and their needs as well as understanding your business needs will help you implement the best marketing methods that will get you in front of the right people. Does your B2B audience spend a lot of time on social media? Then you’ll know to highlight your newest blog post on Instagram. Do your potential customers want to read hard-hitting, factual information? Be sure to prioritize insightful case studies, use cases, and podcasts.
A content marketing strategy may be the key differentiator between successful audience outreach and a lack of customer engagement. Essentially, without a plan, you may completely miss out on the most beneficial marketing approaches.
What Makes a Good B2B Content Marketing Campaign?
A B2B content marketing strategy is completely different from a B2C content marketing strategy. While B2C advertising targets individuals, B2B marketing is directed at companies. That means the strategy must be designed specifically to reach business leaders and company decision makers rather than consumers.
To do this successfully, a strong B2B content marketing campaign should:
- Build trust with your audience by being a reliable source of information and truth.
- Establish your brand’s credibility.
- Inspire companies to choose your B2B business over your competitors.
- Speak to the needs of the specific target audience in focus.
- Involve support and engagement from the entire marketing team, including the strategist, writer, senior leaders, and product specialists.
- Collect feedback through engagement with readers and potential customers. Sources could include comments, surveys, focus groups, or direct messages.
- Be measurable through essential marketing metrics like time spent on page, bounce rate, backlinks, click-through rate, pageview, conversion rate, pages per session, and overall traffic.
Now that you know how vital a content marketing strategy is and have a clear view of successful content marketing campaigns, it’s time to build your own strategy. Let’s get started.
How To Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy — every B2B company is vastly different from the next, meaning every content marketing plan will be unique. But, there are some key steps that every brand should follow to create the most effective marketing foundation.
Understand Your Audience and Their Needs
Your audience is the whole reason that you create content in the first place, so the importance of better understanding them can’t be overstated. Because your content will attempt to solve their specific business problems and meet their needs, you need to have a clear grasp on what will resonate with this group of people.
Create a buyer persona to identify your audience. This is essentially a fictional person who fits into one or all of your target audiences. Write out their demographic information, what they’re passionate about, and what they struggle with, all to concoct the ideal customer for your marketing efforts. Then, look at previous customer behavior and information to determine what types of interactions and engagement you can expect from your B2B buyer persona(s).
You’ll have a clearer idea of who your content marketing will be for once you’ve laid out these details.
Recognize Keywords and Buyer Preferences
You know your brand better than anyone, but it’s vital to understand how your prospects search for your content. They may not use the industry jargon that you’ve grown accustomed to, but instead utilize more general phrases or umbrella terms. That’s why your team needs to conduct research on what people are looking up when attempting to find your B2B brand’s specific products and services. To accomplish this, use analytics data to reveal buyer behavior, preferences, and popular search terms or keywords.
Picking out the main keywords and keyphrases that you’ll aim for allows you to write content surrounding these terms to better reach the people most likely to make a purchase. It also helps you narrow down your focus so that you’re winning the right customers and able to communicate in more detail.
Compare Competitors
To get the full picture of your industry, it’s beneficial to analyze competing companies to see what they’re offering your target customers and how they market their brand. The point here is not to copy other industry leaders, but simply to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and identify their service gaps. It also assists with clarifying your brand’s unique selling points so you can better market your company as a viable alternative for a potential customer.
Define Your Goals
You need to look at B2B business and marketing goals to stay on track and measure your progress. Now, these goals can’t be far-fetched dreams. While wanting to change the software world is a nice thought, your objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. To set SMART goals, ask yourself questions like:
- What am I trying to achieve with my content marketing?
- What steps will it take to reach these goals?
- How will I know if I’ve achieved my goals?
By setting realistic and measurable goals, you can calculate your successes and failures with quantifiable data. This leads to clear results that can help you determine if you’re meeting marketing milestones.
Pick Your Core Types of Content
As a B2B company, you probably won’t need to create content for every single possible platform or write all asset types. It’s best to pick staple content formats and publish them where your target audience already spends time. If your customers are partial to lots of written information that dives deeper into a topic, then creating long-form blogs and educational content will be beneficial. Should your prospects prefer more visual, data-heavy assets, then case studies would be a good route to take. Ultimately, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to read your marketing materials, so set up your content for success by posting where people will find it.
Ideate Content Topics
Once you know what content type you’re hoping to create and the main keywords your customers are already familiar with, it’ll be time to come up with amazing topics your content marketing will cover. While it’s fun to write pieces that interest your marketing team, the subjects should truly be aimed at satisfying your target audience
Promote Your Content
You already know where your prospects spend their time, so your focus should be on reaching this audience as part of your B2B content marketing strategy. Every company will have a different combination of promotional platforms they utilize for content distribution, but there are a few general tips and tricks.
Here’s how you can effectively leverage your content:
- Improve your website’s discoverability in search engines: Because a lot of your assets will be housed on your site, you want people to find it quickly when searching for industry keywords or phrases. You can increase your page’s ranking by enhancing all content for search engine optimization.
- Use paid ads: It may be advantageous to use Google ads to secure a first-page position for your website. You can also get more eyes on your content through paid social ads if you’re posting on social media. For example, LinkedIn has access to 850 million professionals across numerous industries, meaning paid LinkedIn ads have the potential to reach new audiences. They also claim to drive 3.5 times more conversions for businesses.
- Utilize your email list: If you’ve acquired a list of engaged users from either your website or another secure source, then send a short but informative email with your new content pieces for them to enjoy.
Measure Your Results
Track your marketing progress and results to see if you’re hitting the mark on your SMART objectives. As you review your content’s performance, pay attention to metrics that may be lower than expected and determine what could be the leading cause. And, don’t lose heart if you’re not seeing the results you were hoping for! Sometimes, it takes time for beneficial assets to positively affect your marketing ROI.
B2B Content Marketing Best Practices
With a B2B content marketing strategy in your corner, your advertising efforts will have more of an impact and boost customer interaction and retention in the long run. Here are some other B2B content marketing best practices that can help you excel within your industry:
- Answer FAQs: When coming up with content ideas, include commonly asked questions within the topics. Answering frequently searched inquiries will not only help you appear higher in search engine results pages, but will also help you be a source of truth for your prospects.
- Map out the customer journey: You need to reach out to your target audience at the right time and place for the maximum impact. Understanding the B2B buyer journey is critical to sending helpful content to people at the most opportune time.
