Content marketing is a way to build brand awareness that is relatively low in cost. Web site owners can use effective writing to bring in new visitors. (And convert them into customers, too!)
It’s not easy to just write a blog post and have sales come in, especially when you’re selling a B2B product. If you use the wrong B2B content marketing strategy, it could negatively impact your brand.
What Does a Good B2B Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?
A successful B2B content marketing strategy starts with understanding the brand and its target audience.
It takes into consideration the buyer’s journey and provides genuinely valuable content that solves problems and builds trust by meeting its audience where they are.
The key here is genuinely valuable. One similarity between B2B and B2C content marketing is that neither target audience wants to be marketed to. Instead, they click on blog posts and videos for informational or entertainment purposes. Business-to-business buyers are not interested in reading overly sweet marketing material, just as consumers are not.
Whether the content is for businesses or consumers, people click on it because they want to find an answer to a question or solve a problem. The goal of most internet users is to find content that is relevant to what they are looking for. Whether this is through a search engine, social media, or another website, they want to be able to find what they need quickly and easily.
Good B2B content creation, then, has to begin with understanding.
The key to creating good B2B content is understanding your audience. An understanding of the brand and its position in the market, as well as an understanding of its customers and the issues they face, are both important.
B2B marketing strategies need to be informed by analytics in order to be successful. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to target your content to their needs.
The kind of content you’ll produce will depend on your understanding of the brand. Educational content is often important for a B2B audience.
Show your customers how they can solve their problems. Along the way, demonstrate how your product can help.
A good B2B content marketing strategy does not only focus on creating content, but also on distributing it to the right people. The plan must also be able to measure the content’s performance. This means that you should track web metrics, as well as data related to conversions, as a minimum.
It is ideal to track users on an individual level so you can better understand the customer journey. This way you can analyze where on the journey customers are encountering your content and fine-tune the content for that moment.
How to Develop a Good B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s go over each step of creating a good B2B content marketing strategy so that we have a better understanding of it.
We will mostly focus on creating a strong foundation for increasing brand awareness. It is important to create a content marketing strategy that fits your company rather than following current content marketing trends.
Step 1: Understand Your Brand Positioning
The positioning of your brand is how you want your customers to think of your brand in their minds. It’s what sets your brand apart from your competitors.
The first step is understanding the brand’s current and desired positioning. Customer research and customer journey analytics are needed to answer the first question. It is more important to know your long-term brand goals when answering the second question.
It is important to know the answers to both questions, but as Cisco’s example shows, it is the answer to the second question that will influence your content strategy.
One way to define your brand positioning is by researching your competitors to understand their brand positioning. If you want to be successful in selling to B2B buyers, you need to understand the competition and what makes your brand different.
Although brand positioning is important, it is only one aspect of competitor research, which we will go over in more detail in the next step.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience and Their Needs/Problems
Understanding who your potential customers are is critical and spending time on it is worth it. What do they need? What problems are they facing?
The only way to answer these questions is by analyzing the data, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The qualitative front refers to customer surveys to determine why they chose your product.
It is important to communicate with your friends and family regularly, through phone calls, video chats, or in person. Although surveys provide valuable information about your audience, they don’t reveal everything. To write effective B2B content, you’ll need to understand not only their businesses, but also who they are as people.
Companies should use both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect information about their customers. Qualitative methods, such as customer interviews, provide insights into customer behavior, while quantitative methods, such as analytics tracking, provide information about customer demographics.
The best analytics platforms will allow you to see how individual users interact with your content across multiple channels over time, so that you can see which factors (e.g. blog posts, videos, social media content) contribute to sales, and which ones don’t.
The qualitative and quantitative data should be organized and simplified so that everyone at the company, especially the B2B content marketers, can understand it.
This typically involves creating customer personas, which are archetypes of your most common customer segments. Marketers can use these personas for information including (but not limited to) demographics, job titles, interests, and preferred social media platforms.
Step 3: Research Your Competitors
Although it is likely that your search will start on a competitor’s website, you should not stop your search there. Some people who use TikTok also have accounts on other platforms, like YouTube. They may also be placing content with trusted media sources or marketing partners.
As you find content, log it. As you spend more time investigating your competitors, you will start to understand their business-to-business content strategy better. This includes the channels they focus on and the types of content they produce.
It is also beneficial to use analytics tools to determine how effective your content marketing strategy is. Some tools that can be used for SEO purposes are analytics tools. These tools can give you some insight into the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. Your competitor’s weak points can be your opportunity to improve your content.
Your brand’s content strategy should be as unique as your brand is. Although you may not want to copy your competitors exactly, studying how they are using content marketing can give you some good ideas about what would work well for you.
Remember that this is an ever-changing situation. It is important to keep an eye on your major competitors’ content strategy as it can evolve quickly.
A well-optimized article or video can be very powerful in the realm of SEO, especially when it comes to the most important keywords in your market. It is important to monitor your competitor’s content strategy even after you have launched your own.
Step 4: Make the Strange Familiar
In order to be a thought leader, you need to produce content that will establish you as such. However, part of being a leader is also making sure that you have people who are willing to follow you. If people are not aware of a new product, but there is an absence of complete understanding, people will fill the silence with questions and grumbling. Some people will respond to this question with fear, and these stories can become widespread if brands do not take action to fill the void.
This can be a problem for people who use old, unpopular services, like taxi riders who are afraid to try new ride-sharing apps. It is more of an issue for institutions that are loved and have a lot of tradition. The college classroom, for example, is a treasured space. No one wants a new, strange element to jeopardize what they have.
This narrative has caused many people to view technology in education as a threat. Edtech companies must work to change this narrative and show that technology can enhance the student experience. Education for customers in this area is typically about demonstrating that a given product category can actually enable educators to do what they do best. For example, a new advising technology may free up faculty from figuring out student schedules, so they can spend their office hours on tutoring and mentoring.
Step 5: Grow the Market
Although this type of customer education content may be more challenging to produce, it may be more essential. You cannot market to a customer base that does not exist yet, so you may have to cultivate it. Some companies don’t just need to create awareness of their brand; they need to encourage awareness of their entire product line.
What is the current market value for self-driving cars? Or for 3-D printers? List the number of people in the sales funnel. Investing in cryptocurrency is seen as a high-risk move by many, but some investors and companies are gambling on the market being much larger in the future.
Those companies can wait for the market to grow on its own, but they can also take charge of their own destiny by teaching prospective buyers about the category itself–what a self driving car or 3-D printer is and what its advantages are.
Autodesk, a company that makes CAD and other design software, has a great example of thought leadership content on their microsite Redshift. Redshift focuses on the future of technology and how it will shape the world. This includes topics such as generative design and robotics. This means that Autodesk is using content to make more people interested in 3-D printing technology, making the market for Autodesk grow.
Step 6: Grow the Ecosystem
The previous mode of growing the market is like increasing the number of fish in your pond. However, growing the ecosystem is similar to nurturing the range of species that the overall health of the pond depends on. We really work hard to make sure that we educate our customers on the choices that they have, Although customer education is important, there are other factors that contribute to a customer’s decision. The goal is to help your strategic partners learn and grow through the use of content that will interest and attract them. You want to create an environment that is conducive to their success.
The success of many products depends on other companies in the ecosystem. An example of this would be how different Ford Motor Company would be without Firestone by its side. Not only did Ford need customers to understand the horseless carriage, but it also needed manufacturers of tires, steel, and other materials and parts to understand the product and how to make it.
This is familiar to anyone who sells products or services. Each of Udemy, eBay, Amazon, and AirBnB have their own individual educational content in order to attract and support the strategic partners who actually put products and services on their platforms.
An example of content that promotes growth within an ecosystem are the developer communities that many platform companies create. Blogging is beneficial for IBM Watson because it helps developers to better incorporate Watson into their applications by providing the skills needed. If there were no app developers, there would be no platforms for Watson to develop applications for, and therefore no market. Growing the ecosystem is a strategic necessity.
Step 7: Hire a Team
Many companies use a combination of in-house and freelance workers, which can be especially helpful for B2B content marketing plans. These strategies often require a mixture of technical content, material that is specific to an industry, and information that appeals to a more general audience.
The skills of your team should obviously match the channels you plan to target. If your goal is to produce videos, it is advisable that you hire B2B marketers who have experience in video production. If you need technical tutorials, hire technical writers.
Look for candidates with specific experience in creating content for businesses, but if you have trouble finding candidates with that experience, prioritize skills over industry experience. A B2C content writer could do great work for a B2B company.
Although it is not always the case, it is generally easier to teach a great writer about your industry than it is to teach an industry expert to be a great writer. This is particularly true in highly technical industries.
It is important to be aware that although there are credentials for content marketing from institutes such as the Content Marketing Institute, the best way to measure the skill of a B2B content marketer is through their portfolio of work.
A great way to find good potential hires is to look for people who have written B2B content that you like, and then contact the author to see if they would be interested in a full-time or freelance position.
Create a Foundation for Understanding
Before I finish, I want to quickly mention two other types of customer education that can help build a mutual understanding.
You can help improve your target customers’ job performance. The focus of the text is more on what the reader is doing, rather than what you are offering. Canva’s cloud-based graphic design software has an excellent Design School microsite that helps designers improve their skills. Adobe is not introducing any new products or categories, but is instead helping people improve their skills in design software.
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