B2B content marketing is a proven way to help you grow your B2B business. B2B content marketing is the process of creating relevant, useful content and promoting it to other businesses in order to educate them and ultimately generate leads and sales. Nowadays B2B business instead of traditional marketing activities, create their own digital content. B2B content marketing is also proved to be a great way of creating brand awareness for businesses.

According to CMI B2B in a 2020 study, 68% of companies that used content marketing to retain subscribers, audiences, and prospects said they were successfully achieving this goal.

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B Content Marketing or business-to-business content marketing is the practice of producing and distributing content to increase brand awareness, educating audiences, building credibility, leads, and sales for B2Bbusinesses. All that sets B2B content marketing apart from other types of content marketing is that it is used exclusively by businesses, for businesses.

Why Is Content Marketing Important for B2B?

One of the most important advantages of B2B content marketing is that it helps your audience trust your brand. As a B2B content marketer, being seen and renowned as a leading resource for professionals in your industry should be your top priority.

When you regularly publish high-quality content that is relevant to the interests of your target audience, not only do you position your company as an industry expert or an authority that people can count on, but also your target audience figures out the solutions to their problems.

Then they look forward to doing business with your company. In other words, B2B content marketing is used to achieve top-of-the-funnel goals like brand awareness and audience education. You can even with content marketing reinforce relationships with your prospects and move them through every stage of the sales funnel.

You should focus your B2B content marketing on producing content that is highly relevant to the problems your audience is facing and be consistent by following a strict content marketing calendar. Your B2B content marketing needs to be customized according to the target audience. Another reason why content marketing works great for B2B companies is it makes the whole selling part easier.

Some content marketing objectives deserve to be studied:

• creating brand awareness
• Establish trust and relationship with your audience
•  audience education
• Attract new organic customers or strategic partners.
•  Customer engagement
• Brand loyalty
•  Traffic
• Lead generation
• Lead conversion and sell

Read More: 10 Steps to Planning a Strong Content Marketing Strategy

How Does B2B Content Marketing Differ from B2C Content Marketing?

The first difference between B2B and B2C businesses is their potential customers.  every audience is different motivations and needs, and so are their reasons to buy. B2B businesses offer products or services are created for other businesses.

Whether you have a B2B or B2C business, using content marketing is about creating and distributing relevant content to your audience to drive them to profitable action and a high return on investment. B2B counterparts and B2C customers are looking to buy products after they are sure of their purchase.  But even if B2B counterparts and B2C customers buy the same product, the inclination to buy it or the reason to invest in it may not be the same.

Where things differ between B2C and B2B businesses is the decision process of their audience and promotion channels that can be successful in customer acquisition and conversions. Thus, the difference between B2C and B2B content marketing revolves around the buying journey and promotion channels.

B2C marketing often works with a relatively simple and fast buying journey. While B2B content marketing is more likely to involve a lengthy and complicated purchase funnel that could take weeks, months, or longer, of nurturing a prospect through.  Because B2B customers and consumers are always professionals looking to get the most out of the product or service they use. They also want to learn more about their industry and see it from a different, more mature perspective.

However, even though B2B content marketing differs from B2C content marketing, they must first know their audience intent and create content that actually needs their audiences.  This directly affects the kind of messages they craft.

How to Do B2B Content Marketing

Now we know what B2B content marketing is, let’s take a look at some tactics you can use to take it to the next level.

1- Story Telling

The best way to get your target audience to connect with your content is to focus on telling stories connected to your potential client’s situation. Because stories have the power to push your prospects to take action.  Your content should be in the form of stories that your reader will benefit from and be able to act upon.

Creating relevant and inspiring content in your B2B content marketing and including lots of quality stories allows you to be more competitive. It’s true that your B2B content marketing is business-driven and you promote your content to other companies, but you should never overdo it with a professional style.

Because in fact, you are targeting people whose profession is managing their business. Try to explain the whole process, which can be told as a story, being both professional and friendly.

Read More: Storytelling : A Powerful Content Marketing Strategy

2- Take Advantage of Different Content Formats

Successful B2B content marketing requires you to diversify your efforts to achieve more effective results and higher ROI. Blog posts are considered the most effective form of B2B content marketing because they help you effectively educate your audience through content and can generate large volumes of organic search engine traffic.

However, it is important that you integrate different content formats into your B2B content marketing that work together to get results. Some examples of different content formats are as follows

Original Research Studies

 Publishing original research studies that your audience actually wants to consume is a powerful way to stand out with your B2B content Marketing against your competitors. It dramatically increases the rate of sharing and linking of your content and can even position you as a leader in your industry.

eBooks

 eBooks or White papers are still incredibly popular amongst B2B marketers.

Templates and Checklists

To help your customers, you need to be able to offer them the products or services they need. Creating and sharing useful templates and checklists with your target audience for free is a very valuable format for B2B content marketing. This way you can address your audience, build a funnel, and present yourself as a solution.

  Infographics

In addition to producing and promoting content written in your niche, you can use all types of content in your B2B content marketing to market your own product or service. infographics are easy to consume and more effective for visual learning compared to written text. Because Infographics offer a detailed visualization using graphics and targeted information.

  They are more likely to be shared across social media which will, in turn, give your brand the exposure and traffic that it needs.

Video Content

High-quality and informative video content can help your B2B content generate the type of engagement you’re looking for.  You need to figure out what type of video content ensures the engagement of your target audience as your text-based content will go with your brand.

Creating video content is a powerful tactic to strengthen your B2B content marketing because videos are very popular and you can use them on many different channels such as YouTube or LinkedIn and other social platforms to reach new audiences.

Webinars

Including webinars in your B2B content marketing give a high engagement rate and thus lead to better conversions. Because it’s a powerful way to give valuable information to your target audience, build trust, and get them to take action.

By Inviting your B2B clients to a webinar you can interact in a live discussion with your prospects and shorten the product’s sales cycle giving them the solution or answer that they are looking for. You can even partner with other relevant B2B companies.

Podcasts

Podcasts are an effective way to build an audience for your B2B content marketing and be seen as a voice in your industry. 

3- Identify Your Audience by Personalization

You can get very accurate information about your audience and the people who visit your site simply by exploring your Google Analytics data. You can see basic demographic information such as age, gender, and location, as well as valuable data of interest that shows their decision-making behaviors.

In order to make the most out of your B2B content marketing no matter in which niche you are operating in, it’s extremely important that you focus on personalization for building relationships with your target audience.

Personalization, when you actually use audience data effectively, can help you create content that reads well and solves a problem with your target audience, and take it to a whole new level.

This allows you to know your audiences are made up of individual people before giving them content. It also allows you to rank some audiences by the reader and some by the buyer. You can then segment your audience according to the funnel stage they are in.

Personalize by Segment

The most popular way to personalize is to customize your content by audience segment. you can choose to target your audience by Job title, Job department, Current industry, Age, Gender, Geographical location, and Behavior.

Segment-based personalization allows you to send the right content to the right group of customers and micro-targeting will allow you to communicate with a highly targeted audience.

 Personalize by Persona

Using personas in your B2B content marketing allows you to know for whom you are creating your content. Not only does it help you find the right type of content, but it will prove to be more efficient and give you a better return on investment.

Personalize by Stage

 personalizing by stage allows you to make your B2B content marketing more robust. This will help you to know your customers’ journey and create useful and relevant content for each step of their buying cycle. By answering clients’ questions and needs at each stage in a very contextual way, you make it easier for them to move on to the next stage.

-The customers at the top of your funnel need the most relevant information.

– Customers in the middle of the funnel or purchasing process need a little more security.

– customers at the bottom of the funnel and close to the sale need some critical, last-minute data

4- Develop New Content Ideas Consistently

Creating content in your niche is easy when you’re just starting out. But at some point finding new content ideas becomes a constant challenge. You must consider your audience’s priorities when creating new content ideas. By examining the demographic data of your audience, you can understand what your audience wants to read and what they want to accomplish for their business.

Social media is the best place to find new content ideas because it’s where people talk about their needs or problems. You can also take advantage of some online marketing tools such as BuzzSumo, which allows you to examine data from all major social networks to identify the topics that are gaining the most ground in your industry.

This helps you create content that presents a new angle on an existing topic.

5-Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Your site should be considered as much more than just a place to publish content. Your B2B content marketing must ensure that each and every one of your content is created with the goal of achieving a good SERP ranking. That is why your B2B content marketing should be seen as an opportunity to position yourself as an industry expert, to have SERPs for key topics related to your business, and to generate increased organic traffic.

When your content will be ranked in search engines, customers will find your website, and the targeted traffic could become prospects. When researching keywords and content ideas, you can use the Jaaxy tool to help you find the right keywords and variants to target in the first instance for quick ideas.

Read More: 

SEO for Beginners: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

12 Best Tips for Creating SEO-friendly Content

Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool Review 

6. Sharing In Social Platforms to Increase Your Web Traffic

For your content to be more likely to be found, consumed, and shared, you need to share it through social media. A solid promotion of your post on social media combined with a search engine discovery strategy extremely increases your web traffic considerably.

You can promote your B2B content on a powerful social media platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Reedit, Quora, and other social media platforms to get organic traffic.

LinkedIn is ideal for sharing your B2B content in the form of posts, video content, images, E-books, and others for your target audience. You can even consider taking advantage of paid promotion across LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and YouTube.

Read More: Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

7-Email Marketing

Another form of promoting your B2B content marketing is the newsletter. But to do this you must first build up your email list to have a database of people to send your emails to. To build your email list you can proceed as described above.

– Include a newsletter subscription box in your content to captivate readers.

– Clearly display a subscription box on every page of your site.

– Capture email addresses via resources such as e-books and checklists.

As you build your email list you can effectively use email to both communicate with your audiences and offer them quality content. This way you will succeed in keeping them in your funnel.

Read More: Email Marketing: Beginner’s Ultimate Guide

8- Track the Metrics Constantly

B2B content marketing is a process you need to engage in by regularly testing different ways. Creating new content on a regular basis will foster a culture of research and allow you to keep abreast of changes and trends.

Some of the important metrics for B2B content marketing are SEO ranking, conversion rates, sales, website traffic, and subscriber growth. As you progress, using these metrics you can track the success or failure of your content marketing to your target audience and identify what types of content and styles really help you grow your business.

 The changes you make as a result of these measures will help you improve and strengthen your B2B content marketing. This will result in a high return on investment.

Conclusion

The above tips will help you focus on the most important elements of B2B Content Marketing. To be successful in your B2B content marketing, you need to understand your target audience and their needs. In fact, B2B content marketing is pretty fluid and it’s constantly evolving as your audience and their needs change.

In addition, creating and delivering useful and beneficial content can help your business grow over the long term. In your B2B content marketing, you should also use a variety of promotional techniques, such as content creation, ad placement, and search engine optimization, to build customer relationships, generate more quality leads, and drive sales.

If your audience consistently finds value in your content, they will see you as an authority in your niche – a brand they can trust. They will buy your products or service and this could position your brand as an opinion leader, as an expert at the top of your field, and become a key voice in your industry.