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Your B2B (business-to-business) content marketing strategy plays a significant role in the success of your company. Data from Forrester shows that 90% of B2B buyers expect the companies they buy from to provide relevant, valuable content throughout every stage of the buying process. If you’re only providing this content during the acquisition and buying stages, your business could unwittingly be leaving money on the table.
The best B2B marketing strategies are those that are customized according to each stage of the customer life cycle. Without the right content marketing strategy in place, you could miss out on leads that could be converted into ongoing revenue streams for your company. Alternatively, your sales team may be tasked with handling the bulk of the revenue generation process using outdated top-down models.
In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about creating a successful B2B content marketing strategy. Our guide will cover best practices for B2B content marketing in 2023, how to create content that engages your target audience, and how to use employee advocacy to supercharge the effects of your content marketing strategies.
What is B2B Content Marketing and Why Is It Important?
B2B content marketing is the process of designing, creating, and sharing content with a target audience. This practice aims to improve brand awareness, generate more web traffic, and attract more leads and sales for businesses that sell their products and services to other companies.
Some of the most widely used forms of B2B content marketing include blogs, email newsletters, podcasts, and infographics. Creating content that shares valuable information about your products and services helps to simplify complex subjects and build trust between your brand and critical B2B decision-makers.
How Does B2B Content Marketing Differ from B2C Content Marketing?
What are the differences between business-to-business content marketing and business-to-consumer, or B2C, content marketing? The most crucial difference between these approaches is simply the audience that the content is directed toward. B2B companies create marketing content to appeal to business leaders, teams, and decision-makers. While B2C companies create content that targets individual consumers or small customer groups.
Additionally, B2B companies have a longer buying cycle than B2C businesses. B2B content focuses more heavily on lead generation than on building a strong brand. B2B marketing content should also be professional, helpful, and informative, while B2C content tends to be more emotionally driven and personal in nature.
What Are the Key Elements of a Successful B2B Content Marketing Strategy?
These are the core elements of an effective B2B marketing strategy. Try to include them in your brand’s strategy to create a comprehensive roadmap for your success.
1. Buyer Personas
B2B content marketing strategies are created with the goal of reaching the right audiences with brand messages at the ideal times. This makes knowing your potential buyers essential. Even if you generate excellent marketing content like white papers, blogs, videos, and eBooks, you may not be able to attract leads and convert them into buyers consistently.
When you put time and effort into learning about your buyers, you can better understand their specific pain points and challenges. Use this information to market your products and services in a way that offers them solutions to these challenges, and you may see your sales soar as a result.
The best way to create buyer personas is to speak to real leads and buyers. Locate them using your customer relationship management software and send out short surveys asking what prompted your leads to reach out, how they discovered your business, and why (or why not) they chose you.
2. Marketing Messages
You need to tailor your messaging to the needs, expectations, and preferences of your buyers. Once you’ve found out what their key challenges are and what they want to learn, you can plan your content creation strategy around their questions and concerns.
The key to creating messaging that resonates with your audience is to focus on being authentic and providing information that’s relevant to your audience’s needs. Your messages should align with your brand identity, your level of expertise, and the services you offer your clients. Messaging should be unique to your brand and your industry and needs to establish you as a leader in your respective niche.
3. Content Marketing Goals
You need goals in place for your content marketing strategy in order to measure your progress. Your goals can range from increasing website traffic and improving brand awareness to sharing your brand’s voice in your industry, enhancing your reputation, or attracting more qualified leads to your business.
Each of these goals can be measured with specific indicators and metrics. But you will need a general idea of what you aim to accomplish before you can truly measure your progress. Additionally, you can use these goals to motivate your sales and marketing teams and enable them to track lead generation progress as your organization grows.
4. Structured Content Generation Framework
In the past, B2B marketers relied mainly on blogs, white papers, and case studies to share value-added content with their leads and clients. However, content creation has become more complex, and the sheer volume of content available today creates a need for businesses to truly stand out.
Your content generation framework should include newer, more popular forms of content in 2023 to drive the engagement you want to see. These content formats include digital interactive content, podcasts, and short-form videos.
If your business is on the smaller side, it’s essential to consult your buyer personas and hone in on a few key content types and sharing platforms to focus your efforts on. If, for instance, your audience primarily watches video content on Instagram, then this information should form the basis of your strategy and framework. This approach will maximize your reach while helping you to save time and money on marketing.
5. Content Promotion Strategy
It’s no longer enough to post your content on your website in 2023. You may still be able to earn some organic visibility using long-tail keywords and SEO. But if you really want your audience to see your content, you’ll need to adopt a paid strategy like social advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns.
The strategy that will work best for your business will depend on a wide range of factors. However, the simplest way to choose the right solution is to pick one that maximizes your reach. You can’t force anyone to read your content. But by using strategic targeting and confident headlines, you can boost the chances of the right people finding your B2B marketing content.
How To Share Content That Appeals To Your Target Audience
Creating content that resonates with a B2B audience can be challenging without a customized approach. Use these tips and tricks to create engaging, value-added content that appeals directly to your B2B target audience:
1. Know your target audience well
Use your ideal client profiles, industry information, and data on the challenges, pain points, and needs of your audience to create content that appeals directly to them. You can also use tools like analytics, interviews, and social media surveys to gather important insights into the motivations, needs, and behaviors of your ideal buyers.
2. Address your audience’s problems
Your audience wants to know how your products and services can solve their problems. Once you know which pain points they face, you can provide information on how your product or service can help to address it. The best way to make a compelling case is to include high-quality information, solutions, tips, questions and answers, and examples that demonstrate your skill and expertise in your industry.
3. Tell a story
Capture your audience’s attention with stories that align with their key challenges and goals. Use testimonials, positive reviews, and case studies that show your audience exactly how your business has improved the lives of other clients just like them. Employee advocacy platforms like Clearview Social can also be used to share your team’s stories and perspectives and add new dimensions to your B2B brand.
4. Use the right content formats
Your B2B target audience will consist primarily of busy professionals and decision-makers with hefty responsibilities on their shoulders. Make your content as easy as possible for them to extract value from by ensuring that it’s easy to scan and comprehend. Use headings and subheadings, brief paragraphs, lists, graphs, charts, videos, and images to make your content simple to read and highlight your core messages.
5. Include calls to action
Including a CTA, or call to action, in your content tells your B2B marketing audience exactly what they need to do after reading through your content. You can prompt them to sign up for a free demo, contact your sales team, download lead magnets, or head to your website with a simple, clear call to action. Remember to make your CTA as direct and easy to follow as possible for the best results!
Choosing the Right Marketing Platforms
There are a few key content marketing platforms that B2B brands use to spread the word about their products and services. However, LinkedIn is by far the most popular and practical choice, with as many as 81% of B2B marketers using the platform. LinkedIn has a relatively high organic reach when compared to other channels like Facebook, and works just as well with text-based content as it does with video for lead generation.
LinkedIn allows you to publish your own articles, share visual and text posts, and attract the attention of thousands of skilled decision-makers in your industry or niche. As the platform is primarily used by working professionals, LinkedIn is particularly effective in a B2B context. Although other social media channels, email outreach content, and webinars can also produce exceptional ROIs.
How To Measure the Reach and Results of B2B Content
Once you have crafted engaging content for your B2B audience and shared it using the platforms they use most often, you will need to measure your results. This is an essential step that helps you to track and analyze how your brand’s content is performing and how it is helping you to advance toward your goals. Likewise, you can also measure your results to identify practices that could be hindering your progress.
B2B businesses use metrics like conversion, retention, engagement, website traffic, and revenues to assess the efficacy and return on investment of their content marketing strategies. Additionally, you can also rely on social comments, client reviews, testimonials, and other feedback to assess your audience’s satisfaction with your content and discover how best to engage them in the future.
How To Amplify Your Content Marketing Efforts with Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy strategies offer many benefits to B2B businesses, including the ability to enhance their brand awareness, recognition, and client loyalty rates. Once you’ve started sharing your B2B marketing content on the right platforms, you can use employee advocacy software to enhance your business’ ability to reach its goals effectively.
The right employee advocacy program will allow you to paste your content into the platform quickly, share it across multiple channels, schedule posting, and measure your results from a single dashboard. Automating this process can also aid in enhancing your online presence and reaching out to your leads.
How Clearview Social Can Help
Clearview Social offers all the tools you need to create captivating B2B marketing content for your business. Our employee advocacy platform allows you to create videos, infographics, eBooks, blogs, and other engaging content forms that compel your audiences to reach out and take action.
Our platform can enhance your client and lead communications, boost lead generation, attract quality talent to your business, and increase your social media traffic using the power of automation technology.
Contact the Clearview Social team today to discover how our employee advocacy program can supercharge your B2B content marketing strategy and get you the results you want to see!