For many B2B brands, content marketing forms the basis of the customer acquisition strategy, and for good reason! A solid content marketing strategy can serve as a phenomenal growth engine.
In this guide, we’ll guide you through what B2B content marketing is, how it works, and how to put together a content marketing strategy built for success.
What is B2B content marketing?
The content marketing institute explains it as “a strategic marketing approach, focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
This definition is the same, whether you choose to use content marketing for your B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) company.
Things get a bit different, however, when it concerns the decision-making process and the types of promotion channels being used for customer acquisition and conversions. But more on that shortly.
If we look at Google Trends we’ll see a rise in the popularity of content marketing, as well as evidence of continued interest and demand for content marketing. Why? Because it works.
As consumers, we’ve become immune to advertising, in fact so much so that many people have now begun using ad blockers in order to filter out most ads. As a way around this, brands have begun using content marketing to connect and engage with audiences to build trust before they make an enquiry or purchase.
B2B brands in particular tend to attract high-value orders and require long term commitments. Mostly because they don’t offer throwaway consumables, but rather high-value products and services. This means that buyers require increased confidence when investing in the right service provider. Content marketing works to provide this by helping brands attract, engage and delight their audiences, before, during and after they make a purchase. It also allows for greater opportunities to position themselves as thought leaders and key voices in their industry.
B2B vs B2C content marketing
The main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing are around the purchasing journey and the intent of the audience.
B2C content marketing works with relatively simple and quick purchase journeys. In contrast, B2B content marketing involves a lengthy and more complicated purchase funnel that usually takes weeks or months to complete.
The underlying purpose of content marketing, however, remains the same, regardless of whether it’s a B2B or B2C audience. And that is to use great content to engage potential and existing customers and drive ROI.
How to put together a B2B content marketing strategy
B2B content marketing success is a result of having a solid strategy in place. But to find out what you need to achieve, and how you’re going to do it, you first need to consider four key elements:
- Brand positioning
- Owned media value proposition
- Business case (What business goals do you need to achieve?)
- Strategic plan (How will you achieve and measure your targeted results?)
You also need to realise why strategy is important and to understand that, you first need to understand the difference between strategy and tactics.
- Strategy is what you are going to do.
- Tactics are how you plan to do it.
Think of your content strategy as the ‘why’ behind what you are doing. It should answer questions about why your brand uses content marketing and clearly define the expected outcome.
This is highly important because having a strategy prevents you from ‘working blind’. In other words, working without any direction. For example, going off and creating loads of 500-word blog posts because someone said that your website would rank higher on Google. These myths are nothing more than hearsay and simply aren’t true.
The purpose of a well thought out content marketing strategy should be to give you direction, help you justify the cost and provide a clear plan that can be executed and accurately measured. Here’s how you start.
1. Identify your customer personas
Set aside the time to identify your customer personas. Don’t skip this step, it’s vital.
Once you know who your different groups are, you can create a strategy around each of them.
2. Understand your sales funnel
To drive success with content marketing, you need to first understand how the content you create fits into the different stages of the sales funnel.
A B2C’s sales funnel is fairly straightforward but a B2B’s can be a little more complicated because of the length of time required to nurture a lead into a prospect.
A simple sales funnel (B2C) looks like this:
- Awareness
- Interest & evaluation
- Desire
- Action
Because B2B is a lot more complex, it’s important that you spend time working with your sales team and other departments to get a better understanding of what your unique B2B funnel looks like to effectively map out a strategy to target leads at every stage.
3. Set goals
You need to create content with a purpose. This means knowing exactly why you created it and the goals you’ve assigned to each one in order to successfully track success.
The purpose of content can either be to:
- Rank in search engines and drive organic traffic
- Earn links
- Funnel leads through the sales funnel
- Drive social engagement
- Raise awareness
The corresponding goals you set for your content should then include:
- The number of leads generated
- Organic traffic
- Social reach and engagement
- Rankings achieved on SERPs
- Number of quality links earned
- Impact on brand visibility
Conclusion
B2B content marketing can drive huge success, and it’s very much at the forefront of many brand campaigns. So it’s worth taking the time to understand and develop a content marketing strategy for potential and existing customers.
