When it comes to digital marketing, there’s no escaping to content creation. Whether you are in the B2C or B2B field, if you want to reach potential customers, you need to be creating content. But how can you do it as effectively as possible? How can you manage your resources to create content that engages your audience, and drives sales? We’ve obtained an average Return On Investment (ROI) of 25:1 for our Growth clients, helping many B2B companies diversify their content strategies and reach their goals. Today, we’ll share our best practices and tips to follow when it comes to B2B content marketing.
Understand Your Audience
First things first: understanding your audience is key when it comes to marketing. You probably already know that: if you want to sell something, you need to know who you’ll be selling it to, what are their preferences, their paint points, their needs, and objectives. Creating detailed buyer personas will be the first thing you do when ideating a B2B content marketing strategy. Make sure you include demographic information, potential job roles, and all the information you think could be useful to tailor your content and make sure it resonates with your potential audience.
The Basis of a Content Strategy
Before even starting to produce your content, apart from defining your buyer persona, you should define the key components of your strategy: goals, key messages, forms of content, and channels you’ll be using. Especially in B2B, it’s important to produce content that’s informative and educational, to gain a voice of authority and also generate trust in your brand. Consider mixed formats of content such as blog posts, ebooks, case studies, demos, webinars, Q&A sessions, anything you think would be helpful for your audience and could eventually drive sales. Pro-tip: ALWAYS focus on quality over quantity. Don’t try to do everything if you don’t really have the time and resources. Doing fewer pieces of content that are truly valuable for your audience will work too, since you can find different ways to promote them in different channels.
Search Engine Optimization
There’s definitely no escaping SEO in digital marketing. Optimize all your content for your web (and even socials!) for relevant keywords to improve your visibility in organic search engine results. To learn more about how to conduct keyword research, read this blog post. Also, don’t forget to focus on technical SEO aspects as well like website speed, mobile-friendly content, intuitive navigation, and secure connections to enhance web performance.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to generate leads. Maybe not as effective as B2C in closing sales, B2B businesses still benefit from a strong social media presence, especially to generate trust in their audience and share their brand values with prospects. For its nature itself, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for B2B content marketing, with the possibility to network and share your content in industry-specific groups. Make sure you engage with your audience in any way you can: respond to comments, participate in niche discussions, and share relevant industry news adding your piece of thought too.
Paid Media
Hand in hand with social media, but not quite the same, comes paid media. Paid Media is essential for business growth. Considering it’s definitely going to drive more traffic to your site, make sure your website is ready for the newcomers and have in place strong lead generation strategies such as funnels, forms, etc.
Business Intelligence
Without data, where would we be? Data is at the core of any B2B content strategy, making sure we can optimize our content over and over with the insights it gives us. Make sure you regularly monitor key performance indicators such as engagement, page views, time on page, bounce rate, conversion rates, you name it! Also, we are firm believers in testing everything: from the content on your site to the way you share it on social media, make sure you track what’s working and what’s not, to always focus your efforts on the right places.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and guide them through the sales funnel. We have reached up to 100:1 ROI for our clients through email! How? By setting automatic flows such as abandoned cart recovery, birthday messages, newsletters, or holiday sales emails, you can deliver personalized experiences based on your prospect’s preferences and their state on the buyer journey. For this, segment your email list based on factors such as industry, job role, and engagement level, making sure you’re sending the right message, at the right time, to the right people. Here are some more email marketing best practices.
Collaboration
Apart from digital content, even in B2B, we need to remember that we are still dealing with people, not just businesses. Try to collaborate with industry influencers, thought leaders, and partners that can expand your reach through content such as webinars, blog posts, podcasts, etc. You can both benefit from each other’s audience and exposure, just make sure you work with people that align with your brand values!
As we’ve shown, B2B content marketing is a powerful tool to generate trust in your brand’s authority, driving awareness and reaching new audiences. Follow our best practices at all times to make sure you’re ticking all the boxes, focus on quality, and always remember to truly connect with your followers and partners. To start ideating a tailored B2B growth strategy for your business, contact our experts today!
