Content Marketing Strategies for B2B Marketing

B2B marketing is all about how good businesses understand their fellow businesses who are their potential customers. A strong B2B marketing strategy starts with defining a target audience by creating buyer personas and understanding how they make the purchase decisions at the organization level.

Such demographic and psychographic information ensures that the content is marketed to the right eyes and ears. To check what other businesses are marketing to the target audience, a competitive analysis is performed. It includes data collection on – competitors’ product offerings, sales tactics, marketing content, and ways of social media promotions. With such details, the organization can get a fair idea about the competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Content (in all forms – text, visual, videos) plays a vital role in B2B marketing as it answers the audience’s questions, helps build trust, and ultimately generates leads. Consistent content symbolizes the organization’s presence on the web and helps strengthen brand awareness as well as recall.

B2B Lead Generation Strategies with Content Marketing

As part of a holistic content marketing plan, the process of lead generation in the B2B space involves collecting the potential customer information like – the POC’s (Point of Contact) name, email, company name, etc., that helps in targeting them with customized sales pitches and ad campaigns.

Content Research

Content research is an essential first step toward understanding the Why, What, Whom, and How of a particular business. A thorough content marketing research is a must in order to develop a unique content marketing strategy that will benefit the brand visibility and a company’s long-term growth.

It is very important to research whether or why the products and services are required, who needs them, in what form, and how they must be delivered. Content research before starting a marketing campaign helps connect with the audience that can make all the difference in web traffic, brand visibility, resonation, recollection, and eventually a conversion.

In the context of quality content development, there are a few critical steps to be performed before content creation:

1. Know who are your target audience.
2. Interpret what the target audience shares and engages.
3. See what is being written by the competitors, thought leaders, and influencers in the space.
4. Research for questions and keywords in your industry.

Target Audience Research

A thorough target audience research is performed to fetch all the aspects of the buyer persona, including location, age range, gender and interests, and hobbies.

Competitor Research

It involves finding out as much as possible about your competitors and their vendors. This can help in finding out the marketing positioning of your competitors, what market, geography, ethnicity, and categories of consumers they are targeting, etc.

Industry Research

It is essential to stay updated with the market scenario, such as its growth, inclining/declining trends, and other internal/external factors influencing the demographical (population statistics such as age, gender, and family type) or geographical bias.

Content Planning

All content should be planned with the intention of achieving the business objectives and core business goals. It should be used to increase sales. Depending on the products or services the organization is selling and the industry it belongs to, the content strategy may be different from one company to another.

The marketing content must focus on addressing the queries and/or problems of the target audience primarily. The search engine optimization must involve the inclusion of the keywords based on only the search intent and not from the promotional or ranking perspective. It includes in-depth customer research and alignment of the keyword research exercise to plan an effective marketing strategy.

More content on your site means the more pages the search engine has to index and show to users in search engine result pages. For example, creating blogs on various topics relevant to your target audience make your website visible on search results of the trending topics as well as establishes your brand in a thought-leader position.

Content Development

Content development includes creating content in Text/Visual/Video form based on the research and planning to achieve the marketing objectives. Like we write blogs, articles, social posts, video ads, and podcast content on the basis of what audience we are targeting. All these are developed by the team of marketers and content writers, keeping in mind the factors like- the consumers’ interest, behavior, search practice, etc.

After developing the content, it is optimized with relevant keywords and visual creatives for enhanced readability. The optimized content new subject lines for an email campaign, improving the layout or design and trying different days of the week for content distribution.

Optimization of content should be an ongoing process in a content strategy and needs to be optimized towards the audience’s taste suited for the target platform.

Content Promotion

Content distribution and promotion are also equally important. When the consistent content publishing cycle is the priority, frequency, platforms, and modes of content distributions must be thought through keeping a number of factors such as the audience, their information retention levels, where they hang out most, and more.

B2B marketers see email marketing and social media marketing are the most effective content promotion methods. Among so many social platforms in terms of the success of marketing strategy, LinkedIn ranks higher than all other social platforms, followed by YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare, Facebook, etc.

• LinkedIn – It allows one to run advertising that can be extremely targeted by location, industry, title, company, and other demographics.

• YouTube – It includes optimizing videos with relevant keywords to achieve maximum exposure and displaying them prominently in Google search results.

• Twitter – It’s a great way for companies to provide links back to their website as all tweets can be seen by everyone, unlike Facebook.

As part of aggressive marketing, to achieve several goals like – sales, user engagement, downloads, reach, likes, etc., companies also promote their products/services by creating their content (paid ads, gated blogs, podcasts, infographics, etc.) for paid advertisements. To get the most out of it, a pinpoint strategy must be made and run seasonal promotions.

How and With What Content Inception Can Help in B2B Marketing

Content Inception is a digital marketing company with a focus on organic authority building and lead generation process easy and affordable. We believe in delivering content that holds value engagement and works for businesses even in the niche segments.

Since content is all around in the digital marketing landscape, our content and the B2B marketing plans aim to create a great content consumption experience for your consumers and generate leads with conviction.

With a team of seasoned marketers along with an in-house workforce of content creators, creative designers, and search engine specialists – CI has been helping businesses in enhancing web presence, branding, and lead generation. Contact us to make your business outshine with effective B2B content marketing.