B2B Content Marketing – How to Improve Your Business

Per the 2021 HubSpot state of marketing report, more than 60 percent of marketers have a B2B content marketing strategy. Your company may be struggling to come up with such a strategy yourself. How can you strengthen your B2B content marketing?

Here are our top tips for improving your B2B content marketing strategy:

• Determine your goals 
• Do deep audience research 
• Revise buyer personas
• Do a content audit
• Expand on email marketing, ads, and website design

In this article, we’ll discuss what B2B content marketing entails and the importance of this form of marketing. Then we’ll delve deeper into the points above. Your company will be so able to create an actionable, efficient B2B content marketing strategy! 

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B is short for business-to-business, and it’s the opposite of B2C, which is business-to-consumer. 

Rather than produce content with the goal of reaching the everyday consumer, B2B content marketing targets other businesses that are capable of making purchasing decisions. 

Although the audience may be different, the goals of content marketing are the same. Your B2B business should strive to:

• build awareness
• develop and strengthen your brand
• generate leads
• convert customers
• earn more sales through your content

We’ll talk later about the types of content you can produce for your B2B audience. For now, we’ll say that most importantly, B2B content must be valuable. 

Your audience wants to take something away from having read, watched, or otherwise consumed your content. Usually, they’re hoping for tips they can directly apply to their business to grow it.

That doesn’t mean your content has to be bland or dry though. Anything but!

If it fits within your personal B2B brand to interject some entertainment into the content you produce, then that’s fine. Engaging content is going to get views, after all.

Just don’t sacrifice quality and value in the name of entertainment.

Why Is a Content Marketing Strategy Important?

Most B2B companies today have a documented content marketing strategy. Utilizing such a strategy can be highly advantageous for these reasons. 

Standardizes the Process for Planning

When you develop a B2B content marketing strategy, then you know you can implement the strategy this week, next week, and three months from now. 

That’s a much better option than the alternative, which is flying by the seat of your pants and producing content when and if your team can agree on an idea.

Consumers expect consistent content, and that’s true of B2B customers as well as B2C customers. 

Through consistently posting content, you prove your reliability to your audience, which could improve their rate of trust.

Further, you could boost sales. According to Inc., consistently showcasing your brand such as through content marketing can lead to a revenue boost of 23 percent. 

Affords You the Option to Target Specific Demographics

It’s hard to determine which target demos you’re after when you’re rushing through content just to get something out there.

Fostering a B2B content marketing strategy as part of your business development affords you the time to be more careful and methodical about which audience segments your content will be tailored towards. 

Personalize your content tone and the type of content according to that which is the most appealing to your B2B audience. You can even determine which promotional and distribution channels are the most appropriate.

Taking these measures can ensure the success of your B2B content marketing campaign. 

Allows for Content Budgeting

It doesn’t matter whether your B2B business is a startup, or a Fortune-500 company. No one wants to go over the preestablished marketing budget. 

The amount of money that’s best to spend on B2B content marketing varies based on your industry and company size. However, Forbes suggests that upwards of 30 percent of your overall marketing budget should be allocated for content marketing. 

Gives You Consistent Metrics to Track Progress

Has your website traffic spiked this month compared to last month? What about this quarter versus last quarter?

Has your YouTube channel gained subscribers, and how many?

With metrics attached to your B2B content marketing campaign, these questions don’t have to linger. You and your team will be able to clearly see what’s working and what isn’t. So, you can finetune your marketing campaign even further for next time.

The Types of Content Marketing and the Best Ones for B2B

As promised, let’s now go over the types of content that may comprise a B2B content marketing strategy.

Admittedly, not every type of content we’re going to present may naturally slot into your campaigns. But we’ll recommend which ones to use and which to skip. 

Blogs

This article you’re reading is on a blog, which is one of 600 million according to Oberlo.

You want the blog content you produce to be actionable and valuable first and foremost, then entertaining secondly.

The same writing tips for any blog apply to a B2B blog. Write short, snappy sentences and don’t make paragraphs too bloated.

As for the length of your content, longer-form content that’s 1000+ words is best. 

Writing longer content is a good chance to establish your B2B business as a topic authority, and longer content can elevate your SEO as well. 

Videos

We’d also highly recommend videos as part of your B2B content marketing strategy. 

Most businesses use videos, and so failing to do the same will leave a noticeable gap that your audience will ask about.

Video resource Wyzowl states that most videos that companies make are explainer videos. They are followed by social media videos, presentation videos, video testimonials, video ads, sales videos, and product demos.  

Case Studies

Case studies are highly valuable, as they show a potential B2B customer what your company has achieved for other customers. 

When putting together a case study, be as illustrative as possible.

Detail precisely what your customer’s issue was and how your B2B services helped the customer overcome their challenges. Include as many numbers and stats as you can, especially sales numbers.

eBooks

We’ve already established that long-form content is excellent in the B2B market and that the content you produce should be actionable and valuable.

What better way to provide value than to write an eBook? 

Research what kinds of eBooks exist in your industry before you start writing. If you can improve upon an existing topic or concept or even provide more up-to-date content, then you can cover an existing topic.

You should still select a target audience for your eBook and use relevant keywords to ensure your writing resonates with your B2B audience. 

Infographics

An infographic takes the content you’ve produced on your blog or even brand-new content and translates it into a visually appealing format.

Infographics, when done correctly, are highly sharable. They’re a valuable tool for building a brand, establishing credibility, and proving authority and thus slot in well into a B2B content marketing strategy. 

Checklists

How does a new company in your industry establish itself? What are the trends in your niche for the year? What are 10 things everyone starting off in your industry needs to know?

You can answer these questions by producing easy-to-read checklists. Then you can use the checklist–as well as infographics and singular chapters of your eBook–as a lead magnet. 

User-Generated Content 

User-generated content or UGC does exist in the B2B sphere, often in the form of third-party reviews, guest bloggers, customer video or written testimonials, and UGC FAQs.

UGC is perhaps not a critical part of your B2B content marketing strategy but would behoove you if you can manage it. 

Whitepapers

A whitepaper is a six-to-eight-page document that expands upon a topic or concept. Whitepapers are longer than blog posts but not longer than eBooks. They too would fit in well in your content plan. 

Memes

Lastly, there are memes, which are joke images or videos. Although some B2B industries might be able to utilize memes effectively, this type of content is better-suited for B2C industries in most instances.

How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy

To wrap up, we want to share our tips per the intro for developing and improving your B2B content marketing strategy. 

Determine Your Goals 

What does your B2B business hope to achieve? You probably have common marketing goals such as lead generation, customer conversions, brand awareness, better SEO, and more sales. 

Once you’re aware of what those goals are, you can create stepping stones on the path to eventually reach the outcome you desire. 

Do Deep Audience Research 

Who is your B2B audience? 

Since the composition of an audience changes all the time (which is true of B2B industries as well as B2C), you must keep your finger on the pulse of your buyers, especially long-term customers.

Now is a great time to issue your current customers a survey to learn more about them. The circumstances of some of your customers could have changed between the time they first bought a product/service from you and now.

The way you market to those audience members should change in kind, so get to know who is in your audience at current. Then your B2B marketing strategy can follow. 

Revise Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are a useful marketing tool for visualizing large audiences with hundreds to thousands of people as one overarching personality. 

Your B2B company likely already created a slew of buyer personas to represent the most common personality traits and pain points among your customers. 

Now that you’ve gone back and done more extensive research on your audience, it’s best to update your buyer personas as well. 

Do a Content Audit

Unless you’re starting your blog from scratch, then you have content that may stretch back over months or even years. 

Your B2B website can benefit from a content audit.

During a content audit, you review your existing content, track its performance and other metrics, and determine what the fate of your content will be.

For example, you may wish to update content that’s outdated or add more words to very short-form content. You can rewrite content that doesn’t fit your new standards. 

You may even wish to delete some content. 

By updating the content on your blog, you can direct refresh traffic to it, so make audits a regular part of your content plan. 

Expand on Email Marketing, Ads, and Website Design

Finally, the last part of your B2B content marketing strategy should be promotional. 

Double-down on email marketing and advertising. Build your email list but don’t be afraid to prune dead email addresses.

Since you’re directing so many potential customers to your website, now is an ideal time to focus on your site design. You might even wish to redesign your site. 

We have a post highlighting some great examples of B2B web design that can serve as inspiration.

Conclusion

A B2B content marketing strategy starts with a goal. Content audits can help, as can advertising, email marketing, and developing buyer personas. If you’re struggling to formulate a workable B2B marketing plan, trust the pros at Mediaboom. We’re a B2B digital marketing agency that can help your company in many ways. Contact us – we can support you by generating leads, establishing retargeting funnels, boosting your email list, raising brand awareness, and elevating your SEO.