Content marketing is a powerful tool for B2B businesses to connect with their audience, drive business goals, and create long-lasting brand loyalty in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just stepping into the field, this guide is your key to unlocking the full potential of content marketing. Let’s dive deeper into it!
What is B2B content marketing, and how to master it?
B2B (Business-to-Business) content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage the target audience within the business sector. In contrast to B2C (Business-to-Consumer) content marketing, which aims to reach individual consumers, B2B content marketing targets businesses, organizations, or professionals.
How to create a content marketing strategy and start working?
As in all marketing, before starting, you should define the business goals and what you want to achieve through content marketing. To know your audience, create buyer personas to understand your target audience’s needs and preferences.
Content audit and keyword research will help you to identify your strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. Identifying your relevant keywords helps you to optimize the content for search engines.
After doing these, start creating valuable, high-quality content that addresses audience pain points!
Tips to boost B2B content marketing
Content production requires time and resources. Therefore, leveraging produced content in as many ways as possible makes sense, considering customer profiles, available resources, and marketing objectives.
Discover our 40 invaluable tips on optimizing your content marketing effort!
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Utilize already existing material in a suitable way:
- Update your old content, such as popular pages and articles, to keep them current.
- Use a publishing calendar to track what and when you’ve published, and regularly create new social media posts on important topics.
- Put together a downloadable guide from existing material.
Repurpose Content Organically
You can share the same content or products made from it, for example, in the following different ways:
- Create content pages, blog posts, or references on your website. Optimize the content for search engines to achieve high visibility.
- Utilize RSS feeds to share new content with subscribers automatically.
- Feature topics in newsletters or include quality content in newsletter automation.
- Post content on company social media, sharing links to website content.
- Share posts on personal social media or repost company content.
- Utilize different options on social media platforms (such as feeds, stories, and articles).
- Inform colleagues that social media posts need reactions and shares.
- Share posts in relevant groups.
- Pin important and/or timely posts to your social media profiles.
- Highlight relevant content on your Google Business Profile.
Expand Reach through Paid Efforts
When you need more visibility, money can get that, too:
- Create an ad based on your content and target the right audience. Avoid using boosts!
- Depending on the nature of the content, explore the possibility of lead generation advertising.
- Feature content in Google Ads site link extensions.
- Experiment with publishing articles as native advertising.
Produce live content
Many platforms offer opportunities to communicate with your audience in real-time:
- Address the topic in a live broadcast (e.g., webinar, podcast, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook Live).
- Record the live session and use it for marketing, or upload it to platforms like YouTube. Alternatively, create other content based on the webinar.
Create videos or visual content
Images speak volumes, so include relevant visuals:
- Make differently sized and length formatted videos for various placements (e.g., 9:16, 4:5, 1:1, or 16:9).
- Create infographics on the topic.
Compile and link content appropriately
Make your content easily discoverable in the future:
- Assemble downloadable materials into a resource bank.
- Include links to other relevant website pages.
- Develop an online course based on your content.
Additional Considerations
Let your imagination run wild when brainstorming content marketing ideas. Try these methods:
- Collaborate with partners and networks (joint publications, tagging, and other collaborations).
- Share content from others (you don’t always have to come up with everything yourself).
- Conduct interviews or surveys on the topic.
- Start a podcast.
- Experiment with new channels for content distribution (e.g., Medium, Reddit, Quora).
- Localize successful content for a new market.
- Send popular content as a drip campaign using marketing automation to newsletter subscribers.
Utilize content in internal and client work
Consider if your produced content could also serve internal information sharing or training:
- Use your content to train or educate new team members.
- Apply produced content in client work. For instance, we create a monthly Digital Marketing report based on the Digital Marketing Weekly updates exclusively for clients and publish it on their portal.
Measure, analyze, and develop
- Remember to track key metrics to assess content performance and make data-driven decisions.
- Develop your content based on learnings from analytics.
Use AI to create content
Using AI in content creation can streamline processes, enhance creativity, and improve overall efficiency. Remember that while AI can automate certain aspects of content creation, it’s crucial to maintain a balance between automation and human creativity to ensure the content resonates effectively with the target audience.
- Use AI tools to plan content and get new ideas.
- Generate written content, including articles, blog posts, product descriptions, and more.
- Use AI tools to modify content.
- Produce visual content easily.
- Translate content with AI.
Also read:
Passive Lead Generation with Active Inbound Marketing