Content marketing has been here for quite some time now. As 2021 moves on, business-to-business marketers need to know that valuable content comes from evolving and adapting with the audiences. The business-to-business marketing teams need to think beyond the classic promotions and blog posts shared via social media.
One interesting statistic of 2021 is that almost 21% of business-to-business teams still cannot come up with a comprehensive content marketing strategy. They are just publishing things randomly. This only shows that the business is not focused on creation that has a value package. In turn, they do not realize how powerful this mistake is or are not using tailored marketing for business-to-business interactions. If you are one of these companies, then you are missing out on many opportunities.
On the other hand, if your company is already generating business-to-business content marketing, it will not be impactful if you are oblivious of the content marketing trends.
What Is B2B Content Marketing?
Related Content: Top B2B Content Marketing Agencies That Can Help You Build Your Brand
Before getting into B2B content marketing, we need to understand what it is. It’s the processing of creating and distributing engaging and valuable content to your target audience. It’s created to solve problems or answer questions that your customers (target audience) may have. In simpler terms, your content is there to supply the answers the people are searching for. There are different types to fill the various gaps in a customer’s journey. The more valuable and helpful your content, the more leads you generate and the more trust you build.
So, what is B2B content marketing? It’s a type where the content relevant to your target audiences. The only significant difference here is that other businesses are your target audiences, not the customers. Therefore, B2B marketers need to come up with an efficient marketing strategy. When compared to a B2C transaction, the B2B journey is more complicated and longer. Regarding cost and volume, the investment for B2B may be more; additionally, there may also be more people, depending on the decision taken by the buyer.
Overall, it all boils down to the need to showcase your industry expertise and build trust. This is the reason why B2B content marketing should be your priority. Apart from impacting your marketing strategy, you will see a significant increase in value when the marketing is paired with the efforts for outbound sales.
Benefits of B2B Content Marketing
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| More Qualified Leads | Increases traffic through targeted strategies such as emails, blogs, and social media. |
| Increased Conversion Rate | Builds trust by delivering the right content at the right time, leading to better conversions. |
| Dominate Industry Keywords | Allows outranking competition on search engines with smart content planning. |
| Better Brand Affinity | Builds customer loyalty and brand affinity through valuable content. |
| Increase Followers on Social Media | Attracts new followers through high-quality content and social media sharing. |
One of the most successful marketing tactics for B2B companies is content marketing. Here are some known benefits your company can expect from the B2B content marketing plan:
- More Qualified Leads and Targeted Traffic
One of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your website is using targeted strategies. Whether it is through emails, white paper, social media, or blogs, the content you create will show your customers who you are and what your company offers.
Also, when your potential target audience requires help for their pain points, challenges, and needs, they can find your company via keywords that match what they need. Content marketing is all about creating value targeted to answer these needs, which eventually increases leads to your web platform.
Perhaps, the best aspect of using this strategy is that you do not have to rely on a sales pitch to be a driving factor. Instead, you need to concentrate on developing content that will answer your customers’ queries and provide them with valuable information about your products and services.
- Increased Conversion Rate
If you want to build trust, you will have to deliver your creation to the right audiences at the right time; doing so will lead to conversions. It will also help to remarket audiences and lead nurturing tactics. In fact, remarketing is considered one of the most valuable ways that content marketing can aid in improving conversion rates.
After creating and tracking your targeted materials, you will be able to study analytics and display the ad for the same service or product. Alternatively, you can also send follow-up emails related to the blog post. These are just some ways to get in front of your leads several times for similar materials.
- Dominate The Industry Using The Keywords
If you can create content based on the most competitive keywords used in your niche, you can outrank your competition on search engines like Google. In addition, if you plan your content marketing strategy well, you will develop enough materials to dominate the space for the specific keywords.
For instance, let us consider one of your services or products is already ranking the top on organic searches. If you make use of smart content marketing techniques, you can cover the rest of the search page with landing pages, white papers, and blogs so that your competition will be pushed over to the next page.
- Better Brand Affinity And Customer Loyalty
When you start providing valuable materials to your customers at the right time, it only goes on to show that you’re listening to their requirements and needs. This will make them happy, and they will always engage with you. In turn, this increases the chances of cross-selling or up-selling.
In reality, your customers need more than just services and products if you want to better your brand affinity. If you can do so, your audiences will spread the good word to your family and friends. You can easily build B2B customer loyalty by providing valuable content.
- Increase Followers On Social Media
If you provide high-quality and helpful materials to your customers, they will also follow you on social media. If you focus only on selling, your leads and customers will not follow your brand. Therefore, you also need to provide value. This is the reason behind why most B2B markets prefer to use social media as a trump card for their content marketing strategy.
You can easily reach your customers on various social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn via the right content marketing. One of the crucial ways to do this is to start a blog as the marketing hub for your business and share the content on all these social media platforms.
Additionally, you can also curate high-quality content and share them on your social media platforms. This will attract new followers to your profiles who will appreciate the value and materials you provide. You can also use various tools to help keep track of the external materials you share on these platforms.
What Is The Difference Between B2B Content Marketing and B2C Content Marketing?
| Aspect | B2B Content Marketing | B2C Content Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Main Focus | Useful, engaging, high-quality content aimed at professionals in the industry. | Primarily entertaining, brand awareness driven. |
| Balance | Must balance quality, engagement, and usefulness. | Focus on entertainment and brand promotion. |
| Example | Content aimed at solving business problems, showcasing expertise. | Red Bull’s media-rich, exhilarating experience. |
Above all else, the content for B2B needs to be useful. If your customer cannot use the actionable elements of your content to their business or work, it is a missed opportunity. However, this does not mean that you cannot publish an off-topic idea once in a while. But, your top priority should be seen as a leading resource for professionals in your industry, as a B2B content marketer.
Of course, this does not imply that the materials for the B2C strategy do not have to be useful too. However, this is not the primary or only consideration. Let us take an example of the energy drink leader, Red Bull.
The material you see on the official Red Bull website is primarily entertaining. There are many notable things happening across various media outlets to create a media-rich and exhilarating experience. This move is great for promoting brand awareness. However, it does not affect sales or leads extensively.
You can consider the same approach that marketers take when it comes to Google Search and Display networks – the Search network (B2B content) is more result- or metric-driven. On the other hand, the Display network (B2C content) is more useful for promoting brand awareness.
But, this does not mean that you can get away with forgettable, boring, or bland B2B materials. By all means, B2B marketers need to balance the three elements of adequate content marketing – high quality, engaging, and useful – much better than for B2C content marketing.
B2B Content Marketing Strategy Trends
| Trend | Description |
|---|---|
| Video Content | Engages more audiences; provides a visual showcase of the business environment. |
| Podcast | Informal, conversational content that can increase brand recognition and thought leadership. |
| Personalized Email Marketing | Customized emails to build trust and initial investment with potential business partners. |
| Co-Marketing Partnership | Collaborative marketing to extend reach and attract new partners. |
Your content marketing goals will depend on what strategies you place. With time, businesses need to implement the current trends in their business and marketing plans. Here are some trends for 2021 that we expect to see boom:
- Video Content
There is nothing that can rival the popularity of video content in business-to-consumer marketing. However, video materials are becoming increasingly crucial for business-to-business content marketing efforts as well. It has been studied that video gets higher engagement and has more chances to provide service to customers and transition potential partners through the tailored marketing funnel, which will eventually lead towards conversions.
If you can manage to curate well-crafted video content, you can easily engage with more audience than you would with a 60-page detailed document. This type of creation will provide an excuse for your business to showcase your business environment and culture to potential partners, even when they are still learning about your company’s statistics and product/service offerings.
For a B2B company, video is crucial for B2B content marketing since it can get much information across quickly. Additionally, business partners also work with companies that work hard to make their content engaging and dedicated to pushing the brand forward.
- Podcast
Similar to video, podcasts have been used primarily for the business-to-consumer space. However, it has been found that B2B marketing plans can also hugely benefit from podcasts. Fundamentally, podcasts are informal, conversational, and informative. This provides a unique convenience for businesses that want to improve their business-to-business marketing strategies.
Additionally, the investments are also quite low since you will not require expensive technicians or equipment to produce high-quality podcasts. All you need are some mics and a relatively silent office. Publishing the podcast is very easy, and you can get it listed on significant distribution channels for the best exposure.
So, what can you add to your podcast? First, remember that the introductory podcast will be all about increasing the recognition and exposure of your brand. On the rest, you can move your focus on thought leadership and trends. This can help increase conversions and aid business cooperation retention as well.
- Personalized Email Marketing
According to an expert content marketing institute, personalized email content may very well help B2B content marketing. Of course, email marketing is not a new strategy; most of our inboxes are filled with marketing emails that we have sent into the junk or simply chose to ignore. Additionally, it does take some time to create personalized emails for B2B content strategies, especially if you are trying to pitch for a specific business or creating an email funnel. However, you should know that your efforts will be worth it.
When you are creating personalized emails, you need to focus on the outreach and pitch emails. It’s where you can hit the nail on the head in regards to B2B materials since businesses are always on the lookout for tailored content. When you think about it, none of us like the exact same blanket emails that are forwarded to maybe hundreds of other strategists and businesses. However, it will definitely catch your attention if the email has been customized to show that you clearly understand the potential business partner/s and their business goals. Even if the follow-up materials are generic, this will help build initial investment and trust between you and the potential business partner.
- Co-Marketing Partnership
One of the many things that we often think about is the tendency of a business to focus inwards while marketing the business-to-business and business-to-consumer content. The main issue of these types of marketing techniques is that they cannot provide you with a reach for fulfilling the requirements for marketing campaigns.
Talking about developing a working partnership with potential partners is the best way to attract new business partners and greatly extend the reach of your marketing tactics. Additionally, it will also help in convincing other companies to join in with you. If you can provide the right marketing tactics and Content marketing ROI, it will only prove that you will take care of the potential business partner and grow together.
Final Thoughts
Related Content:
Content Marketing Tips for 2023
So, there you have it! Suppose you want to implement successful B2B content marketing tactics and strategies. In that case, you need to be involved in creating and promoting the best and useful materials produced by your expert team. Success in the B2B space also includes understanding your audiences, the content they want to consume, and how they want to consume the content, apart from producing fabulous creations.
There is a lot of work involved in creating content marketing ideas and making their word for any type of business. However, for the modern B2B company, the question is all about how affordable it is to ignore this powerful tactic.
FAQ on B2B Content Marketing:
Related Content: Guidelines to Hiring a Content Marketing Consultant
- What is B2B Content Marketing? B2B Content Marketing involves creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage a business audience, with the goal of driving profitable customer actions.
- Why is B2B Content Marketing Important? It helps in building brand awareness, generating leads, nurturing relationships, and positioning your business as an industry leader.
- How Does B2B Content Marketing Differ from B2C? B2B focuses on meeting the needs of other businesses, while B2C targets individual consumers. The content, tone, and strategies may vary accordingly.
- What Types of Content Work Best for B2B Marketing? Whitepapers, case studies, webinars, blogs, and industry reports are often effective in B2B content marketing.
- How to Measure Success in B2B Content Marketing? Key performance indicators like lead generation, engagement rates, conversion rates, and ROI can help measure success.
- Can Small Businesses Benefit from B2B Content Marketing? Yes, B2B content marketing can be tailored to fit businesses of all sizes and can be a cost-effective way to reach potential business clients.
- What are the Challenges in B2B Content Marketing? Challenges may include creating engaging content, targeting the right audience, measuring ROI, and staying updated with industry trends.
- How to Get Started with B2B Content Marketing? Start by understanding your target audience, setting clear goals, creating a content strategy, and regularly analyzing and optimizing your efforts.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!
Ready to elevate your brand and engage your audience like never before? Partner with our leading content marketing agency today, and let us craft a strategy that resonates with your unique goals.
