Published 27 January 2022

Mastering Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy With These 12 Tips

Content marketing plays a crucial role in both B2B and B2C online marketing, serving as the foundation for SEO and business growth. This article shares 12 powerful strategies to enhance B2B content marketing, covering aspects such as selecting content types, organizing content effectively, understanding buyer personas, utilizing research and collaborations, leveraging audio and visual content, targeting keywords, addressing content gaps, utilizing webinars, teaching through courses, and maintaining a focused approach. Monitoring and measuring content performance are emphasized to ensure ongoing success.

12 Tips To Level Up Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Introduction

The content was, is, and always will be King. Whether it is B2B or B2C online marketing, content always matters the most. Content sets the basic foundation for SEO.

So, no matter what others say – always remember the wise words of Bill Gates “Content is a King.”

According to the Technavio report, the content marketing industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16% between 2020 and 2025.

Global Content Marketing Market 2021-2025

Source : Prnewswire

But content marketing will not remain simple anymore. Around 90% of B2B marketers are using content marketing in their overall marketing strategies today.

Thus, you have to level up your B2B content marketing strategy to stay on the top. This post will unveil 12 powerful content marketing strategies that can grow your business beyond limits.

So, let’s get started.

Is B2B Content Marketing Still Beneficial?

Yes, content marketing is still beneficial for businesses to sell their products and services to other businesses. As per 78% of B2B marketers, high-quality content can lead to successful content marketing.

You can also get in touch with a small business marketing consultant to know how content marketing can benefit your business. Based on the generic B2B marketers experience, we found B2B content marketing helpful for:

Domain Authority: Targeting certain keyphrases and keywords via your B2B content marketing strategy establishes your domain authority on those specific search results.
Organic Traffic: When Google shows your website link on the first few search results, people will click on your website. As a result, the organic traffic rate will increase for your business.
Referral Traffic: Publishing your content on high DA third-party websites with relevant links and proper CTA will drive referral traffic your way. This kind of traffic helps to establish domain authority and generate organic traffic in one go.
Shorten Customer’s Journey: A well-defined B2B content marketing strategy can seamlessly walk leads to your sales funnel, educate them, and encourage them to make a purchase. If you design content for customers, this will improve lead conversion rate dramatically.
Repurposing Content: The beauty of content is that you can repurpose or syndicate it in multiple ways. For example, you can turn your blog content into infographics, videos, or podcasts to target a larger audience base.
Timeless Content: If you include evergreen content in your content marketing pipeline, it can generate traffic and sales even after 10 years of publication. Blog posts have the largest shelf life among all other content types. However, you have to write on topics that are evergreen because trendy or news-style content has a short life.
Publish Original Research: You can use your resources to create an original research study that people can share and read for a long time. This way, traffic will constantly remain on your business site.
Cost-effective: Even if you hire a professional to create content, it is a one-time cost that can bring constant traffic. Compared to paid advertising, content is less expensive and more result-driven.

12 Tips to Level Up Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

After reading all the content marketing benefits, you must be eager to improve your B2B content marketing strategy. So, we will not hold you any longer and present you the top 12 tips to improve your B2B content marketing strategy:

Tip 1. Select Your Content Weapons

Content marketing is one of the most versatile digital marketing solutions. Businesses can incorporate content into their marketing funnel in several ways based on their goals. For example:

Newsletters: Newsletters are the perfect content type to keep your email subscribers engaged and motivated.
Blogs: Almost 77% of internet users read a blog daily. That means blogs will bring constant traffic and search engine crawlers to your website. As a result, blogging is one of the best and most powerful tools for content marketing.
Whitepapers: This type of content helps you connect with people who are interested in your products or services. That is because people who are interested in your services will only make efforts to download your whitepapers.
Case Study: Your original case studies can build credibility in your domain. And it can generate relevant backlinks and social shares.
Social Media: Posting content on social media can help to engage and keep potential leads active in the funnel. Social media content might have the shortest shelf life, but it is highly important for building brand image.

As you can see, every content type can be used for different purposes in your lead cycle. So, you simply have to select one or more content types for your marketing funnel to create a powerful B2B content marketing strategy.

Tip 2. Better Organize Your Content

The organization is a very common problem with most brands. B2B marketers keep on producing fresh content daily. But they forget to organize it in the proper way.

Due to this problem, often, old content gets buried under the new content without generating a full value. Therefore, you should first create a proper resource page on your website so readers can easily find relevant information about your brand.

You can take inspiration from Pipedrive’s resource page before organizing your content.

Source : Pipedrive

Pipedrive shares different types of content materials with their users like blogs, sales tips, CRM education, etc. So, they have created a full resource page with separate heads, which helps users to find information faster.

Organizing content will also help Google’s crawler to find and index your content material under adequate keywords.

It might be a small B2B content marketing tip, but it has a bigger impact than your imagination.

Tip 3. Work on Buyer’s Persona

To produce lead-driven content, you have to first understand your leads, aka audience. Without understanding your customers’ needs and pain points, creating content will take you nowhere.

This means you have to first create your buyer’s persona. A buyer persona is a fictional personality of your buyer. It is drawn on the basis of your preliminary market research, data about existing customers, and some assumptions.

If you keep the buyer’s persona in mind while creating content, you can personalize your content to meet your potential customers’ requirements.

It is very simple to create your buyer’s persona. Here’s how to draft a buyer’s persona:

Chalk out your buyer – who can buy your products?
Segment your buyers based on – age, income, gender, and other demographics.
Give a full profile to your buyer – define his age, job, income, and other relevant information.
Select a segment of buyers and produce content targeting their needs.

Tip 4. Back Your Content With Comprehensive Research

Buyers are attracted to numbers. When you back your content with relevant research and statistics, not only will it capture buyers’ attention, but Google will also better rank your content.

This will show Google that your content is well researched and unique, which can brighten your chances to appear in top search results. So, include some statistics and original case studies in your B2B content marketing strategy.

Now, you don’t have to conduct original studies or collect statistics to make your content unique. Instead, you can use research papers and studies conducted by other brands to increase the authenticity of your content.

However, you should always interlink the original source of the study while publishing it on your website. Also, don’t use research published by your competitors.

Smarp is a perfect example in this context. It is an employee advocacy platform based in Finland. They share a variety of blogs on their site on HR, employee development, and other related topics. In addition, Smarp often backs up their content with research and data, which adds more value to their content.

Source : Haiilo

So, you can also use data to validate your content and gain users’ trust.

Tip 5. Collaborate With Other Content Creators

Collaboration is not a new marketing strategy. Many times brands collaborate to promote their products via different mediums.

B2B marketers can collaborate with popular websites and authors in their niche to level up their content marketing strategy in the future. In fact, 62.96% of readers consider blogs with multiple others more credible.

However, it is important to collaborate with the right partner; otherwise, it can derail your entire content marketing strategy. Consider these factors while collaborating with other content producers:

Check the content tone used by the brand.
Ensure that your targeted customers are the same.
The website should not promote or sell any illegal substances.
Make sure your site has a good reputation and DA.
Importantly, it should not promote your competitors.

For example, Content Marketing Institute is a popular website about content, marketing, and other relevant topics. It allows guest authors to often share high-quality and informative content with their audience.

Guest authors sharing high-quality and informative content with their audience

Source: Contentmarketinginstitute

This helps CMI to provide a variety of content to their readers and build a community. Another sure way to get good content, and better said get that content out there is to use an SEO agency for B2B.

Tip 6. Produce Audio Content

Lately, B2C brands are exploring the power of audio content to reach their users. And it has turned out to be a great content marketing strategy for many businesses.

As you can see through this graph, podcast listenership has constantly been going up in the last few years.

Source : Pewresearch

So, you can use a content marketing strategy to connect with people who don’t read the content. You don’t even have to create new podcast content. Simply repurpose your blog content into audio format and level up your B2B content marketing strategy.

Tip 7. Produce Visual Content

Yep, audio content and video content marketing are also ruling the market.

Since Instagram and Facebook have amplified the level of video content and YouTube is already the second largest search engine after Google, there is no doubt that video is the future of content marketing.

So, you better add video content into the B2B content marketing funnel. But how?

Well, it is not that hard to create engaging video content to capture leads and then convert them. So here are a few B2B video content ideas:

Film whiteboard videos demonstrating your products and services to the viewers.
Offer tips and tricks.
Behind-the-scene videos are popular to build trust and connection with your customers.
You can tell a story of your brand and customer values.
Testimonial videos are perfect for social proofing.
Use cool animations and graphics to impress your users, etc.

If you don’t have a significant budget to produce video content, you can syndicate your older blog or audio content to shoot a simple whiteboard video on your phone.

For example, Moz has created a popular video and blog series called Moz Whiteboard Friday. In this series, they create a blog and video following it.

Source : moz

This content marketing strategy allows Moz to target two search engines, Google and YouTube, at once.

Tip 8. Target Short-Tail Keywords

Wait for a minute, short-tail keywords? Yes, you have not read wrong. We are telling B2B companies to target short-tail keywords for their blogs. The reason?

The reason is pretty simple – everyone is today chasing long-tail keyphrases. Unfortunately, if you also join the rat race, your competitors might target the short keyphrases and leave you behind in the pool of over-competitive long-tail keywords to find your way to the top.

However, we advise you to target short and long keyphrases in balance. You should create a list of all competitive keywords in your niche and make a perfect cocktail of long, short, negative, and question-based keywords.

For keyword analysis, you can use tools like Google Keywords Planner and Ubersuggest. They are free and perfect for keyword performance analysis.

Tip 9. Find Your Content Gaps

Before investing in a new B2B content marketing plan, we suggest you look at your present content. Many B2B brands are already aware of content marketing benefits and making efforts to create result-driven content. But they lack the technical knowledge to make their content shine.

Suppose you are also producing SEO-friendly content for some time now but not getting the results. Then, it’s high time you audit your content marketing strategy.

We have evaluated several B2B brands’ content marketing strategies over the years. We saw a very similar problem in most companies’ content funnel – rationalization of content.

In simpler words, companies are producing lots of educational and engaging content. But they are not creating content that can walk potential users to the end goal – purchase.

So, you should evaluate your content assets and arrange them in the right order to shorten the buyer’s journey. For example, use informative content to make aware users, engaging content to retain them, and promotional to convert them.

Tip 10. Leverage Webinars

Yes, webinars are also part of the content marketing umbrella. It is an easy and fast way to interact with your potential customers.

You can host product promotional or informative webinars to walk leads to your sales funnel. Using webinars, you can better understand what your target audience thinks and how you can better help them.

Webinars are such a powerful marketing tool for B2B businesses that Cisco has created a dedicated section for webinars. They host a series of webinars on their website that help them stay in touch with potential users.

Source : Webinar

Tip 11. Teach Your Audience

Blogs or video tutorials can inform your audience to a certain extent. You can take your B2B content marketing strategy one step ahead and create full courses to teach your audience.

For example, Canva has created an online design school for its users to learn graphic design skills using Canva itself.

Source : canva

This strategy has helped Canva in two ways –

First, they can gather the email address of potential customers
Second, they can motivate aspiring graphic designers to use Canva

This is how you kill two birds with one content strategy!

Tip 12. Keep it Simple and Clean

Finally, keep your B2B content marketing strategy simple and pointed towards an objective. Don’t overcomplicate things by implementing different strategies to your content marketing funnel.

Just select one or two content types and fully explore them. There is no need to target blogs, ebooks, videos, and podcasts altogether unless you have a full marketing team. Otherwise, target a content marketing strategy and squeeze out its complete potential.

Level Up Your B2B Content Marketing Roadmap Now!

Undoubtedly, content marketing is the best way to promote your business online within your budget. But you should not sit back ideally after putting your content to work.

In fact, your real work starts after publishing the content. You have to constantly monitor and measure your content assets’ performance. This way, you can know which content type is performing better for your business and which you can let go for now.

So, while leveling up your B2B content marketing strategy, make sure to measure results carefully.

Meanwhile, keep on following us on social networks for more insightful marketing resources.