Content Marketing Benefits & Challenges For B2B Businesses In 2022 – Expert Insights

Introduction

In the B2B space, content marketing is a set of strategies to generate leads, engage with customers, and retain existing customers while distributing relevant content to your target audience.

Several content formats can be used by B2B brands to demonstrate the subject matter expertise they have, to inform, inspire, and engage prospective buyers while helping them resolve their pain points. Empathy is the basis for B2B content marketing, which is to instill trust in the minds of consumers.

Marketing professionals should be aware of a few content marketing statistics.

– 60% of B2B marketers measure success with web traffic, while 51% use sales lead quality, and 45% use social media sharing.

– 55% of B2B organizations successful at content marketing measure the ROI of their efforts

– For B2B organizations, the average percentage of total marketing budget spent on content marketing is 26%

– 70% of B2B marketers always or frequently prioritize delivering content quality over content quantity

In this article, we’ve got together 15 Top Marketing Experts from across the globe who share their views and insights on “Content Marketing benefits and challenges for B2B businesses in 2022”

Here’s Our Expert Panel

#1 Mac Wheeler

B2B content marketing enables lead nurturing through recognizable authority in the marketplace.

Author Bio

A content marketer with over 15 years of experience working at the sharp end of the lead funnel. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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#2 Christoph Trappe

The biggest benefit of content marketing truly is to establish your company and your leaders as thought leaders. Share content that’s relevant with your target prospects and be top of mind when they need help which might not be today. It’s a long-term play but it’s also an ongoing play for relationships.

Author Bio

Christoph Trappe is a top global content marketer, author and podcaster and leads content strategy at voxpopme.com. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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#3 Henry Martin

B2B digital marketing opportunities & challenges for companies in the marine space

Author Bio

I work as a digital marketing specialist, specifically within the marine/ maritime space. I have experience working in the Communications department at the International Maritime Organisation and experience of helping many marine companies such as Maritec (part of CTI Group), Bogerd Martin & Plastic Free Falmouth market themselves online. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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#4 Katie Thompson

B2B businesses will benefit from a more omni-channel approach this year, particularly as the channels that initially attracted Generation Zs become more widespread. Recruitment will be challenging, so B2B marketers may have to rely more on freelances for the guaranteed expertise and security they need to deliver their campaigns.

Author Bio

Katie Thompson is the founder of Katie Lingo, a freelance outsourced content marketing service for agencies. Katie founded Katie Lingo in 2016 while working for a digital marketing agency. Prior to this, Katie earned a diploma in journalism with the National Council for the Training of Journalists, which inspired her to go freelance. You can Connect With her on LinkedIn.

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#5 Julia McCoy

Content marketing has become more important than ever. Over 7 billion searches are happening on Google DAILY. Creating content that gets found and read by your ideal clients is critical to building presence and trust. Yet, more and more brands are missing out on the unsexy parts of content that simply put, work: their content fundamentals, and content consistency. I’m consistently amazed at how many miss out on these and ditch tried-and-true in favour of the flashy, which will only get you so far. First, content fundamentals are often overlooked; but it’s the fundamentals that get you far once you implement consistent marketing. Do you have your position in the marketplace clearly identified? Are you serving one clear market? Is the transformation in your offer/services stated in a way that brings your clients in like a magnet? Next, never underestimate that one quality/blog a week and what it will do for your website traffic. In short, this is a call-to-action for more B2Bs and B2Cs alike to get back to the BASICS with their content marketing, to see massive success in the long run.

Author Bio

Julia McCoy is an entrepreneur, author, and a leading strategist around creating exceptional content and brand presence that lasts online. At 19 years old, in 2011, she used her last $75 to build a 7-figure agency, Express Writers, which she grew to $5M and sold ten years later. You can connect with her on Twitter.

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#6 Anthony Gaenzle

One of the biggest challenges businesses will face in 2022 is meeting the content demands of their audience.

Content marketing is powerful. There’s no doubt. Content should be the centre of every business’ marketing strategy. But, with consumers’ increasing demands for more complex, high-quality content, and for brands to be consistently engaged, it becomes quite challenging to keep up.

Technology will play a key role in allowing brands to keep up with the demand for quality content and to continue to thrive in an increasingly complex digital world.

Tools like Jarvis AI to help draft content more quickly. Grammarly to ensure the quality of your content and eliminate some of the lengthy proofreading processes. Automation tools to pre-craft messages and send them at the best times. And tools like Trello to build out content calendars and stay on track.

The most successful brands will leverage the power of these technologies in their content marketing processes.

Author Bio

Anthony is CEO and Founder of Gaenzle Marketing. He is a two-time published author and digital marketing influencer. He has helped brands both large and small grow and thrive across multiple industries through strategic marketing campaigns and leveraging a powerful network of influencers. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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#7 Alisa Meredith

Content marketing is one of the best ways to educate your audience and potential customers, helping them solve a problem that ultimately encourages them to try your solution, and that hasn’t changed. The trouble now is that everyone has figured that out! And some publishers are so well established that newcomers (even those with exceptional content) have trouble getting any eyes on their content. This requires a creative approach that combines community, personal and company branding, and clever SEO strategies such as the Surround Sound Marketing Strategy. It’s no longer feasible to “not build your home on rented land.” We need to build our “homes” where the people are first, and then also get them to our sites and onto our email lists.

Author Bio

Alisa is the Sr Product Marketing Manager at Semrush where she helps agencies offer new services to help their clients grow. She’s also a huge Pinterest nerd from way back and one of the first “Pinterest Pioneers” charged with helping people make the most of their Pinterest marketing. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#8 Leah Presser

Many marketing dynamics continually evolve. One element never changes: Content that customers feel is relevant to them will help you gain attention, trust, and loyalty. Irrelevant content, no matter how well crafted or well placed, will be ignored.

McKinsey writes that two-thirds of B2B buyers now rely on digital and remote channels throughout their buying journey, with 35% willing to spend $500,000 or more in a single online transaction (up from 27% in February 2021), and 77% ready to pay $50,000 or more.

Meanwhile, 70% of B2B marketers are adopting an always-on digital engagement strategy in 2022, a Forrester analysis found, and marketers are increasingly using autonomous or automated solutions to tailor their online engagements. Yet, 75% of those automated digital efforts won’t meet their ROI goals.

Why? Because marketers don’t know enough about their customers.

Knowing your customers will always matter most. Talk to your customers and prospects. What are their responsibilities? What are their goals? What do they need to succeed? How does a normal day go? What issues arise? How do they find solutions? What do they ask? Listen closely.

Then create content relevant to their concerns, needs, and desires. Your products and services take a back seat in the stories you tell. Your organization serves in a supporting role only—a helpful guide who appears exactly when needed and then gets out of the way immediately.

Prospects and customers who discover useful solutions, boost their knowledge, and enjoy exploring fresh ideas in your content will always be much more likely to return and stay.

Author Bio

Leah Presser specializes in writing marketing content that helps legal tech vendors gain attention and site traffic, establish trust and credibility, and nurture prospects on their buying journey. See how she can help optimize your marketing efforts with well-researched, meaningful short and long-form content pieces at https://leahpresser.com. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#9 Dana Herra

Content marketing continues to be the most powerful way to build brand authority and trust among customers. It’s a long play – you will invest a lot of months and what feels like a lot of money before you start seeing returns. It’s like driving a tank – it takes a lot of energy to start moving, but once it’s got momentum it’s virtually unstoppable.

Unfortunately, content mills are at their peak. That means there are a lot of players churning out tons of fluffy, useless content. To be heard above the noise, successful content plans need to step up the quality of what they’re presenting and the entertainment value of how they’re presenting it.

Author Bio

Dana Herra is on a mission to rescue audiences from being bored to death by B2B content. She gets businesses off the hamster wheel of churning out content that doesn’t go anywhere and shows them how to get more mileage out of every content idea. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#10 Liam Carnahan

In 2022, your content marketing strategy must be centred around customer service. Ask your customer service team what questions they are being asked every day, what frustrations and anxieties they are hearing from people. Your content should be focused on answering these questions, which in turn will help you win over new converts and retain your customers longer.

Author Bio

Liam Carnahan is an SEO and content strategist, and the founder of Inkwell Content. He uses smart SEO to help businesses bring in the right audience, and clever content to delight them once they arrive. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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#11 Jolene Roderick

The benefits of content marketing for B2B businesses are vast and can be applied in many different ways. The main challenge is creating engaging, original material that will interest potential customers or clients on a deep level – but when done correctly this strategy has proven itself time after again!

Because the marketing channels utilizing content marketing are numerous across all industry verticals, it’s important to understand the different formats to present the content in.

For instance, Instagram recently announced that they will discontinue IGTV as a feature, which was originally developed to compete in the vertical video content creation space. Not enough people used it because they didn’t know how to. It’s a shame because the pro was that you could create a clickable hyperlink in IGTV descriptions which was a major win for those with under 10,000 followers.

Author Bio

Jolene Roderick is an engaging, intelligent, and profoundly relevant digital marketer, content creator, and social media manager who has begun to explode onto the marketing scene. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#12 Meagan Shelley

It’s becoming a temptation to use writing as a filler for the content ‘noise’ that’s so prevalent in the industry. But content shouldn’t be just about hitting benchmarks and filling space. More than ever, your B2B clients need to see value in the writing you produce, or they’ll promptly go elsewhere. In 2022, companies need to capitalize on their unique vertical. What content can you produce that nobody else can? It’s no longer about shouting the loudest; it’s about producing nothing but the best.

Author Bio

Meagan Shelley is a professional writer in the central Virginia area. She has written for clients in more than 5 countries, and has worked in several capacities for Fortune 1000 companies. When she’s not writing, she’s likely gardening, baking, or on the occasional thru-hike. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#13 Erika Taylor Montgomery

The benefit of content marketing is that it’s the best and most cost-effective way to reach a potentially wide organic audience and there are many methodologies to choose from, from social media and email marketing to podcasting and blogging and more. Two of the biggest content marketing challenges are inconsistent and uncoordinated content production and how to determine the ROI of your efforts.

Author Bio

Erika is the CEO and founder of Three Girls Media, Inc. (www.ThreeGirlsMedia.com), a full-service marketing and public relations agency. She has over 35 years of experience in media, marketing and publicity. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#14 Lisa Manyon

Businesses are searching for ways to be more authentic in their messaging. One of the biggest challenges is that many techniques that are taught focus on pain points and this approach tends to perpetuate buyer’s remorse, chargebacks, and return rates. Instead, businesses can flip the script to focus on PASSION Points by applying the values-based “Challenge. Solution. Invitation. ™ communication framework to create marketing messages with integrity. It’s time to unlearn antiquated, pushy techniques and energetically align messages to get better results.

Author Bio

Lisa Manyon is the Business Marketing Architect and President of Write On Creative®. Serving mission-driven entrepreneurs, Lisa pioneered the values-based “Challenge. Solution. Invitation™.” communication framework to create marketing messages with integrity by focusing on PASSION points. Her marketing strategies are known to create million-dollar results. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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#15 Rosalyn Page

There are numerous challenges. Foremost is managing the need to develop personalisation at scale while negotiating the customer and regulatory demand for privacy protections. Staying in touch with changing technologies and digital touchpoints, in particular determining the opportunities in the new plays of metaverse, NFTs and Web3. Management at the Covid-19 pandemic continues to play out at different speeds around the world and what that means for managing people and changing customer habits and demands. Innovating within marketing itself and pushing the marketing remit closer to all parts of the organization to achieve genuine customer centredness. Content marketing provides many opportunities and benefits to quickly develop appropriate brand narratives, connect with customers and share brand thought leadership across the challenges landscape of 2022 and beyond.

Author Bio

Connect with Rosalyn Page on LinkedIn.