In the past few years the role of B2B content marketing in brand as well as product promotions has grown tenfold. This marketing strategy has helped a lot of businesses to increase their visibility in front of their prospective audience and generate more quality leads in return.
Moreover, it has been noticed that a B2B content marketing strategy is three times more effective than the traditional methods of outbound marketing when it comes to generating B2B leads. Also, the cost of content marketing is lesser by 62% as compared to other outbound marketing methods.
However, you will not achieve success if you go on publishing blog posts or releasing videos on YouTube randomly.
In order to grow your business you need to have a content marketing which is methodically planned and properly strategized. This is important especially in the B2B domain since it is highly competitive and more than 90% of marketers have found this method helpful.
Grow your business with the help of some of the best B2B content marketing methods that are discussed below.
Must Read: 7 Steps to Developing a Content Marketing Strategy
Determine Your Target Audience
Even before you get started with content marketing you need to understand who your ideal audience is and whom you should target. You need to identify the content expectations and needs of your target audience for coming up with the right strategy.
You can start by create a customer persona or a profile for your ideal audience. You will be able to develop a better and a more detailed client persona by collecting the data about them and their buying preferences.
In case of B2B marketing you can create these personas for the companies or businesses that you want to target. These personas should be created for the people who are in charge of making the purchase decisions and not just MDs and CEOs. The key lies in the information.
Set Clear B2B Content Marketing Campaign Goals
A B2B content marketing strategy should serve a particular purpose like growing a website traffic, increasing the search engine rankings or improving customer engagement.
You should set clear and precise goals for your content marketing campaigns as well as for your individual content pieces.
You should usually set goals that are quantifiable, if possible. For example, your goal is to get 2000 new subscribers for your email newsletter in the next 6 months. Also, when you are setting a goal, make sure that they are realistic as well as effective for your marketing strategy.
Explore Content Ideas
With a target audience as well as goals in your mind, you can focus on researching effective content ideas for your B2B content marketing campaign.
The research can be a simple method like looking up to your competitors and determining what they are doing or finding keywords for using them in your blogs.
Blogging Isn’t Enough
You should never place all your eggs in a single basket if you want to run a successful B2B content marketing campaign. You should be able to divide your efforts and go beyond blogging for your content marketing requirements.
Although the B2B blogging is very effective, it is not the only solution. If you want to get the most out of your strategy you need to leverage B2B content marketing in ways that your competitors are not doing it instead of just publishing regular blogs.
You need to continuously update your approach to B2B content marketing because it is an ever-evolving landscape. Even if blogging is a necessity, you need to build and add more value by providing your customers with other forms of content simultaneously.
Personalize the Content
Your customers will always appreciate your efforts of delivering a personalized experience, regardless of your business niche.
No one wants to be kept in a general category, especially not your audience. They need to feel appreciated and special and personalizing your content is a way of delivering this feeling.
This is why you need to focus your efforts in developing and sharing your personalized content with the customers and prospects. This will help you stand out from your competitors and develop a stronger relationship with your audience.
Must Read: 6 Best Strategies for Targeted Lead Generation
When you personalize the content properly you can come up with a content which is not only interesting but also addresses the problems of your customers, touches the pain points and solves them.
You can move your B2B content marketing game ahead with the help of audience data for figuring out how to deliver personalized content.
Cross Pollination
When you are creating content, it is easy for you to lose focus on the ways to promote the content that you are working on. But there are a lot of tools ready at your disposal that you can use for leveraging to that end.
There are also some options which we can use. The most crucial of which is guest post. Guest post articles are one of the most beneficial means for establishing your thought leadership and promoting your business brand.
Cross pollination is required for your content to be placed in front of more prospects and establish your business authority. It also helps your business to create an online presence.
One more option that you can use is the expert roundup posts. This is an amplified type of guest posting where a lot of industry experts give their opinions in a single post. You can ask them to talk about what your product offers or answer other industry questions.
Track and Optimize the Metrics
You cannot simply start or end your B2B content marketing efforts because it is a continuous procedure that requires high level of regular experimentation. This is why you should be alert about how your marketing efforts are paying off.
You can understand your audience in a better way by defining the metrics and tracking them. This can help you to learn more about how your content pieces are performing. Once you know what is working and what isn’t you can optimize your B2B content marketing techniques.
Depending on your business niche you might need either a full planning and implementing or only a few tweaks to your B2B content marketing campaign.
