When doing B2B business, content marketing is a fundamental strategy for the successfulness of a company. In order to gain the targets’ public attention is essential to create and promote effective contents with the aim of attracting and converting the user, despite its role. Creating high quality contents and adopting an efficient marketing strategy allows you effectively answer to the consumers’ needs and requests. Â
In an inbound marketing strategy contents play a central role with the aim of converting users into clients, whether we’re speaking of B2B or B2C business. But how do we create content marketing strategy for B2B businesses? What are the main aspects we should focus on? Let’s see them together.
Main content marketing characteristics for a B2B
A good content marketing strategy will help you out in obtaining three main objectives: obtaining a lead generation, increasing brand awareness and publics’ engagement. This strategy therefore, will allow you to attract and convert strangers and prospects into new lead, reduce customer defection and increase brand loyalty by increasing customers’ or potential customers’ relations. In addition, this strategy helps companies reaching their objectives in shorter terms, to better deal with all the various activities and to have a clearer vision of their ROI for each of the initiatives.
Keeping into mind this view, in a B2B content marketing strategy, communication plays a central role. When dealing with B2B business, many people are involved in the decisional processes and therefore this is way more articulated than when dealing with a single customer, as it can follow different paths. For this reason, B2B contents should be performant and be able to transmit competence, trustworthiness and authority. Now let’s see the main steps for building an effective B2B content marketing.
Objectives
B2B content marketing final objective is to attract and convert new users into lead with the use of specific contents. However, it is also important to pose some, easy to measure, mid-term objectives, giving us the opportunity to check back on the ongoing activities and adjust them on the basis of feedbacks.
Among the short or mid measurable objectives, we can find newsletter subscription rate, increases in brand awareness, websites’ referral traffic and social media engagement (add link) Objectives can be scheduled on a monthly base or longer, but mostly important is to check their measurability in order to correct errors of the ongoing strategies before proceeding further.
Target
In a B2B content marketing strategy, each content should be addressed to a specific subject. Therefore, our first step will be of defining our buying persona. While doing so we need to take into account their industry sector, the main problems they have do deal with, job position, from whom their choices are influenced by and where do they conduct their research. In this way we can better define the appropriate topics, tone of voice and modality.
Competitor
Analyzing the market and understanding how our competitors behave can help us a lot in defining our strategy. The type of comparisons we already do for the SEO activities can also be applied to the B2B content marketing. For example, keywords’ used by competitors can provide us a starting point for our topic and publishing timing.
Buyer’s journey
There are three milestones to follow when creating a lead generation: awareness, consideration, decision. To increase conversion of lead generation into customer we should create personalized content for each of the users.
In the awareness phase contents have the aim of intercepting the user for eventually future communications, it can be articles, infographics or short videos. When the moving to the consideration phase the main objective is to provide the user with an answer and the appropriate tools are e-books and case studies. The last step is the decisional one in which our role is to assure the customer about the purchase, the ideal type of contents for this phase can be demos or clients’ reviews.
Themes
A B2B Content marketing strategy is good when is able to answer to the target’s requests. Therefore, we need to speak about relevant themes creating long pieces of writing, which are deepened and well-articulated. These types of contents will lead the development of the following ones. In addition, the relevance and centrality of those will increase users’ navigation inside the website and decrease bounce rate. In the main column the writing should be at least 1500 words, but it can be developed in different formats and diffused with different channels in a shorter version.
Editorial calendar
Publishing timing need to be shedulded in detail when doing B2B content marketing, for this reason we always need to create an editorial calendar. In it we will coordinate roles of who writes and who takes care of the graphic and video part. This will allow us to publish, on a regular basis, interesting contents.
Data
Last, after having implemented the B2B content marketing strategy and started to publish, we need to monitor the situation through data collection. For example, how many people have read the material, how many disclosed personal information for further updates, if referral traffic has increased – are all data which help us in understanding if our strategy is effective or not and were to do ongoing adjustments.
By following all of the above steps you’ll manage to optimize your strategy and reach your business objectives in shorter times.
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