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Content Marketing 2021

Why is Content Marketing Important for B2B?

Why is Content Marketing Important for B2B?

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When you think about B2B marketing, sometimes you may forget that you are still engaging people who use search engines such as Google. These are the same people who use search engines to discover a given topic or news, locate the closest location of a particular store, check the score of various games, or get information.

It is crucial to understand that B2B buyers are looking for information on services or products online, just like other customers. Also, consider that less than 20 percent of all companies and businesses think of legacy relationships as a factor when they purchase services and products for their enterprise digitally. According to Content Marketing Institute‘s 2021 report, just 43% of successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. B2B technology and software marketers have to ensure that the services and products of their brand are easily visible online. To achieve this, you need to focus on establishing a strong and robust content marketing strategy.

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B (Business to Business)

B2B content marketing is simply defined as the process of using content to expand the target audience of your audience, develop and strengthen brand affinity, and finally drive sales and leads by engaging other businesses. The major difference between B2B content marketing and other forms is that it is specifically for businesses. It doesn’t deal with consumer-facing content.

How is B2B Content Marketing Different from B2C Content Marketing?

B2B content needs to be completely useful above all else. Your primary target is to ensure that your readers can recognize the actionable elements of your content. Your target audience needs to identify what needs to be done as a business. It does not mean that you need to publish only relevant business-related content. Some 49% of companies outsource their content marketing because they don’t have the time, expertise, or resources to manage their strategy in-house. You can outsource your content marketing strategies and come up with a wide range of on-demand talent to help you produce your content. This means that you get curated content without having to worry about the technicalities that go into developing it.

You can put some odd interesting off-topic pieces now and then, but a B2B content marketing strategy demands that your brand be seen as a leading and renowned resource for professionals. Not only will it help in expanding your clientele, but it enables you to gain a monopoly in your industry. Of course, this does not mean that B2C content cannot be professional, useful, and to the point, but it is not the primary factor.

Benefits of B2B Content Marketing

B2B content marketing

Showcase Your Intricate Services or Products in a Digestible Manner

B2B content marketing lets you showcase your intricate services or products on your website. Most websites have very little content in their fundamental products and services. While the services and products pages are very necessary but they also need to be the starting point where the B2B content marketing strategy begins. Each product and service on your website is committed to the pages of your website, and the associated keywords add up to help clients seeing the bigger picture.

If you are thinking about expanding your business beyond just a services page or a sales-heavy product, you should start by researching what it is that your customers are exactly looking for. You need to understand your prospects and customers. To achieve this, you can create buyer personas, interviews, conduct keyword research that correlates web searches to your customers, and interact with your clients through social media.

Once you start understanding your target audience in and out, you can start by creating relevant whitepapers, videos, webinars, infographics, blog posts, among others. All the content you showcase needs to break down each benefit of your services and products in more significant and more targeted details.

You Can Target Particular Segments of Your Target Audience

When you opt for a B2B content marketing strategy to showcase your services and products, you need to understand what your buyers need. Their needs and requirements depend on their location, industry, and size of the organization. These factors will help you create a dynamic and versatile target audience profile. This means that your services will be better served with a B2B content marketing strategy that provides different offerings for a multitude of buyers.

Content marketing helps businesses in initiating a conversation with a plethora of clients on a granular level. Forrester reports that 92 percent of B2B purchases start with search, and B2B buyers are demanding personalized experiences. You can use a B2B content marketing strategy in creating collateral that helps your business in appealing to specific segments of your target audience. This will help you in showing your prospective clientele that your organization is familiar with the complexities of the business world and aims to create effective and practical solutions that are scalable and customizable.

Achieve Enhanced Search Engine Visibility for Numerous Keyword Targets

You can use B2B content marketing strategies to enhance the visibility of your business. Your products and services will most probably focus on a specific area. For example, let’s say that your company deals with marketing automation software mainly. This means that you will build your website around marketing automation. “Marketing automation” will be the core keyword of your website. In this case, this keyword provides you with a solid starting point. As you keep advancing your B2B content marketing strategy, it is essential to focus on creating content that can be consumed by customers. Your content needs to be engaging for your prospects who might be looking for a solution in your industry. By designing your content around the problems you are trying to solve, you can offer more specified solutions. This also provides you a great way to use different keywords and phrases that can help your customers in discovering your website.

You can also try a number of combinations that are related to the central topic of your website. For instance, if you search for keywords and popular phrases related to marketing automation, you will find “what is marketing automation.” You can also see that this phrase has nearly 1000 searches every month. This means that by incorporating this phrase on your website, you are adding content that answers this question. However, if you don’t add any relevant content on your website that deals with this question, you are essentially missing out on a lot of opportunities that can drive your brand awareness. This can also help in generating leads and boosting future sales.

Capture and Generate Useful and High-Quality Leads

B2B Marketing Vector

The final goal of any organization is to generate revenue and to build profits. To be profitable, all your marketing efforts need to be directed towards engaging prospective clients. Your efforts and actions, such as B2B content marketing strategies, need to generate leads that can offer you real business opportunities. At the beginning of your B2B content marketing strategy, it is essential that you create different kinds of content. Some of these can be case studies, reports, blogs, etc., and determine what appeals to your target audience. Once you grab the attention of your audience, your content needs to engage with the readers and motivate them to take action. You will define what the end goal of your B2B content marketing strategy is. This end goal will determine what action you want your clients to take after engaging with your content. This action may be requesting a quote, call-to-action button, or to sign up on a contact form.

When you start by creating your assets, such as content, you will think about various ways in which you can “pull-in” leads. For instance, when you create free content marketing assets such as case studies, blogs, you can also think about placing some of the more extensive assets behind certain lead generation forms. Once you get this content, you can link it to various relevant sections across your website. You can also place these forms at the bottom of pages that are popular and get heavy traffic. This will enable your audience to quickly navigate to relevant sections and take action just after they have consumed some relevant content.

Once you start to understand what drives your most qualified leads, you can use this data to refine your B2B content marketing strategies. This will help you in finally coming up with a strategy that is very effective for your target audience and convert more and more prospective customers into paying clients.

Conclusion

B2B Content Marketing is an excellent way for businesses to generate valuable leads. By incorporating this into your existing marketing strategy, you can enhance the overall experience of your target audience. Ideally, you should start by defining the B2B content marketing strategy that you need for your business and develop relevant content to pitch your services and products. It would help if you also focused on incorporating popular keywords and other marketing techniques to enhance the visibility of your website. Once your marketing strategy is in place, you need to keep an eye on how each section of your website is performing, which sections are getting the most traffic, and keep refining your strategies as you go.

 

Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing?

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These days, traditional, outbound marketing strategies are not as effective in converting your audience as they used to be. Outbound marketing strategies are anything that interrupts your audience in order to resonate with them.

42% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing. Nowadays, there is a shift in the trends of reaching your audience. Target audience is known to feel more partial towards inbound marketing strategies. A popular inbound marketing strategy is to create a narrative for your audience. Brands that use content to tell a story ensure that their content is engaging, authentic, and tailor-made for their audience. Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs. 2.5%)

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing stands for an extensive process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content for your target audience. Content marketing has been known to boost factors such as audience loyalty, interactions, reach, sales, and brand awareness. Quality content is primarily needed in all forms of marketing. We are moving towards a highly digitized age where sound content marketing strategies are a necessity in this era. 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing can help your organization achieve the following goals:

Content

  • Educating your prospects and leads about the services and products you offer
  • Boost your conversion rates
  • Build long-term relationships with your business and customers that result in enhanced loyalty
  • Show your target audience how your services and products can solve the challenges they face in your field of expertise
  • Creating a sense of community for your brand with a loyal audience

Types of Content Marketing

There are numerous types of content marketing strategies that you may incorporate into your brand. Some of the most common ones are:

Social Media 

There are over 3.6 billion global social media users. It doesn’t come as a surprise that businesses choose to market their content on social media. Platforms such as Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, can help you create and share various kinds of content easily, such as images, videos, stories, polls, and blogs.

Infographic 

Infographics are a data type that helps you share content, data, and information in a graphic and easy-to-understand format. With a mixture of clear words, brief statements, and simple images, Infographics are a very popular way to communicate your content effectively. Infographics can help you distill down a complex or educational topic for all audience members to understand. Generally, Infographics are vertically long graphics that include tables, graphs, charts and statistics, and images.

Blog 

Blogs are a predominant type of inbound content. They help you add creativity in terms of their topic and purpose. With a simple blog, you can quickly promote other external and internal content, other blog articles using social share buttons, links and integrate product information. 57% of marketers reported custom content was their top marketing priority for 2014. In fact, 78% of consumers will trust your brand if you create more customized content.

According to “The State of Content Marketing 2020 Global Report by SEMRUSH”, 92 percent of global content marketing was based on blogs. Businesses using blogs have received about 95 percent more links to their website and have over 400 percent more pages indexed by search engines. Also, blogs are a highly cost-effective way of attracting customers through marketing as blogs require smaller teams and smaller budgets to reach out to the target audience.

Podcast 

A 2020 survey found that 49% of 12-to-32-year-olds in the U.S. had listened to a podcast within the last month, with an average of six listening hours a week. This study justifies the fact that numerous media outlets and businesses are now creating and sharing their podcasts. While podcasts haven’t penetrated as much market as blogs and video content has, they are still lucrative for many individuals from the business and digital marketing communities. Podcasts support a lot of creativity in terms of the topic of choice. You can also determine other factors associated with the podcast, like the length of the episodes, the platforms that will advertise your podcast, the guest speaker, and the cadence of episodes. A well-planned podcast series can be created quickly and gain a massive reach if distributed through popular podcast networks.

Video 

According to Wyzowl’s research, 69% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a brand’s product or service through video. Video marketing can also help your brand build a relationship with the audience members, improve ROI, and boost conversions. You can choose to share your video content on your website, the website of a co-marketer, landing pages, or various social media platforms. Although videos can be time-consuming and expensive to create, they have a high engagement rate with the viewers and generally leaves them asking for more content.

Paid Ads 

Paid ads can boost the audience of your business. They are a great way of marketing that helps you in positioning yourself precisely to all the platforms you want your content to be seen. Paid ads can be especially beneficial when they are paired with other kinds of inbound marketing. There are many platforms that allow you to share paid ads, such as on sponsored content, banners, landing pages, and social media.

Why should you opt for content marketing?

A typical customer buying cycle to convert your target audience into a customer consists of primarily four steps:

  1. Awareness
  2. Research
  3. Consideration
  4. Buying

Traditional or outbound forms of marketing can help you manage the consideration and buying parts of the cycle. However, to tap into the awareness and research stages, you need to employ inbound marketing strategies such as content marketing.

Inbound marketing strategies are known to allow you to put the information out there. You can provide detailed insights and information to your prospective customers, essentially building your brand’s image online. When you make use of this form of marketing where you control what your audience knows about your products, your target audience starts to look for you. In such cases, you don’t require a high-pressure sales tactic for your business.

Content marketing can also support your existing digital marketing strategy positively by providing engaging content. You can use content in different forms to engage your target audience on multiple platforms in synchronization to maximize your ROI.

The role of SEO in Content Marketing

SEO or search engine optimization works in sync with content marketing strategies. This fact is evident by the 7th most asked question on Google in 2020 – “What is content marketing in SEO.”

While search engines are introducing more and more complicated algorithms typically designed to identify and deliver high-quality content to users, there is an increased online competition among content creators. Content creators and marketers need to maximize their efforts to generate and spread valuable and meaningful content into the ever-growing sea of information called the internet. Unique content that is curated with the latest digital marketing techniques needs to be marketed to your target audience to attract customers. Search Engine Optimization or SEO can effectively help in making your content more visible to your prospective audience. SEO is one of the highest performing strategies for content marketing. It helps brands in optimizing the sales cycle of the target audience.

Conclusion

Marketing strategies are continually growing in numbers and types. More and more organizations around the world are leveraging content marketing as a cost-effective way to generate leads, increase ROI and monopolize their industry. Your brand needs to employ a mixture of tools and techniques to help you maximize the immense potential of content marketing. Some skills that you can employ to make your content marketing strategy seamless are editing, research, email marketing, automation, analytics, social media management, and most importantly, SEO.