Winning Approach to B2B Content Marketing

Written by Nick Stamoulis

Content is the king message on blue backgroundWhen it comes to the B2B sector, consumers are looking for as much information about a product, service, business, or brand before making a decision as to whether to spend their money. Since the sales cycle can be rather long with B2B, the content has an even more important role – to keep brand engagement up as they move through each of the phases. This is why it’s important to have content that is designed to actually help educate them during the decision-making process. The content that is created on behalf of a business can go a long way in establishing trust with potential clients or customers.

B2Bs are investing more into content marketing, which is great, but many are still making some mistakes along the way. Content marketing is really a multi-step process and many B2Bs are missing at least one of the steps. A thorough B2B content marketing campaign includes the following steps:

Research

Skipping this step can limit the success of your content. Before you start writing it’s important to see what kind of content others in the industry are creating. Take a look at their approach and analyze what might work for your business and what wouldn’t. The content that gets shared the most and receives the most content is obviously what people want to see. Just as you would when starting a business, do some competitive research. Don’t use this information to copy a content marketing strategy, but look for opportunities where you can improve upon what is already being done. If you just post more of the same, it will be difficult to get noticed.

Create

content strategy concept handwritting on blackboardOnce you’ve decided on your topic, you need to decide what the best format for that content should be. It can be a blog post, article, white paper, eBook, guide, video, podcast, infographic, etc. Once you’ve created something that you think is worth sharing, get a second opinion and make sure to triple check for spelling or grammatical errors. Remember, this content is a representation of your business and it is important to make sure it’s the best it could be. At this stage, it’s also important to make sure that you’ve written the content in a way that will resonate with your audience. In other words, write things that people will want to read and they’ll be more likely to return to your website to read more. Over time, they could even turn into paying customers.

Post

The best place to post content isn’t necessarily on your website. To increase brand exposure it’s important to seek out opportunities on other web properties. Spend some time researching industry related sites that accept content submissions like guest blog posts. Content creation can be difficult for everyone and many bloggers supplement their blog with guest posts to keep it active. Post videos to video sharing sites like YouTube in addition to posting on your own site so that it may appear within a YouTube search. Expanding your content across the web not only improves the chances of it being seen, but also aids in link building efforts for SEO purposes.

Share

After you publish your content, you want to make sure that your audience knows that its there. There are a few ways you can do this, including announcing it in your email newsletter as well as sharing it in social media. Once the content goes live, you’ll want to monitor how well it’s doing and also see if there are any comments on it in social media or on your blog (if you have comments enabled). You don’t want to ignore comments and questions because if they are ignored it doesn’t result in a good brand experience. Be sure to share all published content with social media followers and encourage them to share it with their connections.

In order for your content marketing to really pay off, publishing and sharing new content really needs to be done on a consistent basis. By creating and sticking with a content schedule, the benefits of content marketing will increase. It could take some time before your efforts pay off, but they most certainly will with consistent effort.

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