Before learning how to create a content marketing strategy for a B2B business, let’s see why content marketing for businesses is important. Below listed are some advantages of content marketing. These are the reasons you should invest in building a content strategy for your business.:
These benefits won’t come to you by posting once a month on your social media or creating one paid ad. Content marketing efforts need to be consistent and well-planned to yield results. And for that having a well-planned content strategy is important.
A B2B content strategy is different from a B2C content strategy. B2B buyers make more conscious decisions. You can’t sway with flashy advertisements like B2C buyers. B2B buying decisions are made after thorough research. They make decisions keeping in mind the organization’s growth rather than personal emotions. You need to make your content detailed, structured, targeted, and concise to impress B2B buyers.
1. Start by having deep knowledge about your target audience: The most important element of a content strategy for businesses is the target audience. Your target audience is the group of people who buy from you or bring benefits to your business in some way. It consists of different buyer personas. Identify them, their needs, their pain points, their preferences, etc. Creating a targeted content strategy that addresses the pain points of your audience is the most successful way of yielding positive results.
2. Decide on your core content assets and platforms: Many types of content formats can be used for your content marketing plan. These can be blogs, e-books, newsletters, videos, images, podcasts, interviews, Q&A sessions, social media posts, case studies, etc. Decide on the core formats that you want to create and the platforms that you are going to use. These platforms may depend on where your target audience is present.
3. Analyze your competitor’s marketing strategy: Your target is the same as your competitor. Analyze what strategies are working for them and what can be done better. Look into what kinds of content they are posting and what’s something they have not leveraged till now. For example, your competitor might be using blogs, videos, and social media. You can start a podcast for your target audience besides doing all those things.
4. Include guest-posting and features in your plan: Featuring in the famous B2B newsletter can be a way of increasing your reach. Blogs, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels that have already gained authority in your niche can help you gain your target audience’s trust.
5. Optimize your content for SEO: Building authority in a niche means that if someone is looking for answers related to your industry then they would refer to your content. This can be increased by making your content search engine friendly. You can optimize your content for search engines by inserting keywords and key phrases. Create meta description, headings, image alt text, title tags, etc. The priority should be posting quality content that solves the issue of the reader.
6. Make content for each part of the buyer’s journey: Identify which content fits in which stage of the buyer’s journey. Make content for the awareness stage, then lead the buyer towards content for the next stage of consideration.
7. Measure your success through metrics: The qualitative aspects like trust, authority, and brand awareness can’t be measured through metrics. But you can measure other quantitative aspects like leads, organic traffic, post views, blog views, conversion rates, search engine ranking, etc. A proper content marketing strategy when executed diligently will lead to improvement in these metrics.
Another content strategy for businesses can be promoting your content on different platforms or prioritizing link building and collaborations. Producing content is essentially important in today’s age. It is so because the options in the market are immense and B2B buyers like to do thorough research before investing their company’s money in a certain product. Without enough content on your socials and website, you’ll lag behind your competitors who are using content marketing to their advantage.
Make a calendar that shows which content format is going on which platform, on what day and time. Follow that calendar and measure the success of your content strategy monthly, quarterly and yearly. Improve upon things that are not working for you and do more of things that are working. All the best on your content marketing journey.
For a bonus here are some B2B marketing strategies that you don’t want to ignore.
