B2B Content Marketing: Why Is It Essential And How To Do It?

Every website offers content with the aim of engaging with its target audience.

However, the target audience varies depending on the nature of the business, and not every web content directly targets consumers as its audience.

Many websites create high quality content to draw attention from other businesses.

And there comes the concept of B2B marketing content.

This article shall discuss the importance of B2B content marketing and the best practices for implementing it.

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B content marketing is the method of creating and distributing content targeting other businesses to increase traffic, boost brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately gain a higher conversion rate. 

What Are The Most Popular Formats For B2B Content?

Following are the most popular formats for B2B marketing content,

1. Blog Posts / Articles
2. Reviews
3. Product Descriptions
4. Videos / Webinars
5. Case Studies

However, white papers, templates, and podcasts are also gaining popularity among B2B content marketers.

An ideal B2B marketing content strategy should be designed around the needs and goals of the target business.

Why Is Content Marketing Essential For B2B Business?

B2B content marketing does not demand a massive investment like advertising or organizing a marketing event. 

You only need to bear the cost of maintaining a team of good in-house writers (unless you hire freelance writers) and subscriptions to content-creating tools.

That is why content marketing offers a high return on investment (ROI) to B2B businesses. Moreover, top-notch content has a long life span and can deliver results for years to come.

Creating valuable content for your target business can yield the following benefits,

1. Achieve higher rankings in SERPs that help you draw organic traffic to your website.
2. Increase the online presence of your brand by social media shares.
3. Acquire high-quality backlinks to improve your SEO.
4. Earn topical authority in your industry.
5. Earn the trust of your customers.
6. Educate your leads about your brand.

B2B content marketing is one of the most productive means of inbound marketing that naturally generates leads.

What Are The Best Practices For B2B Content Marketing?

Now that you know why content marketing is essential for your B2B businesses, you must be eager to know how to implement a successful B2B content marketing strategy.

This section will discuss the best practices for B2B content marketing,

Know Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is essential before creating any content.

As B2B content marketing aims for attention from other businesses, knowing your target audience becomes one of the most essential parts of your content marketing strategy for B2B.

B2B content strategy targets the decision makers of those business houses who will finally buy your product or service.

You must know that section of your target audience and their buyer persona to curate appealing content for them.

Conduct A Content Audit

Content audit is the method of analyzing your existing content. It helps you discover improvement opportunities and guides your B2B content marketing strategy.

Revamping your old content is necessary for the following reasons,

1. It reveals the untapped potential of your existing content.
2. Content updation requires less effort than creating new content.
3. A poor-quality existing content can create a bad user experience and damage your brand’s reputation.
4. If your website has a lump sum of thin content, it can harm your SERP rankings. 

You must select a reliable tool that can provide valuable tips to improve the performance of your existing content.

RankWatch’s on-page SEO audit tool can suggest ideas for improving your existing content.

The tool provides an SEO IQ score based on the entered target keyword, depicting how it affects your site’s overall SEO health.

The tool also shows the keyword usage in different parts of your content and suggests if any changes are required.

You can use these suggestions to boost the performance of your existing content and achieve a better ranking in search engines.

Create Content For All Stages Of Marketing Funnel

You can create effective marketing content only when you understand the customer journey.

Understanding the customer journey becomes more complex in the case of B2B marketing, as you need to penetrate big houses instead of direct consumers.

A content marketing funnel can help you understand the B2B customer journey and plan your B2B content strategy accordingly.

The shape of a funnel describes how the customer journey narrows down towards a purchase.

The content marketing funnel has three parts,

Top of the funnel (TOFU) – TOFU content creates awareness among your target audience about your problem-solving capabilities.

Middle of the funnel (MOFU) – MOFU content educates your audience about your brand and generates leads when your target audience considers your brand as a solution.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) – BOFU content plays the most vital role as it finally converts leads into loyal customers.

Publish Various B2B Content

You must publish various types of content for B2B marketing. It will help you target various business niches with varied needs and priorities. 

Moreover, creating content in different formats allows you to tap different distribution channels.

For example, if you want to penetrate distribution channels like Apple Podcast or Spotify, you must design podcast content.

On the other hand, creating video content may help you tap YouTube users.

If you are worried about creating new content separately for each distribution channel, you must consider content repurposing.

That helps you use your existing content in different formats, which is way easier and faster than creating fresh content from scratch. 

Earn Topical Authority

If you can earn topical authority in your business niche, the audience starts trusting your brand as a reliable source of information.

To earn topical authority, first, you must create high-quality pillar content on a relevant topic your audience is searching for (your parent keyword).

Next, you must perform keyword research to find organic and long-tail keywords related to your parent keyword.

You can choose a free keyword research tool like RankWatch to find those relevant keywords.

Once you enter your parent keyword and hit enter, the tool suggests a list of related keywords.

It also shows each keyword’s search volume, cost-per-click, and difficulty level (competition).

You can choose keywords with moderate competition and search volume to create cluster content on those topics.

Next, you need to hyperlink your cluster pages with your pillar content. Topic clustering helps you gain topical authority in your niche with time.

However, you need to ensure the following to find trending content ideas,

1. Keep yourself updated about the latest industry trends and news.
2. Read conversations across various channels on topics related to your niche.
3. Try to create relationships with influencers in your niche.

Implement Effective Content Distribution Strategy

The online visibility of your content depends on your content distribution strategy. 

A successful distribution strategy of content marketing for B2B businesses ensures that your content reaches your target audience.

The following are the most effective channels for content distribution,

Blog Posts – Creating top-notch content in the form of blog posts or articles is one of the most productive ways to bring more organic traffic to your website.

White Papers, e-books, and Reports – These can be effective distribution channels to create brand awareness and elaborate your products or services to your target audience.

Podcasts – Podcasts can help you tap user bases across channels like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Email marketing – Email marketing helps you to be in contact with your existing customers and tap prospective leads. You can send newsletters, links to your most valuable content, and new campaigns to them via email.

Videos – Creating high-quality videos can allow you to target an audience using channels like YouTube.

Thought Leadership – Gaining topical authority helps you showcase your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Infographics – Infographics make content marketing for B2B businesses easier by offering easy-to-understand visual content to explain complex information to your target audience.

How-to Guides – Creating step-by-step how-to guides for using your products or services helps you convince your target audience and generate prospective leads.

Social Media Posts – Sharing your content across various social media channels helps you earn more brand recognition.

Case Studies – Publishing case studies helps you earn the trust of your target audience.

Client Profiles – Showcasing your existing client profiles creates reliability among your targeted businesses.

Examples Of Content Marketing in B2B Business

This section will discuss two successful B2B content marketing examples using different distribution channels.

Example-1: Thought Leadership 

Regarding insights from industry experts and thorough analysis reports of various industries, Deloitte is considered a thought leader internationally.

If you visit Deloitte’s ‘Insights’ page, you will easily understand why they are considered a thought leader.

The page offers tons of valuable blogs on a wide range of topics.

The podcast section of the Deloitte Insights page ensures that more users are engaged on the page.

However, they are most famous for offering detailed survey reports related to various industries.

Example-2: Social Media Posts

Using social media posts as a distribution channel is gaining popularity in B2B content marketing.

A humorous Instagram post by IBM during the U.S Open Tennis Championship to promote their new mobile application for tracking and analyzing tennis matches is an excellent example of leveraging social media platforms for B2B content marketing.

Conclusion

B2B content marketing is a long-term game. 

B2B content marketing strategies yield fruitful results when you know,

1. Who is your target audience?
2. What content do you need to design?
3. Why are you creating that content?
4. When and where to publish the content?

You must ensure that you offer various formats of B2B marketing content like blog posts, articles, social media posts, case studies, reviews, product descriptions, podcasts, videos, etc., to tap audiences across various distribution channels.

A successful B2B content marketing strategy can pay you back a high return on investment due to the low investment it requires.