Your Guide to B2B Content Marketing

“Content is King!” You’ll hear that saying repeatedly — however, your B2B marketing team must understand that not all content is created equal. A B2B content marketing strategy is quite different from the typical B2C content marketing strategy due to the vast difference between audience members.

Before diving into building an effective B2B content marketing strategy, it’s essential to take a moment to define what B2B content marketing is and why it’s so different from B2C content marketing.

Defining B2B Content Marketing

B2B content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating, publishing, and distributing content to a carefully defined targeted audience. This strategy becomes vital in the B2B sphere because you are no longer speaking to general consumers. Instead, your primary audience is decision-makers in the business world looking for solutions to help them reach their own audience (likely those in the B2C community).

What Sets B2B Content Marketing Apart from B2C Content Marketing?

When many marketers hear the term “content marketing,” they don’t realize just how different B2B and B2C content marketing really is. When comparing the two, it’s vital to understand that one is speaking specifically to those in the business world, while the other is speaking directly to consumers.

Business-to-Business (B2B) content is more educational in nature and tends to speak to a much narrower audience, whereas a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) audience can be quite broad.

B2C Content Marketing Example

A great example of a B2C brand is Walmart. They cater to a wide variety of consumers, and therefore, their content tends to be more laidback and conversational.

In one of their most recent posts to their corporate blog, they decide to highlight their various gardening departments by talking about the importance of pollinators and why they’ve decided to roll out more pollinator-friendly plants in their stores.

While this post is educational in nature, it still speaks directly to consumers and encourages them to get their garden started by visiting their nearest Walmart store and picking up their own crop of pollinator-friendly plants.

This content can apply to such a wide variety of individuals, including:

• Conservationists
• Home gardeners
• Educators
• Environmentalists
• Those interested in agriculture

B2B Content Marketing Example

When it comes to a B2B audience, it is vital that marketing teams cut down their focus quite a bit. Again, the goal is to reach a very strictly defined group of people. An excellent example of a B2B brand that may target a similar yet more defined audience is the AGCO Corporation.

AGCO Corporation is a B2B brand that manufactures agricultural solutions for farmers, particularly large-scale farming centers. Instead of trying to target home growers, they create and share content relevant to a very niche community.

They don’t focus their content on selling specific products. They highlight important topics such as sustainable farming, animal welfare, and responsible farming practices. You will notice that they do not share much in the way of promotional content on their pages. Instead, the focus is on becoming a thought leader within the agricultural community.

By posing themselves as a thought leader in the agricultural industry, those brands looking for farming solutions to help them get their product out to the everyday consumer will start trusting the AGCO name and their associated brands. The more trust that is built, the more likely they will turn to AGCO’s many solutions.

In one of their most recent posts, they talk about their 2020 Sustainability Report, which discusses important sustainability trends and benchmarks while also discussing what they plan to do as a brand to improve their efforts towards sustainability and how they plan to help others in the farming/agricultural niche strengthen their efforts as well. This report gives AGCO an authoritative voice in the industry, which other brands are highly attracted to. With information to back up their claims, they are more likely to attract brands, build trust, and form lasting relationships that will result in B2B purchases.

Building Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

While B2B and B2C content marketing strategies will look surprisingly similar at first, it’s this understanding that a B2B audience is very different from a B2C audience that will help you see genuine success.

Here are some steps for building a strong B2B marketing strategy:

Outline Your Content Marketing Goals

As with any business strategy, you need to begin by identifying and outlining your B2B content marketing goals. What is it that you hope to accomplish by providing content? If you struggle with goal setting, here are a few common places to start:

• Building brand awareness
• Become a thought leader in your industry/niche
• Building customer engagement
• Increasing traffic to your website
• Increasing lead generation/conversion
• Building brand loyalty

Of course, you’ll need to take each of these goals and break them down into detailed pieces. You need to be identifying the goal, how you plan to reach it, what constitutes success, etc. One of the best ways to outline your goals is by using the SMART goal-setting method, where you break each goal down by defining:

• Specifics — identify the who, what, where, when, and why of your goal.
• Measurability — how will you track your goal and define what is considered a success or failure?
• Attainability — just how realistic is your goal? Do you have the necessary tools/resources to accomplish it?
• Relevancy — how well does each of these goals align with your company’s mission/values?
• Timeframe — you need to give each goal a specific deadline.

Define Your Ideal Target Audience

With your goals ready to go, it’s time to talk about your ideal target audience. Don’t forget — this is one of the most important steps in building a B2B content marketing strategy because you need to remember that your audience isn’t nearly as broad as that of a B2C audience.

To help with this, you’ll want to think about what your brand is, what products/services you are offering, and who would most likely need them.

For example, AGCO isn’t going to be selling their combine harvesters and application equipment to a small-town gardener. Instead, they need to focus on who would be interested in their large-scale machinery and innovative farming solutions. An example of a possible B2B customer for AGCO might be Tyson since they likely would benefit from the brand’s aviary systems for raising their chickens.

To help you identify who your ideal target audience may be, you’ll want to start out by creating a detailed customer/buyer persona. This can be done using several different approaches, including:

• Conducting industry/competitor research — this would show you who makes up the audience of your existing competitors.
• Checking your website analytics — this will help you identify where your current traffic is coming from and allow you to start looking into how they came across your site and what those other source’s audiences may look like.
• Auditing your current social media following can help give you insight into individuals and their demographics, such as job titles, industries, etc.

Once you have enough information about who makes up both the industry’s audience and your current network, you can start outlining what a typical buyer may look like. You’ll want to make sure you’re not only addressing important demographics but also how potential buyers like to interact with various brands, what information they may enjoy consuming, and where they go to research this information.

Perform a Content Audit

With your audience defined, you’ll want to turn your attention to the content you’ve already started producing (if any). If you have a website, you’ll want to count each of these pages as content, as well as any social media posts you may have started sharing.

Performing a content audit simply means taking a detailed look at your current numbers. When monitoring your website, you’ll need to pay attention to key performance indicators such as time spent on page, clicks, click-throughs, and number of visitors to your website. For social media, you will want to pay careful attention to engagement numbers and reach.

Once you’ve collected enough information, you’ll start to get an idea of what has worked and what hasn’t up to this point, which will allow you to start building your content strategy further.

Hold a Content Ideation Meeting

With an idea of what has worked before and what has not, it’s time to sit your content marketing team down and discuss your options. Content ideation meetings are an excellent opportunity to get all the options out on the table.

Not only should you have an idea of what has and hasn’t worked for you in the past, but if you’ve already conducted an industry/competitor analysis, you should have an even greater idea of what sorts of content has worked for your competitors.

It’s important to note that while B2B content needs to be more educational in nature, there is a time and place for promotional content. So, you want to make sure you are considering all viable options during the content ideation stage.

Identify Ideal Channels for Content Distribution

The next step after you begin content ideation is identifying which digital channel will best suit your brand and its audience. Once you start creating shareworthy content, you need to have somewhere to share it. Your website is where it will likely be published — however, you need to take further action to put it right in front of your audience.

If you haven’t already, this would be an excellent time to invest in some marketing channel research. This process will help you better understand where your audience is spending their time online, which will tell you precisely where your content needs to be shared. With the average individual spending approximately 10 hours a day consuming content, you want to take every action you can to put your content in the right place.

Optimize Your Online Presence

If you’ve already built a website and have begun to establish yourself on social media or online business listings, then you’ll want to make sure you are optimizing your online presence as much as possible. This becomes even more vital once you start regularly publishing your content because proper search engine optimization will ensure that your content is placed in front of the right audience at the right time.

You need to make sure you are conducting keyword research, using these words and phrases throughout your content and on your online profiles. Otherwise, you will have a hard time attracting the ideal audience.

Consistently Monitor and Measure for Success

Finally, once you have all your ducks lined up, you need to be revising your analytics. Whether it’s your social media or website analytics, you need to be paying careful attention to what is working and what isn’t.

If you don’t, you’ll continue shooting blanks into the dark. When you conscientiously monitor your content’s success, you’ll not only know that people are interested in what you have to say but also be able to start tweaking your content to suit their customer journey better.

5 Types of B2B Content Marketing that Work

With your B2B content marketing strategy ready to go, it’s time to start the creation process. If you’re unsure as to what kind of content will work for a B2B audience, here are five ideas to help you get started:

1. Blog Posts/Guest Blogging

If you are stumped as to where you should begin, always go back to your website! Content marketing aims to draw your audience to your website, even if they aren’t necessarily looking to purchase at the moment.

Studies show that 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages each month! Not product landing pages — but blog pages. Research also shows that businesses with their own blogs (which they update regularly) bring in nearly 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t have an active blog.

Blog topics need to cater to your audience. However, they can come in multiple formats, including:

• Promotional/introductory (as in product launches)
• Newsworthy (updating followers on what’s going on with the brand)
• Educational (covering topics they find of interest)

The key to success is to have a nice balance of content being published so that your information doesn’t come off as too promotional or too generic.

2. eBooks/White Papers

Other excellent types of content worth exploring are white papers and eBooks. These tend to come in the form of helpful guides or in-depth reports on specific topics. Content such as this is often sought after when looking for detailed information. White papers and eBooks may not be as detailed as, say, research reports, but readers still get a wealth of knowledge from them.

What makes these forms of content so valuable is not only that they help present you as an authoritative speaker on a subject, but they are effective lead magnets as well. Instead of taking the information and publishing it in blog format, you can use this as a piece of downloadable content that requires interested parties to enter some basic information about themselves to gain access to it. Once they do, you will gain critical insight into who your audience is, allowing you to build your audience profiles further and improve your lead generation tactics.

3. Research Studies

If you’re looking to become a thought leader in your industry, you will want to include plenty of research studies in your content marketing mix. People turn to thought leaders for detailed information, and the only way to get that is through conducting regular research into your industry, your audience, and competitors.

These studies, much like eBooks and white papers, can be used as downloadable content to help you increase your lead generation and better get to know your ideal audience and what kind of information they crave.

4. Templates/Checklists

If you’re looking for an excellent way to attract your audience through the use of freemiums, then you’ll want to consider building and sharing free templates and checklists that can be easily recreated and used by your audience.

People are constantly on the hunt for templates, checklists, and how-to guides to help them solve their pain points. You can feature these pieces of content in dozens of different ways, including:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Downloadables

These are excellent great way to draw immediate attention to your brand. Just make sure you are going the extra mile and providing your audience with a reason to continue coming back for excellent information.

5. Video Content/Webinars

While written content should be a priority for anyone building a B2B content marketing strategy, it’s also crucial that you consider sprinkling in a mix of video content as well. Studies have shown time and again that video is a preferred form of content because it’s easier for the average individual to digest as opposed to long-form written content. Research has also shown that 84% of consumers cited video content as an influential factor in a purchase they’ve recently made.

What’s even better is that video content can be repurposed and used in dozens of different ways, including:

• Shared on social media
• Embedded in email content
• Embedded on a website/blog page
• Repurposed for an online webinar

Revisit Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy with CadenceSEO

Content ideation, creation, and strategy building can quickly become overwhelming — especially if you’re working with a small in-house team. Here at CadenceSEO, we understand just how challenging it can be to get your content marketing strategy off the ground. Our team of dedicated digital marketing professionals can help you get sorted and on the path to success.

Curious as to how we can help? Then contact us today for more information!