A B2B content marketing strategy involves writing, re-writing and promoting content to achieve business objectives. The main difference between B2B and B2C marketing strategies is that B2B targets other businesses, whereas Business-to-Consumer (B2C) targets consumers.
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Consumers may be impacted by product launch campaigns and influencer marketing, but businesses won’t be impressed by such tactics. Instead, they want a solid content strategy.
Businesses prefer useful information which can actually resolve their commercial problems and aid them in growing their company. Your content marketing strategy must be succinct and methodological enough so that it leaves a great impression on your target audience.
This post is all about rescuing your B2B content marketing strategy. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it:
Step 1:
I would suggest you joining your audience rather than forcing your goals on them. Great content helps in creating a bond and eventually facilitates a conversation. Here’s what you can do:
- Respect the value exchange
- The content you offer your audience must create sufficient trust and credibility for your brand. Finally, it improves their perception of your business.
- Your content will enhance your chances for your audience to make an exchange
- Start a customer feedback loop
- Discuss with your sales team about the most common queries and issues faced by your audience. Look for the best answers. This feedback can help you in finding ideas about your content topic as well as calls-to-action.
- Practice social listening. Take a note of how your brand and competitors are talking about on social media as well as on forums like Quora. The buzz surrounding your brand. What questions do people have about it?
- Solve tough questions
Make your audience see a future vision about what your brand could become. The easier topics are usually covered by blogs or articles, but your niche needs a fresh perspective on any given topic. Make sure you research properly what could solve their problems.
- Do keyword research
Don’t pick keywords that are based totally on search volume. It’s good to factor the search query intent along with competitiveness depending on who’s already ranking while picking keywords.
Target keywords on the basis of data. Often you will see pages without any real keyword research behind them. This results in such pages getting very little to no traffic at all.
If you wish to move your content to a better fit your audience’s needs, you have a bigger choice to make. So, whether you should create new content or optimize the existing content?
If you already have quality content, optimize it first, and later create new content.
So, put efforts into keyword research and find ways to rank your blog better. Once your existing content starts working, you can move ahead with rescuing your B2B content strategy.
Step 2:
Dive deeper into your content by thoroughly explaining the topics covered.
- Write a substantial word count
It’s important to provide articles/blogs with higher word count to compete with pages that rank on the first page of Google’s search results. However, don’t just write anything irrelevant for the sake of increasing your word count.
Expand your article by including extra subtopics providing in-depth information that may lack in other pages. The average Google first page result contains around 1,447 words.
- Always try to publish quality content
If you’re wondering how often you should publish blogs or articles on your page. As per HubSpot, you must post 3-4 new blogs every week when writing for organic traffic.
For brand awareness, write informative pieces, and post 1-2 times per week if they are short blogs. Longer blogs can be posted 3-4x a week.
- Focus on more & better keywords and topics
- To begin, target long-tail keywords which are less competitive. Long-tail keywords are more specific keyphrases containing three or more words. They usually have low search volumes.
- Once you get enough traffic from the relevant audience, move to high-volume keywords and try to make an impact.
Step 3:
Resort to ‘full-funnel’ method in your strategy
- Plan content for each stage of marketing funnel
Top of the funnel or TOFU content’s main purpose is to attract relevant traffic and boost brand awareness. This content is meant to answer the query – ‘How is this topic important to me and my business objectives?’ At this stage, you must share relevant blogs or videos to propagate interaction.
Then comes MOFU or Middle of the Funnel that tries to help people who wish to solve their problems while sharing your expertise with them.
BOFU or Bottom of the Funnel has the content that is offered to your audience when they’re ready to make a purchase. This is the place where you can offer insights that build trust with your readers while making them choose you over your competitors.
Moreover, it’s an ideal place for offering a free trial, demo or to even make a sales call.
- Add relevant calls-to-action
As per the 2021 Content Preferences Survey, when asked whether they depend on content to research and make B2B buying decisions, 62% of consumers said that they clicked on the ‘More’ box. So, if your company doesn’t have proper marketing automation tools, it would be better to sell another piece of content in your CTA rather than ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Chat with Us’.
Make sure you appropriately place the calls-to-action in your piece and not just throw it at the very end of it. Give better access to your audience.
To Conclude
Now that you’re well-informed about the ways to save your B2B content marketing strategy, the final thing to do is believing in the process and diligently working through it.
Make sure to follow each and every step mentioned in this guide. This is how you can increase your traffic and rankings, that will eventually lead to a growth in your business.
Author Bio: Apeksha Patrick
Digital Content Specialist at Explainer Video Production Company (EssenceStudios). She holds a Bachelor’s & Master’s degree in Journalism & Communication from Manipal University, India. Passionate about creative writing, she loves reading as well! Always keen to explore new places & opportunities. On a never-ending quest of pushing her boundaries as a writer & editor.