B2B content marketing is an essential strategy for businesses looking to build their brand, engage their target audience, and drive conversions.
In this article, we explore the basics of B2B content marketing, dig into effective strategies for creating impactful content, and consider the role of generative AI in enhancing content creation.
What is B2B content marketing?
B2B content marketing is the creation and distribution of any form of content that is relevant to your business and relevant to your customers. This content includes articles, blogs, videos, and podcasts, as well as in-depth whitepapers and research.
B2B customers increasingly rely on self-directed research on digital channels to learn more about business products and services and make purchasing decisions. Content created and distributed by your business's marketing team and partners should be available across all channels where your customers are conducting research. The most comprehensive content marketing strategy includes all digital channels where your customers are present, including social media platforms.
Similar to B2C content marketing, B2B content aims to build business authority and brand awareness on digital channels where customers seek information and engage with digital communities. B2B content marketing is different. Because purchasing decisions are made by teams rather than individuals, the purchase process is more complex and typically takes longer than a consumer purchase.
Above all, for B2B content marketing to be effective, it needs to be relevant and closely tied to the buyer's journey, just like consumer content.
Let's dig deeper: B2B Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
B2B content marketing strategy
Developing a comprehensive content marketing strategy
A successful B2B content strategy covers all stages of the customer journey. This includes general topics related to your industry for early-stage customers, as well as more detailed content about specific products and services for customers closer to purchase.
To ensure content is relevant and useful, B2B marketers need a deep understanding of who their customers are. As mentioned earlier, B2B customers make purchasing decisions in teams. B2B marketers need to know the types of businesses that buy their products and services. And within these organizations, you need to know the roles typically played by purchasing teams.
Build personas based on key roles using demographics and industry-specific attributes. For example, if your business sells payroll products or services, it can help you determine the age range, common interests, and professional challenges of human resources directors who are likely to be on your purchasing team. Personas refer to the digital channels this role looks for to find answers related to the job. And personas help shape content tailored to these roles.
Successful B2B content marketing demonstrates deep knowledge of your customers' common pain points and other important topics related to your industry that they want to learn more about. Your competitors already have their own content marketing programs in place, so be sure to do your research. Search online for pain points and related topics and create content that addresses “content gaps” where your content doesn't address a perceived customer problem. At the same time, look for the most popular keywords in your industry and make sure your business has content that covers those topics.
By leveraging these content opportunities, your brand can be at the forefront when potential customers are looking for answers online.
Creating engaging and relevant content
The main objective of B2B content marketing is to build authority and trust between the brand and the buying team. If the content is not useful or reliable, it will be passed on.
Establish your brand as a trusted authority by creating and distributing high-quality, well-researched articles and whitepapers. Detailed whitepapers on industry trends and issues show your business is on the radar of your customers. Once customers and prospects become familiar with your brand, they'll start paying attention to other content created by your team. That's because it has been proven to be useful and relevant.
Leaders within organizations can also demonstrate their authority and relevance to customers as well as the broader public by writing thought leadership articles. These articles are shorter and more focused than whitepapers, but just as valuable in discussing the latest news related to your industry. Thought leadership articles appear in many industry publications that potential clients read. These works can also be published on your company's website or shared on LinkedIn and other online communities related to your industry.
In addition to thought leadership articles and whitepapers, your B2B content marketing program should also include case studies and success stories. This type of work has the added benefit of showing esteemed customers and the concrete solutions that a company's products or services can provide them. Thought leadership articles and whitepapers give your brand authority with customers at every level of the buyer journey, while case studies and success stories can help your buying team make their case closer to decision. It helps you put prospects in the role of customers and imagine how they can benefit similarly from your business's solutions.
B2B content marketers can also create a wide range of how-to guides, industry guides, tutorials, and webinars tailored to the needs of specific prospects during the buying journey. These guides can be shared on your company's website or published in reputable publications for similar audiences. Webinars and other multimedia content can be conducted live to increase participant engagement, or shared on-demand for a broader, passive audience who can conveniently view them at any time.
Maximizing the role of generative AI in B2B content creation
As organizations explore, test, and deploy generative AI tools to help create content, the pressure is on for competitors to scale their content with similar tools to catch up.
Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT can speed up production by providing suggestions for content topics and talking points. Tools like Midjourney can help you create creative visual assets to accompany your articles. Major enterprise marketing platforms like Adobe have integrated genAI, and more tools and updates are being released weekly. All results produced by generative AI must be reviewed by humans, and human creators must be involved in content creation at every stage.
AI technology has been used for content marketing long before OpenAI released ChatGPT. Using AI and machine learning, you can add personalized elements to your content based on data from existing customers who are engaging with your organization's content. This data can also be used by AI tools to create personalized experiences for customers on your properties, such as web pages and mobile apps.
Additionally, AI tools allow you to automatically optimize and serve your content to customer segments based on how previous iterations of your content performed in front of your audience. AI continues to optimize with better combinations of content elements across campaigns or across multiple campaigns.
Learn more: 3 ways B2B marketers can use generative AI
B2B content marketing best practices
Adopting a data-driven approach to content creation
B2B content marketing programs should use data to ensure all assets are relevant to the customer. Behavioral and performance data should also be used to analyze which assets perform best.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be used to create content that fits content gaps and maintain a brand presence on the key topics that customers search for. Major search destinations like Google need to be closely and continuously monitored by marketers with SEO experience.
Content performance of all assets should also be monitored and analyzed. Create his KPIs such as click-throughs and view time to define the most appealing content for your customers.
Build a powerful content distribution and promotion strategy
Creating engaging content is not enough. A key part of B2B content marketing is where your content is placed and how it is shared. Placing your content in the right digital communities and social media platforms gives authority to your content and your brand.
Identify key thought leaders and communities in your industry. These industry hotspots exist wherever decision makers communicate online. They can belong to groups on his LinkedIn or other social platforms, or they can be built around independent industry organizations with a strong online presence.
Content marketing team members should reach out to thought leaders with large followings and ask relevant questions and comments to foster conversations that are relevant to the brand's audience. Mention any key articles, webinars, or whitepapers your team has created to enrich your business' content.
Also, develop a strategy for how customers and prospects can share data to engage with specific valuable content. Once customers sign up or register to engage with content, businesses can maintain contact and nurture leads using email and marketing automation programs.
By understanding the fundamentals, implementing effective strategies, and harnessing the power of generative AI, marketers can unlock the full potential of B2B content marketing and achieve impressive results in today's digital environment. I can.
Get Martech! every day. free. It's in your inbox.
