If you’re a B2B content marketer, you’re probably a pretty good one, or even one of the best out there.
But when you’ve been in the game long enough, old habits tend to creep back in eventually. It’s human nature to become set in our ways. The tricky thing about marketing is that you have to challenge yourself to think outside the box every day. It’s a constantly shifting industry, that changes its face every time a new trend rises, and another falls.
To cut a long story short, you can’t fall back on a simple formula that will meet your target audience’s needs every time. If that were true, marketing content would still look like the left instead of the right:
What you can do is keep a set of best practices to hand. Ones that will keep pushing your mind into new spaces so you can continue to produce marketing gold.
Sounds good?
Here are some of our favourites.
1. Remember what makes B2B different
Going back to content marketing’s roots is a good way to refresh and refocus your mind. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines content marketing as thus:
A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
So:
- It needs to be strategic
- It needs to be valuable and relevant
- It needs a clearly defined audience
- And it should drive profitable customer action
Profitable actions aren’t always a sale – especially when it comes to B2B. Unlike B2C, the B2B purchase cycle can take up to 12 months or even more. Where B2C is immediate and benefits-focused, as a B2B marketer, you need to take your audience on a subtle journey that leads them to the logical conclusion at just the right time.
This makes every piece of consumed content valuable. When the eventual outcome is a purchase, ROI can be derived even from a newsletter open or a social media click.
2. Have a content marketing strategy
Your content won’t fly without the strategy to support it. This comes down to asking yourself a number of questions:
- How does the campaign fit together? Are you addressing all stages of the marketing funnel? It’s especially crucial when it comes to the length of the purchase cycle. You need multiple content that addresses touchpoints at every stage of the decision-making process.
- Who are your audience? How will your content talk to their wishes, wants, and needs? It helps to have a buyer persona that’s specific as possible so that you can direct your content towards an actual human being.
- How will you track success? B2B brands have traditionally fallen behind compared to B2C when it comes to analytics – but they’re catching up. Set yourself up for success by setting short-term goals first so you can judge whether you’re going in the right direction and pivot away from tactics that aren’t performing so well.
TIP: Your goals need to be specific as possible so you can track measurable outcomes. It’s not enough to say, “increase brand awareness”. You need the goal, the metrics used to measure, the numbers you’re after, and the timeframe to complete.
3. Use a variety of content types
Traditionally, B2B brands prioritise website blogs. These have excellent SEO potential, which can draw website traffic, but you don’t need to stop there. There’s a whole range of content marketing formats to play with, depending on your strategy.
If you’re after brand awareness, you can lean heavily into thought leadership, investing in researched, statistics-led benchmark reports and trends articles, and distributing on LinkedIn.
If your goal is to network and gather new sales contacts, try out trade shows, set up webinars, or produce sponsored content in partnership with leading publications.
Or, if you want to demonstrate how your complex solution works in a simple and digestible way, videos are gold dust, and infographics can showcase key features alongside success statistics.
The important thing is to keep pushing your content into new formats – it’s best practice. Make sure you know what your audience is looking for – because this will change as contexts shift and markets evolve.
Finally, track what’s performing well. Gather as much feedback as possible and use the website and social media analytics to get more granular.
4. Combine industry expertise and SEO
This is where research and strategy combine to provide you with your angle. Use Google Trends or keyword research to discover what’s trending. Tap into relevant topics, and stay on top of the news. See what your competitors are talking about. What issues are engaging your target audience? Or, where are the gaps – what are they searching for and not getting?
Make yourself an expert in making your target audience happy. Position yourself as an authority with engaging and insightful things to say about the state of the industry. If your SEO strategy is bang on, you’ll appear on SERPs soon enough. If it’s still in need of some fine-tuning, here’s a helpful resource to get it sorted.
A failsafe quality control checklist is a MUST. Make sure every piece of content has at least two pairs of eyes on it, is read aloud for clunky phrasing, and is passed through readability checks (hello Hemingway!) and Grammarly. Finally, backlinks are the best friend of SEO, so make sure you have around three internal and three external links.
5. Find a unique brand voice that talks to your target audience
Here, you can collaborate with your sales department to unearth your target audience’s FAQs and consistent pain points. Your sales team will know about their motivations, buying preferences, what they value in a brand, the content they’re looking for, and more. Then you can find a voice that matches their needs and what you offer, delivering a personalised experience that channels them towards a purchase.
Here’s two examples of B2B blogs that nail this:
- Top 3 trends affecting the kitchen market in 2022. By sharing these trends, HomeByMe establishes itself as an industry expert who wishes to help retailers optimise their strategies.
- 3 ways 3GPP will accelerate industrial IoT. A clear and communicative title sets the stage for exactly what readers can get out of the blog, and subheadings divide the blog into bite-sized, SEO-friendly blocks.
6. Diversify your content marketing channels
Don’t confine your content to tried and tested regular channels. Keep pushing your content into new territories to encourage more growth. Watch your competitors – where are they distributing their content, and where are they not? For social media, this could mean exploring TikTok and Instagram alongside regular LinkedIn content.
Still, make sure that your target audience regularly engages with these channels. It’s not worth investing in a channel that will give you no engagement unless you know a growing presence of prospects is sitting there.
Most importantly – keep consistent to stay present in your audience’s minds. Consistency drives SEO, it’s how social media engagement works, and it’s what keeps your newsletter open rates healthy. Organise your team using an editorial calendar to ensure content distribution is timely and engaging.
Take these B2B content marketing best practices with you for your next campaign
These best practices are known in the marketing world, but they’re an important reminder of how we can keep our minds agile. Rather than sticking to the same routine content on the same channels, new ideas and tactics will gather more interest to your brand – so long as it’s backed up by strategy and testing. Some things won’t work, but some tactics may surprise you and bring rewarding results.
Stay fresh, stay creative, stay reflective, and your content will shine.
Not to brag, but we’re big believers in creative strategies that deliver rewarding results – it’s kind of our thing. Discover how we can help you transform your content strategy at hello@isolinecomms.com.
