There’s a lot of talk about how B2B businesses should be producing content. It’s important to share useful information with your customers on a regular basis, in order to provide consistent value to your audience; but that’s not to say it’s an easy job to do so. Executing a content marketing strategy to get the results you want is a skill – so here are several B2B companies hitting the nail on the head when it comes to developing unique strategies that work.
Lenovo
In order to drive brand awareness, computer manufacturing company Lenovo created TechRevolution for its B2B audience, a digital content hub that delivers the latest tech news to ‘hard to reach’ IT decision makers across Asia Pacific. Through this platform, Lenovo delivers timely and relevant marketing content, which it can then share across multiple channels. The company website is now established as a thought leadership hub as a result, which currently features 252 articles with 34 million impressions, 308,000 link clicks, 170,000 new web users and $30 million attributable sales. A worthy contender for our list of brands winning at content marketing right now.
LeadPages
LeadPages is a B2B company that designs and sells mobile-optimised landing page templates. The initial challenge was the company’s small size, combined with a lack of cash flow and some serious incumbent industry giants to contend with, such as Infusionsoft.
To grow the numbers, LeadPages’ CEO and founder, Clay Collins, decided to take a content marketing based approach. He was determined to prove that a content team of just four marketers could successfully compete against one with more than 80. To make this happen, Collins put together a comprehensive content marketing strategy, offering prospective customers the following:
- An engaging marketing blog on lead generation and A/B testing
- Weekly webinars about digital marketing
- A set of free marketing resources, including seven marketing courses, two eBooks, ten case studies, and eight infographics
- A podcast, ConversionCast, run by Tim Paige, a popular host
The result? LeadPages saw 35,000 new customers in three years and boosted revenues to $16 million in 2016 – when it was also named #148 on the list of fastest growing companies in America.
SecureWorks
SecureWorks needed a competitive edge in the world of B2B cybersecurity. To meet that challenge, its marketing team created a series of buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of the company’s ideal customer, based on market research and real data about their existing customers – which reflected the needs of key decision makers. From this, a host of educational resources were created, including:
- Webcasts
- White papers
- Case studies
- Solution briefs
Using content marketing to engage customers, SecureWorks increased conversions by more than 50% compared to the previous year, and closed sales with more than half of all new leads.
WP Engine
WP Engine exclusively targets WordPress users, so decided to focus on content marketing targeting bloggers and other users of the content management system. Amongst other content offerings, two unique platforms were created to help customers:
- Torque – a content platform for the WordPress open source community
- A Support page – to solve customers’ challenges through written and video content
WP Engine’s content marketing strategy has driven significant results. These include acquiring 300,000 sites, applications in 128 countries, and raising five rounds of funding worth over $40 million since implementation.
Simply Business
Industries such as insurance aren’t known for being exciting. Let’s face it, businesses deal with insurance not because they want to but because they have to – with considerable repercussions if they don’t.
With that in mind, Simply Business, the UK’s largest insurance broker, wanted to create content that both educated and informed its audience – the small business owner – as a way of also attracting B2B leads:
- An email productivity guide
- A Google AdWords guide for small businesses
- WordPress for small businesses guide
- A guide to business blogging
- Social media success road map
The results speak for themselves. Simply Business increased its keyword ranking – reaching first place in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for ‘professional indemnity’, ‘public liability insurance’, and ‘employer’s liability’ – while significantly increasing weekly organic traffic.
Hubspot
Hubspot’s inbound marketing audience is small business. It has some serious competition from companies like Marketo and Pardot. So, its team developed a content marketing strategy focused on educating its audience by creating the following informative collateral:
- Blogs
- Case studies
- Webinars to teach inbound beginners the basics of social media and email marketing
The strategy helped take a company that started in 2006 with less than $80 million to a 2016 valuation in excess of $1 billion – making them one of the fastest growing B2B business on our list.
So, there you have it. Well executed content marketing can provide a wealth of knowledge to your current and potential customers, and ultimately garner leads for your business.
If you’d like to discuss any of these examples, or you are feeling empowered to start work on your next campaign, get in touch – we can help!
Photo by Ariel Besagar on Unsplash
