Content marketing can be an incredibly helpful marketing strategy for B2B (business-to-business) companies. It is a cost-effective way to grow traffic and build trust with your customer base.
However, to reap the benefits content marketing provides, consider developing a solid strategy before starting content production.
B2B companies with a well-documented content marketing strategy consistently report higher success rates than B2B businesses without a content strategy or a verbal strategy only.
To help you, this article will show the basic steps needed to take to create a successful content marketing strategy for your B2B business.
5 Steps to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
1. Set Content Marketing Objectives
Before you develop a content strategy, figure out why you want to create content in the first place.
Do you want to become an authority in your niche? A strong content strategy can help develop brand awareness and build trust with your customer base.
Is your main goal to drive more traffic to your site? Content marketing can improve your SEO and get you that top spot in search results.
Do you want to focus solely on leads? Research shows that content marketing produces 3x the amount of leads per dollar spent than paid search does.
Content marketing can, and will, provide you with a multitude of benefit. However, you should be very clear and specific about your main objectives from the get-go.
Knowing what your main objective is will help you choose the right content marketing strategy, as well as analyze and measure your content marketing ROI.
2. Understand Your Audience
Since B2B content marketing focuses on building long-lasting relationships with customers, identifying and understanding your target audience is a must.
Instead of just relying on your own experience, get into the mind of your target customer.
Who are they? What do they care about? What questions do they usually have about your product?
Creating a Buyer Persona can be really helpful when it comes to understanding your target audience.
When creating a Buyer Persona, you should include demographic factors like your target customers age, gender, and location, as well as their interests and hobbies.
To help you craft a great Buyer Persona, you can use tools like Google Keyword Tool (for identifying commonly asked questions in your niche) and Google Analytics (for zeroing in on your current customer demographics).
3. Consistently Create Relevant, Valuable Content
There is a difference between creating content and creating valuable, relevant content that your audience wants to read.
Here are a few ideas for you to consider:
- Make your content visually appealing to encourage website visitors to click on it.
- Include special offers and giveaways in your content strategy to get more shares and likes.
- Create retargeting content for website visitors who did not complete a purchase.
- Send out an email newsletter to stay in front of your customer’s minds.
- Consider investing resources in developing white papers for your company: in 2018, B2B businesses ranked white papers as their top performing content type!
- Add a “call to action” at the end of every piece of content, encouraging readers to make a purchase or learn more about your products.
Finally, keep in mind that content production needs to be consistent.
To build strong, long-lasting customer relationships, you need to give your audience a reason to return to your website over and over again.
To stay consistent with creating new content, set specific deadlines and review your content strategy and performance regularly.
4. Choose a Content Distribution Strategy
Choosing the right content distribution strategy, or a combination of strategies is an important part of content marketing success.
Here are some of the most common content distribution strategies:
- Paid distribution. Use paid ads in search engines, or take advantage of social media advertising, to easily target a large number of new leads.
- Organic distribution. Use your website’s blog, your email newsletter and your social media accounts to distribute your content without paying for advertising.
- Crowdsourcing. Invite loyal fans to share your content to build brand awareness and improve trust with new audience members.
5. Measure and Analyze Your Results
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to developing content for B2B companies.
You need to consistently measure and track your results to identify what’s working for you, and what’s not.
You can use a tool like Google Analytics to track your results and tailor your content to what your target customers want to see.
If you notice that a particular type of content is consistently generating a large amount of traffic and conversions, adjust your content marketing strategy to produce more content like that.
How HandmadeSEO Can Help
Here at Handmade SEO, we don’t just grow traffic.
We develop and execute a content strategy that helps your B2B business build trust with your customers and win more business than ever before.
We look at every project from a business owner’s perspective and pay very close attention to tracking your results – all to get you the best ROI possible.
Want to see how we can work together?
