Content marketing has fast become a staple of the B2B marketing world, especially among those who believe in an inbound approach for growing and scaling their company.

And it's hard not to see why.

A solid B2B content marketing strategy can skyrocket your growth, all the while providing incredible value and free education to your customers and prospects and showing the world (and search engines) that you know your stuff.

But we're not here to lecture you on all the reasons we love content marketing. If you're here, you're probably one of the 90,000ish people who've searched for the phrase ‘content marketing' in the last month.

If you are, you no doubt know some of the ‘secrets' by now:

• Add value before you try and convert
• Leverage other brands' equity
• Be genuine
• Focus on cluster-based content creation

And you're ing: sounds good in theory, show me the proof. Of course, you are; it turns out we're sort of obsessed with social proof.

With that in mind, we took to the streets, as it were, to extract some real-life B2B content marketing success stories and B2B content marketing examples.

How is B2B Content Marketing Different from B2C?

B2B content marketing and B2C content marketing are like two different worlds with their own rules and criteria. Business to Consumer and Business to Business organizations utilize various strategies to market to two audiences: chalk and cheese.

Think of B2B content marketing like a courtship dance between companies. It's all about building relationships, establishing credibility, and providing valuable insights that speak to the requirements of other enterprises.

B2C content marketing is more like a wild party where you need to capture the fleeting attention of consumers in a split second. Marketers try to dazzle them with entertaining content, stunning visuals, and catchy headlines that make them stop scrolling and hit the "Share" or "Like" button.

So what does this all mean?

The most significant difference between B2B vs B2C content marketing is the target audience. While B2B content marketing strategies concentrate on advertising to one or more people within an organization before the final decision-makers are involved, B2C content marketing strategies focus on a single consumer.

Why is B2B Content Marketing Important?

If you want your business to showcase how it can fill the target audience's demands, using B2B content marketing to get in front of them is essential. Your potential customer's objective is to learn more about your solutions, products, or services, so the aim should be to provide them with this information.

B2B content marketing and content marketing, in general, are critical to SaaS business growth. It is an organic way to create leads and nurture them. It helps your brand build authority within an industry or niche, opening up the potential for growth opportunities.

In the competitive B2B landscape, content marketing is essential for staying relevant and maintaining a competitive edge.

B2B Content Marketing Best Practices

Perform Keyword Research

Identifying your topics and breaking them down into supporting terms is the first step of performing keyword research. During this process, you'll find top-performing secondary keywords or other long-tail phrases that can be incorporated into your content.

Keyword research is the most crucial step in content creation. It gives you the information required to tailor your articles to the searcher's intent, ultimately leading to better placement on the SERP.

Create Content That Resonates with Your Audience

Understanding your audience is essential to creating content that resonates with them. The goal is to target them by producing readable, keyword-rich, informative content that provides value.

Bonus points if you make the piece visually appealing.

If you tick all the content criteria boxes mentioned above, your articles will be positioned for success.

Create Evergreen Content

Think of evergreen content as non-perishable items in the grocery store. That canned beans (or, in this case, your content) can be consumed years later with no issues or drawbacks. Timely and trending content is more like a gallon of whole milk—only lasting a week or two.

Concentrate on creating evergreen content that stays fresh for an extended period. That means creating search-optimized content unrelated to a specific moment or other current events.

Look at subjects that will always engage the target audience and serve a purpose, giving readers a reason to view your content. There is steady interest in articles of this nature, and traffic remains consistent, whereas you may see a spike and then a drop in views with timely content.

Repurpose Your Content For Other Platforms

Besides the obvious benefit of recycling content (less work, more time saved), there are multiple strategic advantages of repurposing these assets for social media, including:

• Reaffirming your brand's message
• Boosting the SEO value of the content
• Reaching people who may have missed the content during the initial stages of promotion

Short versions of your content for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can help you convey your main message or key points through an engaging post. It would help if you utilized visuals such as videos, infographics, or images to make your content more shareable and visually appealing on social media.

The same can be achieved by repurposing your content for email marketing. You can include excerpts or links from the original content to drive your blog or website traffic. These messages should also have prominent calls to action that clearly show the reader what to do next.

Publish Content Consistently

Regularly publishing high-quality content is one of the most effective ways to develop a brand presence, grow audience engagement, and drive sales.

Consistency is key in content marketing!

The table below highlights seven best publishing practices to stay ahead of your content calendar:

By following these best practices, you can create a consistent and effective content marketing strategy that engages the audience and achieves your marketing objectives. Alternatively, a B2B content marketing agency, like Roketto, can help you accomplish your growth objective with our predictable strategy.

Best 5 B2B Content Marketing Examples

Nobody ever said getting found was easy, especially in crowded SaaS markets where everyone is competing for a similar digital space. The old ‘build it and they will come' adage is just that, old and outdated, and unfortunately untrue for many new B2B companies.

But with organic search rankings and brand awareness being inherently long-term games, how the heck do you win that online real estate as a start-up?

Many B2B marketers are cutting through the weeds by leveraging the equity of other existing brands. It's kind of like influencer marketing but without the stank. The rationale is this: the average person is exposed to around 5000 ads a day. So we're getting pretty good at blocking all of that out. You don't buy 5000 things a day, do you?

So what makes people stop and look?

Well, if Instagram stats are anything to go by, it's scantily clad women. But short of that, it's recognizability. Yes, that's a word.

People will stop and look if they see something they recognize. And if you've got their attention, that's half the battle won.

How Trainual Stands Out By Blending In

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Creating high-quality, valuable content is one thing, but getting potential customers to actually engage with it is a whole other ball game.

Jonathan Ronzio, Partner & CMO of Trainual, an all-in-one onboarding & training tool, LMS and wiki knowledge base, knew this going in. Which is why right from the outset, Jonathan and his brother/Founder/CEO/podcast guru adopted a simple mantra: Stand out by blending in.

“We decided to lead with the personal brand earlier. We didn't want it to be about Trainual trying to sell you, but more like Chris or Jonathan just trying to have a conversation with you”.

So the Ronzio boys decided to ditch the big-budget, big-ego approach to social media ads in favour of something a little more down to earth.

“We knew our tool was for founders who understand the need for systems and processes, and they've probably been reading books like The E Myth, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The 4-Hour Workweek… So we leveraged the equity of those brands.

We were literally just walking down the street holding up the book and saying something like, “You know you need strong processes and systems to scale your business, but how do you actually make that happen? Click here to find out. And we got a lot of traction off of that”.

After tasting success off the back of this campaign, Jonathan made the move to double down on content marketing tactics that take a ‘real-life human' approach, going as far as digging into childhood home videos and using raw content of himself and Chris as kids for Trainual's social media ads.

“I come from a background of media and outdoor adventure, so I come from a place of filmmaking and storytelling. We've found using a similar kind of approach in the B2B world to be really engaging”.

But Jonathan's boyhood clips of falls and failures aren't the only thing capturing the attention of founders and CEOs in need of a way to streamline the chaos of hiring and growing. Teaming up with Leslie David Baker and Brian Baumgartner from The Office, Trainual found yet another way to cut through the noise and win the attention of business owners taking a sneaky 5-minute Facebook break.

“We filmed some stuff with Leslie and Brian and used that at the start of the ads. That was the attention-grabber, it was what made people stop scrolling and actually watch the video. Then we had some of our actual customers film a quick selfie video, so it went from The Office characters to real people doing a little iPhone video about how they use Trainual”.

And the result? Over 50,000 growing teams are ditching their old-school training manuals and Google Docs nightmares and systemizing and scaling their operations with Trainual. Proof that even in the B2B marketing territory, there's room to be an actual human.

B2B Content Marketing Success Stories: Focus On Adding Value Now, You'll Close The Deal Later

If there's one thing that's set to see a business flop, especially one in the SaaS world, it's going in strong for the sale before you've proven your worth.

The consumer decision-making process has changed significantly in the last decade, and unless you've been living under a rock for that time, you'll know it's all about high-quality, high-value content.

Customers are now, more than ever, looking for companies to be a trusted advisors, a companion, and a source of valuable insights that they can apply in their daily lives. This is especially true of B2B buyers, who are unlikely to give your SaaS a shot if you can't demonstrate your expertise and authority first.

How SaaS Marketer Went From Zero To 10K Sessions In Just 3 Months

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With a name like SaaS Marketer, you're going to expect them to be at the top of their game when it comes to content production.

And you'd be damn right.

Tom Hunt, Co-Founder of SaaS Marketer and bCast shared with us his three-step process for insane web traffic growth. Spoiler alert: it's all about content.

1. Consistent, high-quality content
2. Adding value to other communities
3. Simple, clean CTA

“We've really focused on creating consistent, great quality content. We publish biweekly B2B content marketing case study examples and also run a podcast focused (Confessions of a B2B Marketer) on helping people in the niche.”

A pretty straightforward approach then. But Tom knew from the outset that producing content in itself wasn't going to bring the masses through to the SaaS Marketer site, at least not straight away. That's where step two came in.

“There are about five other communities we network and post content into. After value is added, we direct people back to our site.”

Those communities are websites and Facebook pages such as GrowthHacker, Indiehackers, and Zest.is, communities with huge user bases to tap into.

“Before you can push traffic through to your site, you need to please the admins of the platforms first and help them get what they want.”

For Facebook pages, that's engagement. So if you can create engagement, you can create attention, which you can then use to direct people back to your website.

“To drive engagement, I pull out the best parts of my content, post natively into the community and then link back subtly when the engagement starts to increase.”

Once Tom has driven engagement in these communities and directed some potential customers over to the website, it's all about converting traffic into email opt-ins.

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“The site is currently converting 12% of traffic to an email address. How? We have one simple CTA: "Get the case study", and we have three places people can opt-in:

1. Header form
2. Exit-intent popup
3. Inline opt-in box in case studies

This means that with each email address, we guarantee traffic for our next post and also increase word of mouth and sharing potential.”

A simple yet intuitive process, SaaS Marketer's results demonstrate that if you focus on adding value early, you'll reap the benefits in the long run.

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How Bannersnack Leverages Best B2B Content Marketing Practices To See A 61% Growth In Traffic

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Bannersnack is the original cloud-based professional banner maker, and having been in the game for a bit now, they know what works for them.

Sergiu Iacob, Growth Product Manager at Bannersnack, shares with us their overarching content strategy:

“Our content strategy is focused on a cluster-based approach that puts specific landing pages at the core of everything we publish. It means that our strategy is based on more in-depth coverage of topics for our audiences, as we strive to create a wide range of meaningful content that will, later on, educate and convert.”

For Bannersnack, this means breaking things down into a five-step strategy:

1. Cluster-based approach
2. Relevant articles based on keyword research
3. Outreach & link-building campaigns
4. Content and result analysis
5. Constant article optimization

“We believe that content is king, and it plays a vital role in the success of our campaigns and business overall. For us, the definition of success is content that generates traffic, backlinks, and social shares. Our content approach is SEO based because we found that the sweet spot of our content marketing ROI lies between a solid SEO strategy, high-quality content, and also distribution.

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For example, since our platform allows the creation of posters, we decided to offer our target audience in-depth information on this topic. This ranges from:

• a DIY guide,
• how to create attention-grabbing posters,
• or even how to incorporate geometric patterns for brilliant designs

to name a few articles related to that specific cluster.”

The pillar cluster approach is one that's been widely used by successful content marketers and is strongly backed by HubSpot as a tactic that's not only influential in developing a smooth and consistent user experience but is also highly favoured by search engines and conducive to covering and ranking for key search phrases.

“As per our content calendar, we try to identify topics, and for us, proper keyword research and strategy go a long way. By doing this, we can see what our audience is looking for, so we pay attention to the selection of the topics so that we can satisfy their demands. That is why we use keyword research provided by our SEO team to build articles that can help our organic traffic grow.”

Publishing consistent, quality content is one thing, but driving traffic to it is a whole different ball game. In the long run, Bannersnack is aiming to rank these posts organically, but they also realize the importance of promoting and distributing content from the moment it's published.

“Since we believe that good content needs proper promotion and distribution, we also run outreach campaigns to make it available to more audiences that would benefit from knowing about our topics.”

This result-driven approach means that Bannersnack is constantly reviewing, tweaking, optimizing, and continuously improving its content creation methods.

“We look at how it performs—here we include the distribution on social media channels, the traffic it brings, and the feedback from our community.

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When it comes to optimization, we look back on older articles and seek ways to improve their performance by updating them to rank higher for specific search terms.

An example of an article that brought us great success was Biggest Graphic Design Trends for 2023, a compilation of trends selected by one of our visual designers. For this article, we used more than just text to express everything we had to say on the topic. We created a video and an infographic to make sure we get more exposure through various social media platforms.”

So what does all of this add up to, then?

Well, some pretty impressive traffic growth:

• 52% in traffic on the Bannersnack blog
• An overall 61% increase in the traffic on the Bannersnack website

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How Markup Hero More Than Doubled Their Blog Traffic

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Jeff Solomon, founder of screenshot and annotation tool Markup Hero, shares a fairly common SaaS foundership story:

“I was really just trying to solve my own problem. I'm a product guy, and I do a lot of consulting, helping people with product teams and managing engineers, and I take about 10-15 screenshots every day, working with people overseas who are from different backgrounds or speak different languages. I've tried out all of your usual markup tools, and there's a bunch of stuff that's just standard, but then I often found myself going into Photoshop or Canva to do the things that they couldn't.”

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The SaaS only launched a few short months ago, and there's still a lot of value that Jeff is working on building into it, but Markup Hero already sees a healthy usership off the back of an intuitive two-pronged B2B content marketing strategy.

Jeff is a self-confessed SaaS nerd and often finds himself the recommender of handy tools like Notion, so it was a no-brainer for him to start creating product reviews and endorsing them on the Markup Hero blog, using his own software to annotate screenshots of the products he was reviewing.

“I've been talking with other SaaS founders, and they're all trying to content market. So I realized I could write a good review for other tools, one's that I actually use every day, and then get them to promote the review, push it out on social etc. So I get a good piece of content on my own site, and I usually write about the Markup Hero product a little as well, and then I have these SaaS companies linking back to my site and leveraging their reach. These are companies that are quite a bit further along than us.”

Realizing the success of this approach, Jeff saw an opportunity to double down on the product review tactic, this time reaching out to other reviewers.

“Something I've just started doing is reaching out to other content marketers and bloggers, giving them a free sub to Markup Hero and letting them try it out. I'm specifically targeting people who are creating listicle-type posts, as they are already using something to take screenshots, so it's an easy pitch.”

When it comes to marketing a SaaS, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, and leveraging the reach of other companies' B2B content marketing efforts is a surefire way to skyrocket your impressions and grow your market share.

It's early days yet, but it sure seems to be working for Markup Hero.

From B2B Content Marketing Examples To Your Own Content Marketing Success

Hopefully this has quenched your thirst for great B2B content marketing examples.

Now, it's time for you to carve out your own piece of content marketing history and write your own success story. Let's recap some of the key lessons we've learned.

Got a content marketing example you'd like to share in our next post? Or need help crafting your own? Don't hesitate to reach out, we'd love to help.