Building a marketing strategy for a B2B company is a long and complex process. Having a B2B content marketing strategy is one of its constituent elements. That is an effective way for a brand to attract the target audience and make it loyal while building a sales funnel.
To create an effective B2B content marketing strategy, you will have to spend a lot of time planning. Then, things will become easier and costs will reduce, while the results increase (if you are doing it right).
To start, let’s take a closer look at who is involved in creating a B2B content marketing strategy.
Engage Your Stakeholders in Creating Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Developing a B2B content marketing strategy is typically a team effort that involves diverse specialists. A strategist, editor, designer, and social media specialist typically create a content plan.
For example, the strategist analyzes trends and selects ideas for publication. Then, the editor gives tasks to content creators and evaluates their drafts. It is always better to involve writers who know a subject. For instance, if your company deals with the development of IT products, then working with experienced content creators who understand the details and will write material faster would be beneficial. If you need to post often, involve several authors to accelerate the processes. Writing Judge can help you find reputable services for engaging writers.
Once the core content has been drafted, the designer works on the visual components, which could include inline graphics for posts or more involved packaging of the content, as in the cases of infographics and white papers.
At the same time, the social media specialist researches audiences and determines which distribution channels will be best to reach them.
Determine Your Target Audience
Before you can fully flesh out your content plan, you first have to determine your target audience. If you neglect this important step and start writing posts about what you know or prefer, the result will not please you.
For example, say your business makes decorations for weddings. Then, you need to find a way to communicate with small business owners who are involved in the planning and orchestration of weddings. That might include event or wedding planning agencies, caterers, florists, and photo studios. Likewise, end users — i.e., the people getting married — may be interested in your products as well. All of these different audiences need a different approach and will engage with your products in different ways.
Once you have determined who your audiences are, try to uncover what their pain points are, which you can address directly with your content. You should also begin to understand where they go for information and inspiration (e.g., professional organizations, search engines, Instagram) so that you can design your content for those platforms.
Create a Content Plan
A content plan helps you avoid chaos as you prepare and post materials. It is a document that describes all the specific parameters governing your publication program, such as how you are going to create content, where you will distribute it, and how you plan to promote it.
A content plan should be tactical and can include external calendars for publications, affiliate programs, and marketing events. Include all the nuances of materials, dates, and sites for publications for a certain period. Usually, people look at least a month ahead with their content plan.
How to Choose Topics for the Content Plan
You can identify interesting topics for your audience with Google Trends. You can also analyze basic search queries using one of the SEO tools.
Let’s look at how we might do this using Serpstat. To start, we write a key phrase on the site (for example, “building a sales department”). Select the country and search engine and click “Search.” We get an analysis of the frequency of requests by clusters. Now, you know which queries in your niche are the most popular. Based on this data, come up with topics for writing articles, recording podcasts, or creating video tutorials — whatever you have decided is in your content marketing mix.
For example, you see the query “build a sales department from scratch” has the highest frequency. This might prompt you to write a step-by-step guide, “How to Build an Effective Sales Department from Scratch.” There are more chances that people will need that information.
Wait for the Results
Often, young brands believe that content marketing does not bear fruit and is useless. The secret is patience; attracting customers through the development and distribution of useful materials does not work immediately. You may compare this process with the creation of a manufacturing supply chain, which also requires a lot of time and a wise approach.
For example, it takes some time to get your website crawled by search bots. Follow SEO tools rules to make your website relevant. Then, look at how traffic to the site begins to grow. It may last for at least five months. If you publish unnecessary and not-relevant content, be ready to miss a loyal audience. You can ask Best Writers Online to help you review any drafts and make your content useful.
How to Test Effectiveness
Measure performance by establishing clear metrics for user activity, article views, site traffic, and sales. Use Google Analytics to report on web metrics (e.g., page views, time on site) and social media analytics for on-platfom engagement statistics (e.g., Likes, comments).
Ensuring Success with Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
The reasons why content does not work are variable. One that is fairly easy to avoid is plagiarism. Always make sure that your content is unique and that it delivers value to your audience. Then, there is the question of fundamental strategy. For example, if you need to increase sales and customer contacts, it’s often better to use landing, contextual and targeted advertising.
All B2B companies that are serious about marketing have heard about content marketing. But not all of them use it correctly to promote their business. To do so, they need to develop a B2B content marketing strategy. Hopefully this article has given you some useful tips on how to go about doing that. Good luck with your business promotion!
