B2B Content Marketing has Changed: Principles of Good Strategy
B2B content marketing boosts brand awareness, leads, and revenue through strategic content like blogs, podcasts, and newsletters.
B2B Content Marketing has Changed: Principles of Good Strategy
B2B content marketing is the practice of producing and distributing content to increase brand awareness, traffic, leads, and sales for business-to-business companies. Some of the common forms of content marketing in B2B include blogging, podcasting, email newsletters and infographics.
Content marketing can generate GREAT ROI. In fact, 58% of B2B marketers use content marketing to increase sales/revenue in 2023. A B2B company is a great example of how well content marketing can work for traffic, brand awareness, lead generation, and revenue.
Difference between B2B content marketing Vs B2C content marketing
With a B2C company, your audience is usually pretty broad, but in B2B, the audience for your content is MUCH more focused.
Specifically, your content needs to target key decision-makers who work at the businesses that you serve. For example, Monday.com is a B2B business that sells project management software.
Content Marketing Strategy
Organizations typically use content marketing for building an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable results: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.
The purpose of content marketing is to address customer pain points in order to support corporate objectives. It does this via fostering relationships and educating people: By offering instant value in the form of temporary fixes (awareness and affinity), education draws in prospective customers and influencers. Establishing trust enables a brand to become a continuous part of your community’s lives. The product fulfils the expectations set by content (convert, grow LTV, and upsell) as a result of relationship formation, which aligns outward promises with internal experiences.
Helping comes first, followed by selling, at which point clients frequently feel as though they made their own decisions. They become enthusiastic about investing in the connection as much as the goods. Based on psychology, this is how content marketing functions naturally.
Principles of Good Content Marketing Strategy
Common principles of content marketing include knowing your audience, solving a need, consistently providing valuable content, and converting visitors into customers. By sticking to these principles, you can turn casual visitors into loyal customers who keep coming back for more.
- Understand your audience
- Know your business
- Provide value
- Solve a need
- Deliver exceptional quality
- Write original content
- Share stories based on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, & trustworthiness
- Optimize for discovery
- Optimize for conversion
- Constantly evolve
With these essential content marketing principles, you’re well on your way to mastering the basics. By sticking to these content marketing basics, you’ll not only turn casual visitors into loyal customers but also establish your brand as the go-to-source in your industry.
Create Unique Advantage
As a marketer, your first job is to identify what you already have that can be leveraged for growth. This could be a founder’s network, your CMO’s substantial LinkedIn following that overlaps with your target buyers, or a product feature that solves a previously addressed problem. It might be an upcoming conference where your CEO is speaking to 300 decision-makers who gather only once per year.
Other advantages include-
- Budget, software, and technological resources.
- Existing audiences, email lists, or content archives.
- Market position (whether as an established leader or disruptive newcomer).
- Opportunistic events like funding announcements or key hires.
- Your own unique talents, experiences, and connections.
Create content strategy that-
- Competitors can’t easily duplicate
- Generate exponential impact by leveraging opportunistic events, efficient execution, and activities that serve multiple outcomes simultaneously.
- Is scalable with repeatable elements that compound over time and can expand with relative ease.
By sharing insights from this proprietary data, they created content no competitor could replicate, establishing themselves as the definitive source of sales intelligence while simultaneously demonstrating their product’s value.
Serve outcomes, it can Logically Impact (Better than other Approaches)
Strategies that serve business goals need to be measured to ensure they’re serving those outcomes, and ideally, how well they achieve them.
The benefit of having clearly defined, quantified, time-based outcomes is twofold:
- It helps you narrow down tactics.
- It gives you a target to “bump up against” to extract learnings for continuous improvement.
Can Be Executed with Existing Resources
A strategy is only as good as your ability to execute it.
A strong B2B content strategy begins with understanding your existing content ecosystem and how it supports the buyer journey. High-performing teams shape the content to meet the real needs of real stakeholders at every stage of the funnel. Secondly, strategy must lead execution.
Serves Outcomes: It can Logically Impact (Better Than Other Activities)
Strategy, by contrast to plan, is using the resources you have to show enough impact that decision-makers will recognize, making sure you remind them over and over in different ways about that impact, then using that as leverage to get the budget to do what you wanted to in the first place.
It means being realistic about what you can sustain long enough to see results that you can use to do more later.
Grounded In Facts, Not Best Practices
Choosing channels, tactics, and messages based on YOUR customers, not on what others are doing or what industry best practices dictate.
The principle requires you to reason from your specific facts, including
- How do YOUR customers make purchase decisions?
- What channels do THEY genuinely use for discovery and research?
- What unique circumstances does YOUR company face?
Designed to Have Exponential Impact
Most “strategies” content marketers present are just action plans that itemize tactics they would execute over a period of time to hit a goal.
Creating content, distribution, converting people, measuring results, repeat.
SEO is a part of the B2B marketing modus operandi. The ratio is more incremental; thus, it’s not really a strategic activity, it’s more of a table stakes tactic.
The opportunity for marketers now is to come up with a scalable way to transform bespoke interactions between people from the company and community across multiple mediums into ROI for the company that they can sustain.
This means designing your strategy such that some activities serve more than one purpose or outcome, as well as having “self-sustaining” elements (i.e., automations, workflows, etc.) built in.
