A Comprehensive Guide to B2B Content Marketing: Best Practices and Strategies for 2024

B2B content marketing is a powerful strategy that you can use to grow your business. It can help your organization generate leads, increase brand awareness, and even drive sales.

Learn more about B2B content marketing, the steps to implement it, and how it can equip your business for the future.

 

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B content marketing refers to a set of strategies used to distribute useful and relevant content to a target audience. It leverages digital resources, such as video content, whitepapers, guides, and ebooks, to create brand awareness, attract and engage new customers, generate new leads, retain existing clients, and drive sales.

B2B content needs to be substantial and offer value that can help address your audience’s pain points. It establishes your organization as a thought leader in the industry, so you should come across as polished and professional. Keep in mind that your audiences are humans, so it is essential to create content that’s interesting and engaging.

What Is the Difference Between B2B Content Marketing and B2C?

B2B marketing targets other businesses, their needs, and their pain points. B2C marketing, on the other hand, targets individual consumers and their needs.

While both B2B and B2C content marketing focus on understanding the challenges faced by their respective audiences, they differ in their approach. That is primarily because B2B customers and B2C audiences vary in several aspects, particularly in their buyer’s journey and decision-making process.

A B2C buyer typically undergoes three stages in their buyer’s journey:

• They realize that they have a problem
• They look for viable solutions
• They find the best solution that addresses their pain points

B2C buyers also tend to make their own decisions and have more control over how they spend their money.

In contrast, the journey of B2B buyers is more complex. Once they’ve determined that a problem exists, they start to find solutions. They create a set of requirements that a solution needs to have so it can solve their pain point. Afterward, B2B buyers will need to gather and compare different vendors who offer various solutions. They’ll also need to get all stakeholders and key decision-makers on board before choosing a vendor.

Once a buyer decides on you and your solutions, you now have the opportunity to nurture their loyalty. Thus, you should have a variety of marketing content that fits customers’ different needs at every stage of their buyer’s journey. In a nutshell, B2B content must be useful and targeted. It must contain actionable information that your audience can apply to their own business.

With B2C brands, the emphasis is to generate engagement and build relationships with their audience to strengthen brand recall. Often, the approach is to show potential customers how the brand’s products or services can have a positive impact on their lives. B2C content is also more casual or conversational to tap into audiences’ emotions, desires, and needs.

Meanwhile, B2B content marketers create content to showcase their expertise in a particular field, provide key industry insights, establish and nurture trust, build brand awareness, and educate their audience.

B2B content marketing can follow the same approach used in B2C content marketing. However, B2B content emphasizes how a business’s solutions can help address the challenges of an organization and contribute to its success.

The Main Tasks of B2B Content Marketing

The main tasks include:

• Generating leads. Content marketing is vital for lead generation. Through different content types, you can attract new customers, keep them engaged, and turn them into qualified leads.
• Spreading brand awareness. There are many ways to let your B2B audience know that your business exists and how you’re positioned to help them. For example, you can reach a wide audience and ensure your business stays top of mind by distributing email newsletters regularly.
• Establishing your leadership. You can position yourself as an authority or expert in your field by sharing key industry data or providing your audience with data-backed research.
• Driving user engagement. Generate user engagement by creating content that your audience wants to read or watch. Communicating with your audience is also essential. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, make sure to check the comments and answer or react to what your viewers have to say.
• Educating your audience. Crafting educational B2B content can help you build stronger and more authentic relationships with your audience. For example, by creating articles on industry-relevant topics, you can make your brand more credible, address your audience’s questions, and share valuable insights.

Steps to Implement B2B Content Marketing

Here’s how you can implement an effective content marketing strategy for B2B.

Analyze Your Target Audience

Before creating content that addresses your audience’s pain points, you must know who they are first. The primary goal of B2B content is to convert your audience into paying customers. This means that your content should meet their specific requirements.

This is where buyer personas come in. These include key pieces of information about your target audience, such as their demographics, goals, challenges, and industry.

Developing buyer personas is vital because they can help you understand your target audience better. Furthermore, buyer personas can inform your marketing and sales strategies and guide you in tailoring your content to meet your ideal customers’ specific needs, goals, and challenges.

To create a buyer persona:

• Start within your own organization. Discuss with your key stakeholders, marketing and sales representatives, and customer service teams what your ideal customers’ biggest hurdles are. What are their common questions? What interests them? What’s keeping them from making a purchase-related decision? Who are their key decision-makers? Getting into the mind of your customers can help you understand what they need and how your business can solve their pain points. For an objective evaluation of your company, it would be beneficial to consult with qualified specialists from a content marketing agency. Their vision for a B2B content strategy might differ from your team’s and reveal new directions for development.
• Conduct interviews with customers or prospects. The key is to strike a balance—to not be too broad and risk generating general buyer personas; and to not be too specific and risk creating very limited profiles of your ideal customers. During the interview, ask questions about their business, goals, challenges, and personal background. You can stop the interviews when you start seeing a pattern. Note that the number of buyer personas you create will vary depending on your business. This means you can have two to three personas or as many as 15.
• Segment your audience. Classify your audience into subgroups based on factors like buyer Determine how many subgroups or segments you want to focus on. For this, you’ll need to use analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, and data to uncover information, such as their preferences and the keywords they use online.
• Determine how you can address their problems. Knowing what you can and can’t do for your customers can help you set more realistic goals and make it easier for you to find clients who are a good match for the solutions you provide.

Create a Content Strategy

When creating a B2B content strategy, you need to identify your goals.

What is your content trying to achieve?

Aim to follow the SMART model (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) to deliver impactful content. By setting realistic and measurable goals, you can better assess whether your content marketing strategy is working or not. This can also help you identify areas of opportunity.

If your goal is to build brand awareness, focus on crafting content that establishes you as an industry leader or subject matter expert. Create articles, industry research, or explainer videos. Then distribute your content in different marketing channels, which should be easily accessible to your audience.

After identifying your goals, consider conducting a content audit. This refers to the process of analyzing all your existing content to assess their performance, who their target audience is, and which stage of the buyer’s journey they’re targeting. Running a content audit also helps you take stock of which topics you’ve already covered and which stages of the buyer’s journey you need to create more content for.

For example, if you find that you’ve already made a lot of content for the awareness stage but you’re lacking content for the evaluation stage, then you can prioritize creating more content for this stage. For content aimed at the evaluation stage, it’s essential to generate high-quality content with compelling calls to action. You also want to provide your audience with different ways of engaging with your brand.

Moreover, you need to know who your competitors are. Conducting competitor research allows you to learn more about other businesses seeking the same audience as you. Asses their performance, unique selling points, and weaknesses. Then determine what makes you stand out and how you can position your business as a solution to your ideal customers’ pain points.

If you’re interested in content marketing, read on: Content Marketing Strategy for Mobile Apps

Create a Content Plan

• Brainstorm within your organization. Find out what topics interest your buyer For example, what is this specific audience struggling with? From there, you can come up with related topics or ideas that can potentially solve these challenges.
• Identify key aspects. This includes identifying the teams responsible for creating your content, the types of content you’ll be producing, your B2B content distribution channels, ways of promoting your content, and methods for measuring its performance.
• Set your goals. Determine what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. Do you want to create brand awareness, or do you want to generate more leads? Some of the common goals that B2B content marketers try to achieve include creating brand awareness, building trust or credibility, and educating audiences. Aside from setting your goals, you should also identify your KPIs. These include reach, conversion rates, and engagement rates so you have a benchmark for your content’s performance.
• Identify your distribution channels. This typically comes after identifying your audience and running a content audit. Start by assessing your current distribution channels to see which ones are generating the most engagement. Use analytics tools to find out where most of your website traffic is coming from, what types of content visitors are engaging the most with, and how much time they spend on each page.
• Determine the content types you want to produce. The type of content you create is often influenced by the marketing funnel stage you’re targeting. If you want to build brand awareness, focus on creating content that educates your audience, such as articles, explainer videos, and infographics. If you’re focusing on the retention stage, then you need to create content that nurtures customer loyalty. These include providing your customers with resource hubs, video tutorials, and easily accessible customer care channels. Some of the B2B content assets that generate remarkable results include virtual events, webinars, and online courses (58%), research reports (48%), and short articles (48%)

Create a Budget

To complete your content marketing plan, you need to identify your resources, such as budget, tools, and manpower. You should figure out how much your organization is willing to spend on your content marketing strategy. On average, content marketers spend $185,000 annually for content marketing in B2B. Note that this will depend on your company’s size. Larger companies tend to have bigger budgets ($400,000+), while smaller companies will have more modest budgets that average less than $100,000.

Creating a budget will help you allocate your resources more effectively. For example, if you want to use a content management system to streamline how you create and manage your content, you will need to look for relevant solutions, assess their functions and capabilities, and check their pricing plans.

Furthermore, if you’ll be hiring additional people to create content, such as content creators and content managers, you’ll also have to factor their rates into your budget.

8 Best B2B Content Marketing Strategies

Below are eight of the best content marketing strategies that are used by B2B content marketers.

SEO

So you’ve crafted awesome content. However, that won’t give you the results you want if your target audience can’t find it.

With SEO, you can drive organic traffic to your website. This can help you rank higher on search engine results pages and enable more visitors to find your website or content.

To generate quality traffic that converts, you need to leverage long-tail keywords and low-volume keywords. You also have to optimize your content for all the different stages of the marketing funnel. So aside from conducting keyword research, you need to optimize your website and content for SEO. For instance, you can work on improving your website’s page load speed and create an XML sitemap to facilitate better user experiences.

Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for content marketing. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, also double as tools for promotion. When using social media, note that different types of content perform better on some platforms than others. If you’re thinking of using TikTok, you’ll want to focus on creating short-form videos. If you want to use Instagram, then you’ll need to take stunning, high-quality photos or videos that come with engaging captions.

E-mail Newsletters

Email newsletters are a great tool for nurturing leads and building brand awareness. They can also help expand your reach. Through newsletters, you can update your subscribers about your business regularly, reminding them that your business exists and you can help them with their potential problems.

Create Ultimate Guide

Ultimate guides help position you as an industry expert. It shows your audience that you know the subject well and can explain concepts and key topics comprehensively. This type of content also contributes to your SEO. However, this requires a lot of time and research. It can also take a longer time to read. But, when done well, ultimate guides can become valuable resources to your audience.

Publish Industry Research

Industry research can be a compelling and effective way to reach out to your audience. Aside from establishing your authority as an industry leader, you’re also providing your audience with industry-relevant data. Furthermore, well-written industry research can become a valuable reference for your audience. When publishing this type of content, consider sharing it for free across your marketing channels. This way, besides making your research more accessible, you can potentially get more leads compared to when you set up a paywall.

It’s also vital that you are transparent about how you collected your data or how you came up with the study. By doing so, you can continue building trust and establishing credibility with your audience.

Create B2B Video Content

Videos are an engaging marketing tool. Plus, they can be shared easily across different promotion channels. With a short video, you can explain key concepts in a more digestible way, compared to giving your audience a lengthy article. If you have existing videos, you can repurpose them to cater to various market segments and different stages of the buyer’s journey. Furthermore, you can use SEO best practices to ensure that a wider audience will find and watch your videos. However, note that you may need a bigger budget to create video content.

PPC Advertising

Using paid ads enables your business to find new prospective clients, generate leads, and grow brand awareness. PPC advertising provides measurable results and makes it easier for you to monitor conversion rates. It lets you target audiences who are proactively searching for solutions like yours. It also gives you better control over your budget because you’ll only be paying once someone clicks on your ads or completes a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or free trial. When using PPC advertising, consider leveraging different platforms, such as search engine marketing and social media advertising.

PR & Influencers

Content promotion is vital to get your content in front of your target audience. You can work with PR agents and influencers to promote your content to a wider audience. For example, you can work with other industry experts or thought leaders and create a video or podcast. This is one way to expand your reach—you’ll not only be reaching your target audience but also those of your partners.

How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Content Marketing for B2B

So how will you know if your content marketing strategy is effective?

You need to measure your content’s performance according to your KPIs and goals. You can regularly monitor your content’s performance on a monthly or quarterly basis using analytics tools. Doing so will help you learn if your content is meeting your goals, such as if it was able to generate more leads, drive sales, or grow brand awareness. If your current strategy’s not making an impact, you can utilize some of our tips above to improve it.

Conclusion

Having a solid content marketing strategy in place can help your organization achieve your business goals and address your target audience’s needs. With B2B content marketing, you will have to use logic, given that B2B buyers are different from B2C buyers. Therefore, it’s crucial to pay attention to your target audience, create buyer personas, and craft content that caters to different stages of the marketing funnel.