Content marketing has been one of the biggest trends business to business brands have been embracing in the last few years.
With shifting demographics, more accessibility to the internet, and overall marketing shifts, brands that have a content marketing plan designed to interest and engage potential customers across multiple channels can see more qualified lead generation over the long term.
Unfortunately, a recent study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute found that many B2B brands aren’t clear on exactly how to go about setting up a content marketing plan, or what success with that plan would look like.
This leaves major gaps in an overall marketing strategy, but also quite a bit of potential. If your brand takes the time to build (and document) a solid content marketing plan now, you’ll likely stand out from the pack in your field.
Here are a few tips and strategies that can help get you started.
Quality Counts
It’s great to push out a ton of content, but your brand is going to go a lot further with high quality content. Just because your customers are other brands, it doesn’t mean you want to ignore the impact of hitting emotional trigger points and great storytelling.
Too many B2B brands have boring content because they think customers want only information. Embrace the idea of creating content that draws your customers in by highlighting how you can solve their problems, save them time, or make them more revenue, not just facts and figures.
Mix it Up
Today you need to be sharing your content over a number of channels. Blogging once a week just isn’t enough. If you don’t have the bandwidth to put more content out there, take the content you have and format it for different channels.
Break blog posts up into SlideShares, record some of your customers most frequently asked questions as YouTube videos, turn your best data into a white paper, or even better, an infographic that can be shared across social media.
Plan Effectively
Great content marketing takes effort from all sides. Many successful brands have a weekly content meeting where they discuss what is going to be produced, shared, and created over the coming weeks.
Setting up even simple things like an editorial calendar, a social media sharing schedule, and a quarterly calendar of new content plans like eBooks or white papers, will help you effectively produce and distribute content throughout the year.
Be Where Your Customers Are
B2B brands should have a good idea of where their customers live both on and offline through their ideal customer personas, so include that as part of your content marketing strategy.
Instead of using a scattershot approach, test and tweak. See where your customers are and put your efforts out towards reaching them on those channels. You may find that you have very few potential customers on Twitter, but tons of options on LinkedIn. So focus on creating high quality content that shines on there.
Be Helpful
One of the best ways to get your brand noticed is by engaging with potential customers and being helpful. Part of this goes hand in hand with creating high value content, but this also includes giving away some knowledge or insights to help build trust.
Some B2B content marketers have found places like Quora (a question and answer site) to be a great place to build a positive reputation. You could also contribute on industry forum sites, host webinars, or be a guest on a related industry podcast.
Include Brand Advocates
If you have at least one happy customer already, then you’ve got some potential great content. The more happy customers you have, the more you want to include them in your content marketing strategy.
Go beyond asking them for testimonials for the website, use their successes as case studies, feature them in online interviews or podcasts, and highlight their successes. When you consider your current customers as advocates for your brand you have a built in partnership that help attract others.
Use these six tips to start skyrocketing your B2B content marketing today. Already seeing success? What are some of the strategies you’ve used? Let us know in the comments.
