C
ontent is the cornerstone of marketing. It is the most effective instrument businesses use to sell their products or services. It plays multiple roles in promoting your business by creating brand awareness, instilling confidence about your offerings in the customers' minds, and empowering them with the right tools to solve their problems. So it becomes necessary to have a solid content marketing strategy that includes blogs, e-Books, podcasts, case studies, market research, and videos. However, if you think the same content marketing strategy applies to all business types, that's not true. For example, what holds for B2C, may not be the same for B2B. The latter needs a different approach. In this article, we will learn how to build a cost-effective and powerful B2B content marketing strategy that helps generate leads, revenue, and growth.
Creating a B2B content marketing strategy
Why is B2B content marketing strategy crucial?
You know how much it takes to draw visitors to your website, engage them, and convert them into consumers. A content marketing strategy is like a guiding principle that helps you to chart your course of action. Every B2B business has a different set of goals to meet. A successful marketing strategy is all about identifying those goals and objectives well.
This observation is further corroborated by Content Marketing Institute research. It reveals that 86 percent of marketers use content marketing to boost brand awareness. Nonetheless, at the same time, it is also seen that out of this 86 percent, only 53 percent attribute content marketing to increasing sales and revenue. The remaining 47 percent don't. This proves that not all content marketing strategies are as effective. Then how do some B2B content strategies manage to steal a march over others? To know more about this, we must look at the best practices. Here's a list of some recommended strategies to guide you in creating a successful content marketing campaign for your business.
Figure out your audience and their needs
Identifying your customer base is paramount. It's one thing to attract visitors and make them view your content. While on the other, it's a different ballgame to convert them into customers. Unless you know who your clients are, you won't be able to meet their specific demands. So to make your audience resonate with your content, try to do your audience profiling first. Create a fictitious personality who fits into the role of your prospective buyer.
While doing this, consider common factors like demographics and age to other human characteristics, including your audience's strengths and drawbacks. Then segregate your prospective audience into subgroups, based on customer behavior, for example. Now, decide if you want to target all the subgroups or any one or two of them. Once you have identified your audience, you can customize your content to address their needs.
What problems are you trying to resolve?
The cardinal principle of a successful business is all about solving customers' problems through your products or services. Hence, design your content marketing strategy keeping your client's pain points, struggles, and challenges in mind. Incorporate into your marketing strategy pieces of advice, information, and answers your customers want. Telling them you understand their problems and are here to help them is a huge morale booster for them. It helps your customers connect to you instantly and builds trust in your products or services.
Micro-targeting to whittle down your focus
The internet is a magnificent universe. Your content can land in the hands of the wrong targets resulting in your strategy misfiring badly. So identifying your audience is a prerogative. Once you do that, your aim should be to give the prospective buyers a great user experience. However, to do this, you must reach out to them with your content first. The question that remains is how to do this.
It's simple. By looking for your target businesses online with the help of short and long-tail keywords and creating brand awareness.
The more popular keywords your content has, the greater your chances of being spotted by users online. The most reliable way of introducing popular keywords into your content is by analyzing user search preferences.
Google Analytics is your go-to option for this. It unleashes the power of discerning how your users, customers, and visitors use your website.
When you have deep insights into their behavioral patterns, you can leverage this data to improve their experience on your website. This, in turn, results in your online business improving drastically.
Without behavior data, improving a website's performance is unthinkable.
Creating unique content
There is too much repetitive content doing the rounds on the internet. So how do you stand out from the crowd?
Simply by answering complex questions that your users may have. Also, by aligning with the way your customers want to educate themselves.
Through your content marketing strategy, try to address problems by finding unique resolutions that your competitors have never tried.
Carry out extensive research about your competitors
To create unique and value-added content, you must know what your competitors are up to. This will help you understand how your competitors are wooing their customers.
And what will help you gain an edge over them? To crack the code, do as much research as possible about your competitors online.
This will help you to decipher your USP or a unique selling point that you can use to attract customers. It's also an opportunity to work out what you can do better than your customers.
Focus on this aspect while selling your goods and services to your customers.
Have clearly defined objectives
Having trackable and measurable goals is the key to a successful marketing strategy. Goal setting and tracking tools help monitor and track your goals. Goal tracking means you are aware of how your content strategy benefits the rest of your business. Simply put, you are setting a target you aim to achieve in a certain amount of time
Achieving this requires you to zero in on some key performance indicators or KPIs that allow you to measure the success of your strategy against the delineated targets.
Also known as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals, they indicate a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve and in what ways. Finally, they help you recognize if you have accomplished the target.
Create consumable content
It's a clear consensus that visual content is more appealing than written words. This is not to say that written content does not have its takers. But chunky pieces of text can be hard to read. This is especially when your customer is hard-pressed for time and looking for some quick, effective solution to their business challenges. So use a combination of content, including text, video, and images, to create a visually appealing user experience.
Conclusion
Content is king, and now more significantly so in this digital age. A B2B content strategy is critical to your business as it brings you closer to your customers and allows you to address their pressing issues more effectively.
Once you give them solutions to their problems, they want to know more about you and your business. Your B2B content strategy must be response-inducing so that your customers find you more trustworthy than your competitors.
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