Whenever someone suggests you make content marketing your priority, you start thinking, “All the content is already there on Google and with AI generative engines, is my blog or any form of content even going to be useful?”
I have a point that may make you think otherwise.
With changes that are popping up every other minute, the content that is out there should also be up-to-date. But did you know that the average age of the content that ranks on top is 2+ years old?
Sounds unbelievable?
You could be one of the businesses that give your audience the answers they want by leveraging content marketing regularly.
Source: Statista
Now it is only fair to outline the process of content marketing for B2B businesses so that you can adapt to the plan and see the benefits for yourself.
This guide will cover 5 vital steps to reach more customers, produce better quality leads and attract more prospects to your business.
You could get answers to your questions like
- What content should you produce?
- How to plan your content strategy?
- What are the aspects of content that you should focus on?
- Ways to bring more traffic to your content
- Methods to improve the performance of your content
Types of Content that would suit your business and your audience
Content Marketing is the process of nurturing your audience. This takes them through various levels of awareness about their problems and the solutions that could solve their problems.
Source: Visme
By creating content that serves the needs of your audience you create brand reliability and trust. This serves as a way for the audience to choose you over your competitors.
There are many types of content you could produce for your audience. Choosing a type of content largely depends on the audience’s needs and preferences.
Blog Posts
A versatile type of content that provides educational information offers industry insights or tells the story of the business. Blogs help in building thought leadership, building brand awareness and driving traffic to your website.
Infographics
One of the less used means of representing data or information, infographics are highly shareable and a great way to communicate complex topics easily. This is an easy content type for finance, technology and healthcare.
Videos
Use videos to make product demos, customer testimonials, and brand storytelling.
E-books
To provide detailed information on any topic, businesses can opt for e-books. E-books are a way to get prospects into the email funnel. This content type helps you position yourself as an expert in your industry.
Case Studies
This is the best way to show businesses how you can solve a problem. More than telling people that you can solve a problem, case studies help you to show how you solve them. This allows you to show the level of impact your product/services would have.
Whitepapers
Research-heavy content that provides in-depth information on a particular subject matter. White Papers help you position yourself as a thought leader in your industry and provide valuable information to your target audience.
Webinars
Use webinars as a way to educate and inform your target audience. Ideal for businesses that want to attract an audience in masses, webinars are the best way to provide interactive and engaging content that helps in building stronger connections with the target audience.
Social Media Posts
Social Media is one of the major sources of traffic which no business should neglect. Social Media Content helps in building brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, engaging with the target audience, etc.
Newsletters
Unlike content that is available to everyone, newsletters can be a more personal form of content focused on a select engaged audience instead of targeting a larger group.
Podcasts
With more audio-based content on demand, podcasts are ideal for businesses of all types to build the needed engagement with your target audience.
How to plan your content strategy
A content marketing strategy begins with getting to know your target audience. Once the target audience is defined, the next step is to identify the business goals and the goals for your content marketing. Content Marketing goals should align with the overall goals of the business and should be specific, measurable, and attainable.
Source: Technavio via PR Newswire
Understanding that content marketing is set to grow more in the upcoming years can be a good reason to get started into the content marketing now.
The next step is to map the buyer’s journey [candidate journey for recruitment businesses]. The candidate journey maps the steps taken by the candidates while they hunt for jobs. The buyer’s journey typically includes the following stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
Awareness Stage
The goal of the content marketing strategy in this stage is to educate the target audience and position the recruitment business as a thought leader in the industry.
Consideration Stage
The goal of the content marketing strategy in this stage is to provide helpful and informative content that showcases the recruitment business’s expertise and differentiates it from competitors.
Decision Stage
The goal of the content marketing strategy in this stage is to provide persuasive and compelling content that inspires confidence and motivates the target audience to choose the recruitment business.
Develop a content plan based on the research data you have gathered. Decide on the effective content formats for your business.
Identify the topics that will resonate with the target audience and support your business goals. Make a content calendar with a time and distribution plan for a specific period of time.
Once the content distribution is done, define the metrics that will show the success of your campaigns. It may be website traffic, leads generated into the email funnel or conversions for a sales page.
Ways to optimise your content marketing strategy for better performance
It is not sufficient if a content marketing plan is in place. It is also important to optimise the strategy to get the desired results.
When you do not hit your KPI goals, you would certainly be in a fix about changing or dropping the efforts altogether.
What if you know the exact reason behind failure in your KPI targets?
Well, there are some controllable elements in tweaking a content marketing campaign to make it a success.
→ Target Audience
→ Target Keywords
→ Content format and quality
Optimising your Target Audience
If your campaign is not attracting people properly or you are seeing a dip in the engagement rate or your conversion rates, then maybe you are not targeting the right set of audiences.
Also, there is a high chance that it could be because your content is not relevant or appealing to the current audience you are targeting. This could also be resulting in increased bounce rates on your content and web pages.
To optimise your Target Audience, make sure that your target audience research answers important questions like
- Who are the target audience members?
- What are their pain points and goals?
- How do they consume information?
- What content formats do they prefer?
- What topics are they interested in?
Optimising your Target Keywords
SEO is a long-term game and you can monitor the results of your efforts with the help of the right KPIs that support your business goals.
You can ascertain that your SEO is not working in your favour if the keywords you target have a low ranking and the keywords are not relevant to your core offer.
If there is a steady decrease in your organic traffic from the keywords you are targeting. This may be because the content, keywords and search intent are not in alignment.
Parallelly there would be a dip in your conversion rates and Engagement Rates and it is the result of misalignment of the content, keywords and search intent.
Many times wrong keyword choices can result in a higher bounce rate. Using heat maps can help find the cause of the bounce rate accurately.
Optimising Content Format and Quality
Bounce rates are mostly associated with target keywords. If the bounce rate doesn’t decrease even after working on your keywords, you should check the content quality. If your content quality is poor, your audience is not going to like your content or stay on your page.
Improving content quality involves making the content easy to read and understand with effective presentation techniques.
Lower average time on site [site sessions] can indicate the level of engagement that a piece of content has.
The comments you get on a piece of content can indicate whether the content is resonating with the target audience.
Source: Social Marketing Writing
Creating Engaging Content
When the content you create does not serve its purpose, the efforts become wasted. Normally we create content for various reasons.
- Building brand awareness
- Establishing thought leadership
- Educating potential customers
- Drive lead generation
In the pursuit of nurturing the audience to help them move from one stage to the next, we end up stuffing too much information in places where it is not needed.
Creating engaging content is the need of the hour and storytelling could be your one-way ticket to creating content that attracts your audience.
Knowing what your audience is looking for and giving them the solution to the problems they can solve themselves helps in building a relationship with your audience.
Problems you face when you create content:
Once you make a content strategy, you are off to writing the content you want to use to attract your audience.
The outcome of this exercise sometimes brings no resolution to the problem at hand as the audience does not relate to the content you have created.
It is not sufficient if you know what problem your audience is facing, you also need to know the language used by your audience to explain their issues and concerns.
Use Cases that share ways to solve similar problems is a way to attract and nurture your audience.
Engaging Content gives us benefits like:
– Makes the audience aware of the brand
– Promoting the brand to show your audience what your brand can do
– Creating publicity for the solution provided by the brand
– Making a relationship with the audience through trustworthy service
– Selling your solution to the audience by showing them how you will solve the problem
Promoting and Measuring Your Content
Content Marketing is not just another method of distributing content for your business. You may be thinking that content marketing is just another option but remember that it is an important channel to leverage for your B2B business.
To maximize the impact of your content marketing business, your distribution channel must be chosen carefully and all those channels must be tapped effectively to monitor the performance of the channels.
Promoting your content
Content promotion is like oil to powerful content distribution systems. Some methods and tools to ensure effective content promotion are enlisted here for your reference.
Social Media
Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook enable us to share content from other platforms. Leveraging Facebook and LinkedIn Groups can ensure that your content receives attention from the right audience groups while also ensuring proper engagement.
Email Marketing
Using email as a channel of content distribution may seem like an ancient method. But according to the engagement statistics, emails are still the most preferred method of communication for many buyers out there. Emails can be used to distribute content and increase engagement amongst subscribers. Remember the word ‘Creativity’ when you use this channel to enhance the performance of your content.
Paid Advertisements
Do you remember the TV commercials that used to update us about the brand’s sales, discounts and other ongoing improvements? Paid ads on social media have proven to be an effective method of media buying more than TV commercials purely because of the hyper-targeting that can happen in social media ads. You can opt for Social Media ads to promote your content and run targeted campaigns to drive traffic to your products and services.
Measuring Your Content
Without measuring your content distribution framework, you cannot blindly spend on social channels or even emails. This is why I am going to re-introduce you to the methods of monitoring your efforts on content distribution.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
Analytics
Tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs are popular options that are preferred by agencies and businesses worldwide. These tools can help you with checking out the performance of any page or blog on your website. You can also run competitor analysis with these tools to see how you fare in your industry.
SEO
We all love organic reach. Something that we don’t have to work for with so much money at stake. Isn’t it? This is exactly what SEO is all about [and much more in fact] and continuously working on your content from an SEO point of view is going to be a rewarding experience for your business. If your company has that long lead form, better optimise it along with optimising the page that hosts the form. This way, your website visitors who may be your leads, won’t slip away through the cracks.
Social Media Metrics
If you are on social media, you may be more concerned about the level of engagement your social content brings in. But as a business owner, you must be concerned about various metrics and not just engagement according to the stage that your business is in.
Must Read: Find the apt social media for your business
For example:
If you are a business at an early stage, you may be worried more about getting subscribers to your products or services.
If you are a business that has been in the market for a while, you may be focused on new launches [engagement, awareness] and updates [awareness, likes, shares], etc.
Also Read: Top 27 Tools for Every Business Owner
Using data to improve future campaigns
Is it enough to just monitor your metrics and the KPIs that matter to your business?
Of course not!
You must use the data you have acquired to act upon it and change the direction of your efforts according to the metrics.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
Analyse your metrics
Your metrics are the way to know how your efforts have helped your business achieve its goal. Identify the content that performed well and the gaps that your content has created. Look at the competitor’s content to know where you can improve.
Identify Trends
Look for trends that are in your industry and that are in alignment with your goals. Adapting to the trends not only keeps you ahead of the competition but also makes you look more approachable.
Experiment
Use various types of content, different formats of content and various content channels and see what works and what doesn’t.
Trending Content Marketing Techniques
Creating and sharing valuable content is something that every brand out there follows. So be different in sharing the content at the right place and at the right time. Now making valuable content doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be considered the authority of the topic or domain. Choosing the right format for the content is as important as the content itself.
Attract and retain your target audience with the right content marketing and distribution strategies.
Video Marketing
Videos have been in the boom stage since 2019 and the pandemic only attributed to the growth of YouTube and other video-based content. Lots of people sprouted up online and we have seen a surge in the number of YouTube accounts consistently producing quality content with limited resources.
Source: Animoto
Companies have joined the bandwagon and are in the pursuit of creating a mark in the most popular video publishing platform in the world. If you haven’t started already, then when?
Tips to implement Video Marketing in your Marketing Mix
→ Your target audience wants to associate with your company and the people who are helping the company thrive. Personal content related to your company’s growth, values and culture, employees working at your company, are a part of the target audience you may have.
→ Topics relevant to your company’s products or services. Example: How to use your Product X or How to avail your service Y?
→ Repurpose the highest-performing blogs into video content and embed them in the blog so that you can drive traffic to your YouTube channel and vice versa.
→ Make content entertaining, knowledgeable and meaningful to your audience and their pain points.
Tips to make the videos work well for you
→ Keep your videos to the point – no nonsense and no fluff
→ Don’t forget that the more you give, the more you get.
→ Invest in your Video channel as its ROI is more promising and quicker than your Blogs.
→ Add captions to your videos and make them more accessible to everyone
→ Cross-promote your videos on other social media channels.
Podcasts
Just like video content, audio content and podcasts have taken the voice world by storm. It’s time that the brands take a look at the audience base using podcasts and produce quality voice content if the target audience is present on the platform.
Source: Statista
Just adding recorded voice content of your blog to the posts enhances the quality of your written content as you increase the accessibility of your content to various audiences.
Some Tips to Make Podcasts and Other Voice Content a Success
→ Inviting renowned guest speakers from the field of interest can help you gain a lot of followers who may directly be your target audience.
→ Content distribution and cross-promotion are important to make your podcasts a success.
→ Just informative podcasts can become boring but making the informative content interesting and filling it with entertaining content can attract a lot of people to your brand increasing your brand awareness.
Webinars
One of the favourites of SAAS and many B2B marketers is webinars. Using this type of content to educate, train and share insights about the products and services has proven this type of content to be the best sales channel. There are many marketers who still vouch for more sales through webinars.
Source: Finances Online
Tips for using webinars as a promising marketing tool
→ Keep your webinars to the point and fluff free.
→ Promote the webinar across all the channels you are in to bring the interested crowd to attend the webinar.
→ Webinars can become boring, so make it a point to keep it as engaging as you can.
→ Guest speakers who are popular and experts in the field of the topic, can attribute a lot to the success of the webinars.
Still Waiting to Believe The Capabilities of Content?
Chat GPT might be on the rise and this may have put many companies to rethink their content procurement patterns. But humans thought processes, their experience and their journey are reflected in the writing of the humans which generally lacks in the GPT 3 or even 4. This is why content marketing is always going to be relevant to all businesses that want to provide genuine content as answers to many questions of the target audience. It’s not just producing high-quality content but also working on analysing the performance of your content and bridging the gaps that you left in the process. Trusting the process and playing it long-term are important factors to remember when you are starting with content marketing for your business. Because, at the end of the day, consistency with quality is the key to your success.