Essential B2B content marketing best practices

Is there any difference between marketing directly to consumers and business-to-business (B2B) content marketing? Every content marketing strategy has some common elements, from market research to lead generation, but a B2B strategy presents its own unique set of challenges.

For B2B businesses, it’s crucial to know what best practices you can do to maximize the returns of your content marketing. Here are some best practices that every B2B business needs for its content strategy.

Always Start with Market Research

Developing a targeted B2B content marketing strategy starts with your sales team because they are the ones speaking with prospects and customers every day. To begin the research process, ask your salespeople what common questions and issues your customers may have.

It can be helpful to use solutions like Google Analytics or other marketing analytics tools to identify relevant search terms and keywords. They can also help you identify detailed information about your website visitors and what they're looking for.

In addition to revealing what topics your prospects are sharing and commenting on, social platform analytics will reveal other businesses and brands they're interested in.

Before contacting a salesperson, most B2B buyers conduct initial research online. You should use this to your advantage by ensuring your content is highly customized around the topics your buyers care about.

An excellent example of a solid research strategy is using survey-based whitepapers. Surveys take on the pulse of the audience, which can help you build powerful buyer personas. Whitepapers also generate better B2B leads, as they contain insights that put your business into the expert spotlight.

Build Buyer Personas

Another critical component of any B2B content marketing strategy involves building buyer personas. Personas are fictional characters representing the attributes, goals, and problems of your various personas. They include demographic information such as age, gender, education, and job function, as well as the interests and motivations of the people you’re targeting with your content.

Buyer personas are your “best guess” at who your buyers are, making it easier for you and your team to create content that resonates with your target audience. While they are educated guesses, they are also based on accumulated data. This information includes various pain point resolution data that help identify the best leads.

You can build buyer personas by mining sales data, using surveys, and conducting interviews. Once you’ve developed your personas, you can use them to create buyer-centric content. For example, if your personas are nonprofit organizations, you could create helpful content about fundraising, best practices, and crisis management.

Expand Into New Content Formats

While B2B content marketing involves creating valuable and immersive content, that doesn’t mean you can’t include interactive elements, such as quizzes, surveys, infographics, and sharable videos. These interactive assets can help make B2B content more engaging, which increases the likelihood that your buyers will share it with their network. AI copywriting tools can make the entire process more efficient, they are especially good at generating short pieces of copy.

For example, a B2B software company could create an infographic about successful software integrations. An infographic that includes charts and visuals may appeal to tech-savvy B2B buyers. At the same time, an interactive quiz or survey would add an element of fun, which appeals to younger audiences.

Don’t hesitate to expand your existing B2B content marketing assets into multiple content formats, including social media content, videos, images, and more. For example, you can create a whitepaper, then convert it into a podcast. Similarly, you could convert a slide-deck presentation into a video.

Manage Your Branding and Reputation

Your branding and reputation are essential to B2B content marketing. These two elements are intertwined because both can help your business establish authority and credibility, and any business needs both to succeed.

In fact, your brand and reputation are intertwined. A strong reputation helps you build brand awareness in the B2B space, while a strong brand helps your business attract more customers. A strong brand can help generate buzz and attract new leads, while a positive reputation can establish your business as a trusted resource.

To manage your brand, you need to ensure your B2B content delivers on its promises, never misleads your audience, and is always backed by data rather than speculation. It’s important to ensure all your marketing is relevant, respectable, on-brand, and truthful. Otherwise, you may end up spending a lot of time writing client apology emails because of something controversial you said.

A strong brand involves setting your business apart from the competition. Branding consists in establishing your business as unique, authentic, and innovative. Its foundation is your brand values, which define how your company operates, what you stand for, and what kind of value your business provides.

Use Paid Promotions for More Engagement

When building a B2B content marketing strategy, one of the biggest challenges is generating traffic. Every business needs a traffic boost, and one of the biggest traffic generators is promoting your content. Several paid promotion options include PPC, display ads, and social media ads.

Paid promotion can help your business reach a broader audience, but it takes a lot of time and money. Many B2B businesses can’t afford to spend a lot of money on paid promotions, but this situation may be changing.

PPC ads are affordable, but they’re also practical, making them a good choice for B2B content marketing. A PPC ad campaign can deliver instant results when managed effectively.

The Bottom Line

Developing a B2B content marketing strategy can be challenging. Following these best practices can help your business address these challenges and succeed. By combining great content, strong branding, and a strong marketing strategy, you can boost brand awareness, establish credibility, and generate new business leads.