B2B content marketing is undoubtedly a very challenging task to perform. Know the content marketing tactics that can help you reduce the cost of leads and increase awareness.
Despite the several arguments against content marketing, it is an established fact that content marketing is one the most effective online marketing tactics ever.
Yes, content marketing does take some time and hard work to yield results, but it does payoff big time in the long run with patience and consistency.
Many successful businesses have been built from the ground up with effective content marketing tactics. And more so, most renowned businesses retain their business success with effective content marketing tactics.
That said, content marketing strategy can be employed by different kinds of businesses, including B2C and B2B. B2C means Business to Customer, while B2B stands for Business to Business. In this article, we’ll be specifically talking about winning B2B Content Marketing tactics.
What Is B2B Content Marketing?
B2B content marketing refers to strategic creation and distribution of contents for the purpose of increasing brand awareness and authority, generating and nurturing leads and ultimately increasing sales.
B2B content marketing as the name suggests is majorly a set of content marketing tactics used by businesses to appeal to other businesses. And given the fact that B2B content marketing is targeted mainly at businesses, it is quite different from B2C content marketing.
Even though B2C and B2B content marketing aims at engaging prospective customers and providing solutions to their pain points, B2B content marketing tactics and format differs from that of B2C. But despite the differences in approaches, the basic rules of developing effective contents remain the same regardless of the targeted audience.
Have a B2B Content Marketing Strategy Handy
Before we delve into discussing the B2B content marketing tactics that get results, it is important to let you know that you need to have a strategy in place.
Like every result oriented adventure, for a business to business content marketing campaign to be effective, it must have a strategic plan in place. As the old saying goes; “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
A strategy simply means the overall plan of a particular undertaking…
While tactics are the different ways of accomplishing or achieving the overall plan or strategy. So when I talk about having a B2B content marketing strategy, I mean you should have a plan for your content marketing campaigns.
That is, you should have a goal for your B2B content marketing. Before creating your content, you should document what you want to achieve with your content marketing. Whether it is to expand your brand awareness, generate more leads or sales, etc...
Then you should specify the period you intend to achieve the set goal. Document the exact period and date with which you would want to achieve the set goal. Once your B2B content marketing strategy is clearly spelt out, you can then employ the following winning 6 B2B Content Marketing Tactics below.
6 B2B Content Marketing Tactics That Get Results
1. Research and know Your Audience Personas
The number one tactic for effective B2B content marketing is good knowledge of your targeted audience or prospective customers. You need to research about your audience demography, their pain points and questions relating to your business…
So you can create contents that solve their problems and answer their questions. So you can speak to them in a language they can easily understand. You can research your audience personas using the famous Google Analytics Tool.
2. Create Engaging Contents
For your B2B content to be effective, it has to be of a very high quality and very engaging too. The better the quality of your content, the more engaging and authoritative it becomes.
Unlike B2C contents, extra effort must be put in researching and developing B2B content marketing materials. However, when we talk about quality, it doesn’t mean your contents should bore your audience.
Even if you have the greatest content on the web, if your content drives your audience to sleep, it won’t do anyone any good. So in order to make your B2B contents engaging, you should add stuff that makes your contents more engaging and interesting.
Such as stories, infographics, statistical figures and even video or audio contents. An example of such engaging B2B content is this article from Hubspot.
3. Collaborate with Complimentary Firms
Another winning B2B content marketing tactic you can employ is collaborating with complimentary firms. You should not collaborate with competing firms.
You can collaborate with complimentary firms by exchanging contents in the form of guest posts on each other’s websites or blogs. Guest posting is a great B2C content marketing tactic as well as effective B2B content marketing tactic.
Guest posting on complimentary firms’ website or blog helps you leverage on their audience for your business. Then as you also publish their contents on your website, they also leverage on your audience. So it’s basically a win, win tactic.
4. Repurpose your contents or use diverse content formats
A great B2B content marketing tactic is repurposing your contents into diverse formats. Repurposing means, if you publish content in text format, such as an article for example, you should also reproduce the same content as a video content, audio content and infographics.
That way you maximize the reach of your contents. Because your audience will always prefer contents in different formats. Some may love to read, others will prefer videos, while others may prefer infographics. So for greater results of your B2B content marketing, you should present your contents in diverse content formats.
While there are several free media to distribute your contents, such as blog, social media pages, Q/A websites, etc, you also need to use paid ads to promote your contents for greater reach and result.
As you develop contents for your business, the contents that do very well with organic traffic should be promoted with paid ads for greater exposure and reach.
When it comes to promoting B2B contents effectively with paid ads, the number one platform that comes to mind is Linkedin Ads. But apart from Linkedin Ads, you can also make use of Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads for promoting your B2B contents effectively.
6. Measure your content marketing results
The last and one of the most overlooked tactics in this list of winning B2B content marketing tactics is result measurement. For B2B content marketing strategy to be effective, you need to consistently measure the outcome of your content marketing efforts against your set goals. As you meet your goals you set higher goals…
If you don’t achieve your goals, you work on improving your efforts and the value of your contents.
The list above forms what I believe to be the most effective B2B content marketing tactics. If you do have some other effective B2B content marketing tactics, or any other comment on this topic, you can share with us in the comment section below.
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