5 Steps to Effective B2B Content Marketing (+ 4 Pro Tips)

Quality B2B content is what your SEO strategy needs to succeed.

Here you’ll learn:

• How to develop a B2B content marketing strategy
• What to consider when creating your buyer persona
• Top-performing B2B content channels
• More expert B2B marketing tactics

More than half of B2B buyers are reportedly more likely to convert after reading a company’s content. 

If your B2B company hasn’t prioritized content creation, now’s the time to start.

Between competitors vying for the same customers and the B2B buying cycle tending to be longer than in other industries, the most efficient marketers rely on a variety of tactics to increase the chance of a conversion. 

Content not only boosts your SEO by gaining you more visibility in search results, but it can enhance your credibility while educating your audience, which leads to brand loyalty.

Let’s take a closer look at designing and revamping B2B content marketing tactics for SEO success.

Creating a buyer persona can help you focus on the audience’s needs when designing your content strategy. (Image via Unsplash)

How to develop a B2B content marketing strategy 

Whether you’re developing or tweaking your B2B content marketing strategy, these steps can help you stay on the right track.

1. Identify your target audience

You can’t create helpful, effective content for your audience if you don’t know who they are. Even if you think you’ve got a good idea about your target demographic, it’s worth digging into the data to make sure the picture you have in your mind is accurate.

Creating a buyer persona can help you focus on the audience’s needs when designing your content strategy. Depending on your niche, you can either have one or several segments of the target audience.

Try to build your persona with information like:

• Demographics – including age, education, industry, company size, and job seniority
• Communications – places where you can reach the persona (e.g. LinkedIn, email)
• Hierarchy – who the person reports to and their role in the decision-making process
• Decision drivers – what drives the person to make a decision, including business goals
• Challenges – what keeps them from achieving business goals

And since your business is B2B, it’s helpful to know what kinds of businesses you want as your clients. What size are they? What’s their average profit or budget? What industries are they in? These questions can guide you during the content ideation and creation processes.

2. Choose content format and channels

Once you’ve identified your target audience and business types, you can consider the channels you’ll be putting your content on. For B2B companies, the key channels to leverage are often:

• LinkedIn
• Email
• SEO
• Paid ads

When it comes to B2B content, you don’t just have to stick to blogs. According to Lauro Media, the top 5 formats B2B marketers used to “distribute content for marketing purposes are email (93%), social media (92%), blog posts (79%) real-life and in-person events (56%), virtual events, and webinars (55%).”

Experiment with a variety of content channels, such as:

• Blog posts
• LinkedIn posts
• Industry studies
• Newsletters
• Guides
• White papers
• E-books
• Podcasts

Got content that’s performing well with your audience? Repurpose it! A popular blog post could be inspiration for a long-form guide. A social post with high engagement could be expanded into a podcast episode.

Not only does repurposing help you maximize your content, but it saves you money to boot.

3. Get organized

You may have heard the phrase, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It probably wasn’t about B2B content originally, but it applies nonetheless.

Identifying and planning relevant topics for your B2B content marketing strategy involves several stages, which can look something like:

• Auditing your previous content
• Conducting a competitor analysis 
• Defining your marketing and business goals
• Creating a content calendar
• Brainstorming and conducting keyword research

A content audit will give you a bird’s-eye view of where your content stands (if you have any), what topics haven’t yet been addressed through content, and what needs updating, revamping, or consolidating. 

A competitor analysis will show how you’re stacking up against the competition. This is also a good opportunity to not only see how other B2B brands are marketing themselves, but you could learn about new tactics or content features that you can try out yourself (just make sure you’re not simply copying another company, of course). 

Creating key performance indicators (or KPIs) can serve as helpful benchmarks when you’re reviewing your content performance down the line.

Building some sort of content calendar will make it easy to keep track of what content has been created, what’s in the works, and what needs to be tackled next. Lastly, keyword research will illuminate the words people are using to search for your products or services, so you can fill out your calendar accordingly.

4. Create your content

Once you’ve planned and prepared your content strategy, it’s time to create the actual content. Depending on your team size, budget, and bandwidth, you can decide whether you want to create the content in-house or outsource it to a content agency.

No matter which avenue you choose, make sure you allot enough time to ensure the quality is top-notch. Not only will low-quality content not be helpful for your audience, but search engine bots may not rank it as highly as more well-written, thorough content.

Once the content is written, either let it “rest” so you can read it at a later time with fresh eyes, or have another team member give it a read to offer feedback or catch any errors the writer may have missed. 

5. Promote your content

Promotion is just as important as creation when it comes to B2B content. After spending all this time and effort on creation, you want people to see it! 

There are a handful of both organic and paid options for promoting your content. You can leverage:

• Newsletters
• Email marketing
• Social media posts (organic and paid)
• Paid ads
• Guest posts
• Internal linking from your own high-performing web pages

Need more help with your B2B content marketing plan? That’s why we’re here.

You need to keep auditing your website and monitoring conversions to understand whether your strategy is working. (Image via Unsplash)

B2B content marketing pro tips

Once you’re in a good groove of content ideation, creation, and promotion, these tactics can take your strategy to the next level. 

1. Pay more attention to LinkedIn

Today, 61 million senior-level influencers and 65 million decision-makers use LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn is an excellent place to share high-quality content, including long-form articles, blog teasers, and exclusive posts. If you have a limited budget, LinkedIn should be your priority channel.

2. Leverage collaboration

Guest posts can help you achieve a variety of content marketing goals, including brand awareness and authority building.

Reach out and explore teaming up with other B2B companies who have a similar target audience but aren’t competitors. You can offer to share content for their websites or platforms while they do the same on yours, or you can create a joint piece of content, like an exclusive infographic.

3. Use paid social ads

While many B2B companies focus on SEO, paid ads promoting your content can be that boost you need to meet conversion goals. Along with LinkedIn Ads, it’s wise to pay attention to Facebook Ads as well.

When considering paid advertising, you can also explore content discovery (suggested content based on user behavior). While only 13% of B2B marketers use it, this tactic is highly effective on Facebook.

4. Measure content performance

B2B content performance changes over time. You need to keep auditing your website and monitoring conversions to understand whether your strategy is working. 

How frequently you conduct audits may depend on your industry, budget, niche, bandwidth, and content volume, but it’s a good idea to start by running content audits at least twice a year.

You can identify KPIs by content type and measure them accordingly. Common metrics to follow include:

• Website traffic
• User engagement
• Bounce rates
• SEO performance

The takeaway

Content is a key pillar for SEO, and it’s an essential part of a successful B2B marketing strategy. 

By coming up with a strategic plan to create high-quality content and distribute it through the right channels, you can achieve a variety of business and marketing goals for your B2B brand.

Not only that, but a successful B2B content marketing strategy can increase brand awareness, drive conversions, build authority, and cut marketing costs.