The Top Marketing Strategies Deployed By B2B Content Marketers

The Top Marketing Strategies Deployed By B2B Content Marketers

  • On : December 7, 2020

There are a lot of different forms of marketing these days, you could be forgiven for losing track of which is which.

This article focuses on how your business can effectively execute B2B or business-to-business content marketing; what it is, and why it is an important area for your business to have efficient marketing strategies in place.

What is B2B marketing

B2B marketing can be a challenging area to excel in, with so many businesses competing for the same goals, partnerships and customers.

Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations, as opposed to B2C marketing that focuses on marketing to consumers.

Ultimately, B2B marketing content is generally more informational and straightforward than B2C, as corporate decision-makers are more concerned with how these business decisions will affect their ROI, finances and future growth.

The aim is to expand your business’ audience whilst developing brand affinity and driving sales by appealing to other businesses who have a need for your product or service.

There are many different types of B2B marketing that your business can use, the majority of which are similar to B2C marketing tactics, only the way you create your content is very different.

The main types and channels are:

  • Blogs
    • Updating blogs regularly can create more traffic for your website and keep your audience interested, as long as the topics and forms of blogs you create stay relevant and shareable.
  • Social Media
    • There are so many social media channels out there for you to reach your audience. B2B marketing generally has a LinkedIn focus, but there is no reason you cannot utilize other platforms to research and engage with your customers as much as possible.
  • Email
    • Many businesses utilize email marketing for lead generation and relationship management. This tactic keeps your brand top-of-mind while also enhancing the lead nurturing process; bringing efficiency, meaning to content and actionable results.
  • Videos
    • You can upload and share videos using all of the above formats. This medium is a great way to engage your audience and present the features of your business in an in-depth fashion.
  • SEO
    • By ensuring your site contains the right keywords for your audience, you will be able to rise up in the search engine ranks and create higher website traffic.

As long as your content produced in these formats is aimed at enticing businesses rather than appealing to your usual customers, these channels and techniques can be a great way of promoting your brand to other businesses.

The best approaches for creating a B2B marketing strategy

With so many approaches to B2B marketing available today, it can be difficult to decipher which is the best of the lot.

But there is no one size fits all way of tackling this problem, there are many different ways your business can utilize B2B marketing to attract other organizations to your services.

So, we are going to outline a few different approaches adopted by the best that you can tailor to the needs and functions of your business.

Approach 1

Develop an encompassing vision for your strategy and define your market:

  • Outline specific and achievable business goals.
  • Create a B2B marketing strategy around these goals, so that your primary focus is on ticking them off.
  • Constantly check that your audience is engaged and that sales and marketing are on the same track.
  • Can you actually measure the results of each of your goals?
  • Your audience should be much narrower than that of B2C businesses; conduct research to identify your ideal customers.

Identify possible channel types to run your campaigns:

  • Decide how you will reach your target audience and ensure you know features about your ideal customers.
  • Understand how your audience is spending time online, which social media channels they use the most and how you can offer them products and services that your competitors cannot.
  • Ensure your campaigns advertise the right message; include calls to action and sophisticated language, as the businesses you are appealing to will have a prior understanding of your product or service when it comes to B2B marketing.

Measure results, make adjustments, and go again:

  • Understand why some content works better than others so that you can make future investments in your strategy wisely.
  • The audience is key; use analytics tools to determine where consumers are engaging the most, what channels they are using and focus on these areas in the future.

Approach 2

Identify your ideal audience

  • Develop market segments and try to create smaller groups of potential consumers so you can better identify what each business will be able to get out of your organization.
  • Utilize tools such as Google Analytics to find out more about your target customers in terms of demographic information and their interests that may help you further narrow down your potential customer base.

Develop new content ideas continuously

  • Once you have identified your audience, you need to provide them with topics and content as consistently as possible, by observing what your audience is talking about on social media.
  • There are a number of tools available developed specifically for B2B marketers that you can use to analyze and track keyword searches for you.
  • Use what you already know about your audience to anticipate what they want to read and learn about, your content, especially for B2B marketing, needs to provide an obvious benefit to your audience, otherwise, they will have no need to be engaged with you.

Test and promote your B2B content

  • LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to test with your audience what they want to read and learn about by creating polls and asking questions and generating conversations.
  • By this time, you should have a much clearer idea of what your audience and other businesses are looking for from your organization, and you can begin to promote your brand through as many channels as possible, such as social media, EDM’s, blogs, podcasts, etc.

There are many examples out there of businesses who are have adopted excellent B2B marketing practices. Ultimately, there are many different approaches to B2B marketing that could suit your business, and we have just provided you with a few options today, but it is up to you to decide which of these practices you adopt so that your business can effectively develop a B2B content marketing strategy.