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Intro to B2B Content Marketing

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Outbound marketing is a reality and generates results to but no one wants to receive annoying cold calls & spam emails. Even you didn’t want to bombard with advertisements than why should others? Ad blocking grew 41% in 12 months with 198 million active ad blocker users. It’s challenging to attract new customers and it becomes even more in B2B situation.

So what’s the solution?

As every other vertical Content marketing will save your day. 91% B2B marketer use content marketing & it’s surprisingly more than B2C marketer. Every marketing professional know that content marketing is less expensive, trackable & profitable than other means of marketing. Content marketing not only directly increase sales. It can be used in an early stage to increase brand awareness.

B2B content marketing Trends according to ContentMarketingInstitute

  • 70% of marketers are producing more content this year
  • 92 percent use social media content as a tactic, Followed by newsletter with 83 percent.
  • According to 84% marketer brand awareness is an important goal for content marketing
  • 58% content marketer measure success with website traffic.
  • 91% Enterprise Content Marketers used LinkedIn to distribute content & 61% says it’s effective.

Despite Content marketing is growing phenomena but still lack professionals. It became rarer in B2B. B2B content marketing is much more difficult than B2C. It has more variable and decision makers involved than B2C. So before moving to B2B content marketer one should be experienced in B2C. Not every content marketer has the ability to properly create & execute strategy.

The successful content marketer has some highly effective habits. These habits divers them from unsuccessful ones.  As a content marketer where do you stand? How many habits do you have?

Content Marketers Habits

Documentation mindset,

Devil lies in the detail, so before starting anything keep focus on details. The best way to avoid a long-term problem is documentation. Document each and everything possible from start to end. It will help to move the idea from your head to execution.

Love to get advice,

No one is perfect so having some expert opinions will be a good start. With experts I mean domain experts (vertical expert), Product experts (product managers), and Business owner. After all business owner know more than you about their business. Even advice from customer care department will act as a cherry on a cake.

Researcher Mind,

Do you have knowledge of every vertical?  No, you didn’t. Your survival depends on research. From strategy creation to execution each step in content marketing required extensive research. While doing research on any phase keep notes, screenshots & references. It will not only help to create strategy but then again help you in adding credibility to your content.

Good at storytelling,

Storytelling is a must have habit for every successful content marketer. Every successful brand has its story, so should yours.  Content marketers are good in creating brand stories to attract customers. After all content marketing revolves around a brand story.

Good Planners,

Not only content marketer but good planners are successful in every field.  They plan ahead so as you. To be a successful content marketer, you should always plan at least 3 weeks ahead.  It’s always a good strategy to preempt than sorry. Preemption only possible if you plan ahead.

Networking superstar,

Networking with industry experts will help in two ways. First shaping content strategy for niche. 2nd help you to spread your content on the wider audience.  So a good content marketer = networking superstar.

If you already have these traits congratulation. You are either successful B2B content marketer or will be in near future. So you should be stop reading this article here if you aren’t or want to polish your skill stay with me.

B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing isn’t random post here and there it moves around strategically crafted strategy. 94% businesses are doing content marketing. But sadly there marketing is nothing more than 1,2 posts on their blog every week or month. Strategy word seems bit scary but your job is to create less scary strategy. less scary strategy=less difficult to execute.

So the first step is to simplify your strategy (:P)

Successful B2B content marketing strategy checklist

•    Goal oriented

Everyone have their goals, without this life is worthless. Do you want to achieve a certain level of success in your life! ie want to be successful B2B content marketer can be your life goal. Like the life, every content marketing strategy has goal. Goal can be anything ranging from leads capturing to product sale. It can be certain level of revenue stream to profit margin. In either case you should have a clear idea of Goals, before even start drafting rough content marketing strategy.

•    Clear marketing needs

A marketing strategy must have a clear idea of the requirement to execute it.

o    Resources (writers, researcher, designer etc)

o    Decision-making power

o    Budgeting

o    Timeframe

•    Accurate buyer persona

The difference between successful & unsuccessful campaign is buyer persona.  Try to make accurate buyer persona as much as possible. It will help in content themeing & topic modeling. You can use this free buyer persona template to save your time.

•    Brand story

Some experts put storytelling outside content strategy and mold strategy around it. But I prefer to put storytelling in a part of content strategy. So it saves time aligning with content strategy. Storytelling is an art & science at the same time. As I said earlier good content marketer have a habit of storytelling. There are many resources available online on storytelling.

•    Have editorial Calendar

Content strategy without an editorial calendar! Don’t even dare to do so. Apologies to be harsh but if you make this mistake it will ruin all your effort & I don’t want this. An editorial calendar helps you in planning ahead. It saves the pain of brainstorming content ideas on runtime. The best part, it makes you consistent & accountable.

•    Good Content Theme/topic molding

Align your content ideas with persona. There are many boring B2B niches where brainstorming content ideas are difficult. The tendency to success of these ideas are near to impossible. In such case use topic molding or shoulder niche.

Shoulder niche: A niche that is closely related to your site’s main topic.

•    Promotion Channels

You have amazing B2B content strategy & have a plan of publishing/Pray technique. My friend this scenario will only give ——– in return. So a Good content marketing strategy must have promotion channels. It  clearly stated sites, search engines & social networks along with influencer. In simple words, you need a content promotional strategy as a subset of content marketing strategy.

•    Strong Conversion funnel

B2B marketing has much more complex buyer cycle than B2C. A successful content strategy accommodates buyer on every phase of buyer cycle.  Write down buyer stages and separately create content ideas for each stage. Trust me conversion will come like magic. You just need to be in shoes of the buyer in each stage.

•    Tendency to automate

We never have required resource available. So a good B2B content marketing strategy should have the tendency to automate. It will save time, resources & eventually money. 73% marketer used automation tools. There isn’t any hard & fast rule to automate, as every b2b niche have a different marketing strategy. Divide every task of content marketing and automate individually.  Don’t try to automate on start rather automate it with time.

•    Way to measure & testing

Content marketing is a complex to achieve success. A good strategy have KPIs to track success.  A Good content marketing strategy has points to measure and variation testing. We can’t only rely on our main goal tracking.

You can use this free template B2B content marketing.

Tools

There are some sort of tool available for task of content marketing. Ranging from complete B2B marketing automation tools to task-oriented tools. Below are some famous content marketing tools, You can chooses which suits best to your needs.

Full automation

Percolate

A complete automation tools trusted by the master card to visa & Unilever to U.S. Cellular. It will streamline the content marketing and align team members to take part. With full company, participation leads to full throttle marketing activity.

ÜberFlip

Trusted by visual.ly uberflip works seamlessly  from content creation to measure KPI.  As Nail Patel said

“If your content strategy doesn’t include Uberflip, you’re missing a huge opportunity to continue the conversation. hubs open the door to deeper engagement and understanding of your customer.”

IFFTT

It’s one of my favorite tool and a secret weapon in my arsenal.  You can automate anything from it either using existing recipes or creating your own.

Content Distribution

Buffer

Schedule your social activity on all channels ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn. As timing is the success while sharing to your audience. No one sees your great piece of content @ 1 am.

Little Bird

If you do not have good content reach want to

Do you have a small reach of content distribution? Want to increase reach? want to find influence in your niche? Little bird is a platform that helps in finding, engaging with real influencers on any topic.

Followgen

Targeting tool that allows business to find a meaningful audience on the social web. With the goal of getting your content in front of the right audience. It’s a strong fusion of a targeting system and social advertising.

Edgar

Crafted an awesome piece share once and forgets about it. That’s not how content marketing works. Edgar automates sharing old content at regular intervals without looks spamming the feed.

Content Creation

Google keyword planner

Use Google free keyword planner to validate your content idea. As their users already searching for the content you are creating or you have to push to keep it visible.

Visual.ly

If an infographic is a part of a content strategy and you didn’t have designer no worries. Visual.ly will help you in creating a stunning infographic. Use its library for inspiration or find infographic experts from the marketplace.

PowToon

Need a professional touch in your pronation powtoon will saves the day.

B2B Content Marketing Examples and Case Studies

Some of my friends think content marketing has little to no value when it comes to B2B space. I strongly disagree with them. According to Demand metric, Content marketing generate 3 times more leads than traditional marketing. Its true for B2B market as well. To convince your peers about a value of content marketing in b2b space here are some inspiring case studies. I intentionally added big brands to emphases on my point. If these brands have success with content marketing than why shouldn’t yours.

Cisco:

It requires no introduction but if you still need. Cisco system is a multinational technology company which specialized in networking equipment. It’s a worldwide leader when it comes to networking. Almost 85% of internet traffic travel through Cisco system.

Case Study

IBM:

Telemarketing & email marketing are core activities of IBM to attract new customers for both software & hardware products.  But when the incorporate social media & content marketing, see the result yourself.

Case Study

Hubspot:

As you are learning B2B content marketing you probably know about HubSpot. It Focused social media on solving customers problems as a way to earn leads. But you know how the achieve this level of success and still growing?

Case study

SAP:

A multinational software company that creates enterprise level software’s. These software’s manages the complex business process.  SAP has more than 250,000 customers in 150+ countries with a presence in 130 countries.

Case study

AT&T:

AT&T is American based telecommunication corporation & second largest mobile telephone in the USA. Content marketing done miracle for them read it yourself

Case Study

The post Intro to B2B Content Marketing appeared first on SEOorb.


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