“Content marketing is the art of creating, curating, and distributing valuable content, combined with the science of measuring its impact on awareness, lead generation, and customer acquisition.” – Grande Guide to Content Marketing
B2B content marketing (or business to business content marketing) can often seem intimidating, often because the difference between B2B content marketing and B2C (business to consumer) content marketing is unclear. We’ve talked about content marketing in the past (check out our Brown Bag Business chat with Tess Wittler for a great discussion about what content marketing is), and we’ve defined what B2B marketing is (click here to read the entire article) but you may be wondering how content marketing is different for businesses.
How B2B Content Marketing Is Different From (And Similar To) B2C
The main difference between B2B content marketing and B2C is that you have a clearly defined audience, an audience which you can often narrow down to a few dozen individual businesses. Instead of focusing on a fairly broad consumer persona, you can focus very narrowly on the exact type of business you work with. Because of this, your content can be more targeted than is possible for B2C.
Furthermore, you often know some of the people who work at the businesses you’re marketing to personally, so you can really narrow that content down to something that can be specifically helpful to them. But just because they work as a business doesn’t mean that the form of the content has to be markedly different from B2C content.
Many people think of content marketing as targeted at consumers; you write blog posts or articles with interesting information relevant to your business to draw consumers in; you write Facebook or Twitter posts with links to exciting content or ideas related to what you sell. But when it comes to B2B content marketing, you suddenly feel like everything has to be different.
“Oh, we’re marketing to a business though! We need it to sound more professional.” What you may forget is that a business isn’t some large, faceless entity – a business is made up of people, people who are perhaps inclined to act more rationally than your average consumer (click here to read our article on what B2B marketing is for clarification on this point), but people nonetheless. People don’t want to read dry, stale documents about quarterly earnings – they want to read interesting, informative content, just like consumers.
What Type Of Content You Should Consider
While there are many types of content marketing out there, you want to focus on a chosen few, especially when it comes to B2B content marketing:
- Blogs & articles
- Newsletters & targeted email
- Whitepapers & reports
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Infographics
None of these types of content is better or worse than any other; they’re just different types of content that you can use for different purposes and target towards different audiences. While you may feel overwhelmed at all the options, remember that you can reuse content you make in one format in another format.
Repurposing content will allow you to target different audiences or simply get your message out several different times without seeming too repetitive, and having a mix of content will help you reach more people because not everyone learns the same way or likes the same type of content.
People who will spend 30 minutes reading a whitepaper might balk at a 5 minute video, while others who won’t spend 30 seconds reading an article will spend 10 minutes pouring over an interesting infographic. You can’t know exactly what type of content your audience prefers (without exhaustive surveys), so it’s good to have a variety.
Why You Need to Use B2B Content Marketing
To put it simply, content marketing can lead to the holy grail of marketing – word of mouth. If you had a way to get other businesses to start talking about your business, then wouldn’t you want to put a good deal of time, effort, and money into doing so? That’s what content marketing to other businesses can do for you. If you can get other businesses excited about the content you’re creating and distributing, then you can get them talking about you and spreading the word about how great you are.
Not to mention that other businesses have a vested interest in spreading the word about you if you’re consistently providing quality content. If you have great content that they can share with their customers or other businesses, then sharing it can help them generate buzz about themselves.
Perhaps even more importantly, this can be one way to seek a partnership with a business you’re interested in working with. When you continually share another business’ content and vice versa, they’re going to notice what you’re doing for them. A conversation that begins with the sharing of mutual content interests or posts could turn into a meeting, and eventually, a partnership.
Why B2B Content Marketing is a Good Return on Your Investment
Remember, your content needs to be good in order to get people’s attention; there’s a lot of content out there, and a lot of it is very, very good. But, once you get your content up to snuff, you can get a significant return on your investment.
In fact, according to an article by Kapost, “Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers.” That’s a huge increase in site traffic (which is a major goal of content marketing), but it brings up an important point – you need to be a content leader for this to work effectively, which means you must invest in content marketing.
And the other guys are investing. According to the experts over at the Content Marketing Institute, the average amount of a marketing budget that companies invest in content marketing is 28%, and the most effective companies invest 37% of their marketing budget in content marketing (you can read the entire article about content trends for the past year here). So, how much are you spending on content marketing?
Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy and Metrics
If you’re going to do content marketing, you need to do it well. And, to do anything well, you need a strategy. A well-defined strategy with clear goals (and clear metrics to measure them with) is critical to successful content marketing.
You also need to know what businesses you’re marketing to and even who you are marketing to in those businesses. You might want to consider making a persona of the ideal business you are marketing to in order to help you further define your goals.
Resources to Help You Improve Your Content Marketing
You have a lot of options out there to help you with content marketing for your business. First, check out copyblogger.com. They’ve got all kinds of resources that can help you learn how to do B2B content marketing right.
You should also watch this video on content marketing with Tess Wittler about how a small business can do content marketing, especially because a lot of it applies to B2B content marketing. For even more content marketing help, click here to sign up for our mailing list. You’ll get weekly articles and tips on how to improve and strengthen not only your content marketing, but all aspects of your marketing strategy in general.
If you’re still struggling with content marketing, call us at 940-312-7842 or click here to set up a consultation today.