Posted by An Overview of B2B Content Marketing
Traditional B2B marketing techniques have proven to be less effective than inbound marketing because of the nature of the message. Disrupting your audience is a key characteristic of outbound marketing while inbound marketing aims to solve a challenge or pain point that the customer is facing when looking for the solution. If your prospect is looking for a solution online, this is the ideal opportunity to improve brand awareness and increase conversions.
Some of the goals of B2B content marketing are to help your target audience know about your brand, develop the information they have about the brand, and allow the consumer to see the benefits of using your product or service. Over time, the goal of bringing leads to your business changes and turning a potential customer into a qualified lead. What distinguishes B2B content from B2C is that it must have some form of use for the reader. If the reader is not able to apply what he has learned, B2B content has not reached its goal. There are exceptions to this rule but the main goal is to be seen as a resource for other professionals in your target industry.
Impact of COVID-19 on B2B Content Consumption
The impact of the Roman coronavirus continues to be massive worldwide. With the advent of extended furloughs, closure of brick-and-mortar stores, and a possible recession, B2B marketing is more determined to keep its head above water. Coming up with a profitable content strategy has become all the more difficult as a content marketing agency has very limited options to discover right now.
Not being able to operate in the physical world has turned our focus to the internet – which is now full of online activities 24/7. This disruptive spike in internet usage has put marketing in a bit of a dilemma as they address COVID-19 through content marketing.
Needless to say, it is a rough time for marketers to understand how the market is changing in real time. To better understand it, we collected a more accurate, vendor-agnostic analysis of how content consumption has disturbed the B2B space.
Packed with content ideas, insights and concrete consumer data, the aim of this article is to provide marketers with a crystal clear view of the volatile market, to understand how to churn out good content, to test any content marketing effort navigating their online business in the new standard.
Mistakes to Avoid in B2B Content
Content Distribution – You cannot justify your efforts in writing an excellent piece of content if you are not proactive with your content distribution. And this is the stage where most companies fail to build their content marketing programs. If you do not even promote your content on the most popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter every day, your audience is bound to lose.
SEO – SEO and content marketing go hand in hand in the era of digital marketing. You can ask your audience who uses the two together. It is a deadly combination to beat your competitors when done right. The biggest issue with most businesses is to mention that they are completely separate in individual aspects of digital marketing, but that is not the case. While creating content just for SEO purposes is a mistake but the marketers should also refrain from ignoring SEO completely.
Missing Plan – Always remember, your job is to create a meaningful content asset that goes far beyond traditional marketing tactics and fits perfectly with your buyer persona. This can be in the form of a blog post, visual content, search engine ads, and more content type that fits your business requirements.
For successful content marketing, you need to have a brand awareness plan to create a documented content marketing strategy that fits with your organizational goals. This can make the difference between success or failure in quality content. It’s always important to make sense of what, how, why, when and where you are doing a content audit. Without answering these questions, your content marketing plan is unfocused and therefore ineffective.
Best Practices to write B2B Content
1) Think of The Audience – This is the single most important point you need to take with you. Your audience is the only reason you create content at all and therefore they are your priority when it comes to copywriting. No matter what it is you write and the reason behind it, the fundamental reason is to satisfy them, it can be by answering them, entertaining them, encouraging them to buy a product and meeting their needs or the like. As a result, you should always think and refer to what it is that they want, why you are creating the content and make sure that every information article in the article addresses this and fits this purpose.
2) Write For Long Tail Keywords – A common mistake that copywriters make is to write content for short, highly competitive keywords. For example, say you would have been a rare vinyl seller after creating custom items as best for cleaning and caring for vinyl.
Although ‘clean vinyl records’ has 1,000 average monthly searches, ‘how to clean vinyl records with soap and water’ has 40 average monthly searches which means much less competition and a greater chance of ranking you well for this keyword.
If you can create a piece that is optimized for this keyword, if you have a high search rank, you can start creating more pieces of content, maybe it’s videos, social media images or so on, the target ‘clean vinyl’ records’ specifically.
This way, because you already have high authority and relevancy ranking on search engines for the long tail keyword, you have more chances of ranking for that shorter, more competitive keyword.
3) Complete your keyword research on multiple tools – Just because Google Ads Keyword Planner shows that ‘clean vinyl records’ has the highest searches, does not mean you should drop that information. Discover the web – that’s why it is. Use other tools like BuzzSumo to get title ideas, complete social media searches and see how hashtags are trending.
Take a leaf out of a scientist’s book. They have to do a lot of research, consult different sources of different types, that can be a book, internet, physical experiments and so on, to get a proper understanding of what it is where they are concentrating.
Sources contradict themselves and offer different opinions, so it’s good to see what other people and tools are saying about the keyword or topic you are talking about. Finding your next golden nugget of wisdom is often in the places you don’t visit often, so research over.
4) Know your text structure before you write – Having a strong idea of the format of your post is essential before you start writing. A good structure means that your blog post is SEO optimized, highly readable to your desired audience and so it will read quickly. Something that is becoming more and more important in the online world.
It is known from research that users usually read the title, the first paragraph, the headings, the subtitles and the first sentences of the paragraphs. This is how people learn what your text is and encourage them to keep reading. Take this information on board and run with it.
How to Measure Your Content Marketing Success And ROI
Track Metrics – Collect data that is extremely relevant for your business. Figure out what serves as the most actionable data for you like the number of email subscribers, email engagement rate, event registrations and time spent on your website. You will be able to examine whether the current content outreach strategy is working or not.
Track Conversions – While some metrics are easy to track (like followers on Twitter or traffic on website), they are hardly useful independent of other data. It is important to track the growth on social media as it helps us to look at the anecdotal and trending information which shows us on which platforms most shares and conversion are happening. In 2021, it will be important to track the conversion rates of email subscriptions, topics of interest, and registrations for CMI activities such as content marketing due to the rise of digital marketing activities. This will help in adjusting your content marketing plan and provide enough confidence that you are delivering content as per your readers’ interests.
Take Actions – Content marketing is integral for modern business strategies. To make the most out of your content marketing activities, take relevant actions to improve the metrics. Fine-tune the processes of looking at the email deliverability, opt-outs and completed profiles to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing done by sending an email. Make sure that you evaluate your list of metrics quarterly, bi-annually, or annually to capture the data that best answers your key questions.
Automate the Data Collection Procedure – An automated data collections procedure helps in providing accurate information and eliminating manual time-consuming procedures. Tools like Google Analytics and Salesforce give you an automated dashboard, making the data collection procedure seamless. The best practice is to look at these dashboards each week and update your key performance indicator (KPI) document.
Take Time for Accurate Data Analysis – Collecting data and adding it to a spreadsheet is just the beginning of measuring your performance. After accumulation, you need to analyze the data and understand the areas of improvement needed. Measuring your data from time to time will help you in learning what your audience likes and how you can use that for improving your conversion rates. It will surely lead to impressed prospects, satisfied clients and most importantly a successful management.
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Try it for free.