Businesses usually struggle with strong marketing narratives that showcase their values. The inability to convey brand promises and vision sinks any business credibility and creates enormous friction with the target audience. No company can survive without having a strong portfolio that describes its achievements, operations, and inclusivity to the target market.
B2B content marketing has been here for a long time now. There is no hidden truth of its relevancy and presence in the digital marketing realm. Content has always been the king, and its creative use cases have helped brands capture their target audience. Studies show that 74% of businesses convey improved lead generation through content marketing.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
When it comes to content marketing plans, brands need to go through certain measures and practices that work towards the common goal of success.
- Decide B2B Content Goals
Before creating a content marketing strategy, first decide the content marketing goals and objectives. Identify how content will add value to business goals. Content marketing strategy is used for different purposes. Some use it to earn initial brand awareness, some use it to accelerate their lead generation growth and some are looking to improve their conversion rates.
Defining objectives and goals will make it easier for marketers to devise their content marketing strategy. Brands can focus on dedicated content formats when aiming for specific goals. For instance, if brands are looking to earn brand awareness, they will focus on creating SEO-optimized blogs, articles, and short-form video content. Brands mainly use SEO content services in this regard.
When goals are decided and set clearly, it becomes easier for marketers to measure their performance and results from campaigns. Given this, brands can set (Key Performance Indicators) KPIs and success metrics to analyze the performance of their content campaigns. In the above example, businesses can use KPIs to see how many users visit their blog. They can also analyze the bounce rate of their website.
- Create Your Buyer Persona
The real purpose of content marketing is to provide what businesses’ ideal customers are looking for. Ideally, every content piece or format is displayed as a helping guide for users who promise to add value to their lives and solve queries. Therefore, to create content that solves audience problems and resonates with their pain points, start understanding their challenges. See what their current needs are and how their branded content can provide solutions to their current problems.
Brands need to understand the depth of the target audience and how each target audience base can be segmented into different audience groups. Brands need to create specific content that profoundly resonates with varying groups of audiences. Creating buyer personas will help marketers create different types of content materials that will play their part in creating resonance with different audiences.
- Create Content For Every Marketing Funnel
The B2B buying journey is much longer and more complicated than Business-to-Consumer (B2C). Brands must create solid and personalized content at every stage of the buyer’s journey and manage every stage of their marketing channel to ensure cohesiveness.
- Top-of-the-funnel content: This stage works to bring the target prospects’ attention. Marketers work on targeting those customers who are in search of a solution to their problems. This funnel involves content formats like blog posts, social media posts, and videos.
- Middle-of-the-funnel content: At this stage, prospects have acknowledged the importance of products and services and are looking to explore options. Brands use strategies to convert cold leads into warm leads and outsource technical writing to create thought leadership and trust. Webinars, ebooks, and case studies are part of the middle-of-the-funnel content.
- Bottom of the funnel content: This is the stage where brands need to jump on taking the opportunity to convert leads into customers. Consultations, product workshops, and free trial proposals are included in BoFu content.
- Expand Content Distribution and Networking
Many businesses hire content writing agencies due to their knack for not only creating effective content but also distributing it to suitable mediums and channels. Valuable content is non-negotiable, but its quality is useless when it doesn’t reach its potential prospects. Therefore, brands utilize social media to distribute content and use organic and paid social strategies to promote content. Moreover, email marketing and influencer marketing can also prove to be effective marketing channels for the distribution and promotion of content.
Wrapping Up
Many brands outsource content writing services to market the brand’s presence and voice across the right marketing channels. B2B content marketing is a long lead-generation process. Brands need to handle all the funnel stages precisely. From defining goals and buyer persona to distributing content, brands create effective marketing strategies to achieve the desired goals
