5 Tips to build an effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy

While B2B and B2C content strategies follow a largely similar approach, the B2B landscape differs from B2C in many ways. On one hand, B2B intent is mainly educating its audience while B2C intent mostly involves engagement through content that can be enjoyed.

For B2B content strategy, there is a high probability that the content strategy will be diverse because the marketing funnel generally involves more stages since the B2B audience is focused on keeping and nurturing the business relationships.

Here are 5 tips that will help you in building an effective B2B content strategy:

1. Create a uniform strategy with well defined objectives

Your content strategy should be uniform. When laying down your content plan, it is essential to focus on creating a common objective so your content is aligned with your goal and doesn’t contradict it.

By having a set of well defined objectives, you can create posts that are in sync with your marketing goal. For instance, if the key goal is to drive traffic through useful content which is not salesy then your strategy must be aligned with the objective and not include anything that is promotional.

Additionally, it is important to focus on the content type that will aptly suit your objective and at the same time, engage your audience.

2. Know your target audience and solve their queries through content

A very crucial aspect of content creation is to understand your audience. Different generations of users may respond differently to the type of content you create. So start by creating buyer personas so you have an effective content plan in place.

While the creation of buyer personas may seem overwhelming, you can start with small steps. Facebook Audience Insights is one great way to build your buyer’s identity and as a result, target them effectively.

Additionally, conducting surveys and interviews can be a great way to come up with first-hand analysis and thereby craft unique content. For advanced research, you can study industry trends and analyze your competitor’s strategies to gain better insight.

Here are a few questions you should be able to answer:

• What influences their buying decision? Does social media play an important role?
• What is the solution they are looking for?
• When evaluating a product/service, what is most important to them?
• What makes people buy from your competitors? What is the unique value offered by their product/service?
• What makes them see a business in a negative light?
• How do they decide the best option?

Buyer personas are crucial to your strategy’s success because the user experience is a crucial determinant of driving better sales.

3. Create content that is relevant to your audience

Once you understand your target audience, you should create content that is relevant to them, content that addresses their pain points in the most friendly way.

So it makes sense to deliver information using those content formats that your audience finds most relevant.

The type of content you use depends on a number of things, especially the generation of audience you are targeting. For instance, memes may not appeal so much to older generations but the young audience will be able to easily relate with them.

Additionally, engagement will not just depend on offering the solutions to problems but going a step beyond to create an interactive layer. This can be done through creating polls, contests etc on social channels.

Here is a tip: Use Ogilvy’s 50-50 rule to write compelling posts.

4. Find the right channel to distribute your content

With the availability of multiple distribution channels for your content, it has become confusing to find the relevant touch points. In this struggle, brands often take a route that encompasses all possible social platforms. This is not the right way to approach your audience.

When you have created content, you must ensure that they are put out on those channels which make the most sense to your users. Additionally, with more channels getting added to the list, there will be a greater need to focus on optimizing for different platforms.

B2B preferred channels differ vastly from B2C. While Facebook is the most important medium for the B2C audience, for B2B users, LinkedIn takes the lead.

5. Mapping out the buyer’s journey before planning your content

B2B buyers look for building long-term relationships with the brand. So your content should help you in achieving that goal.

Before you start out your content strategy, make sure to map out your buyer’s journey so you know at what points you will meet them. This will help in creating content that is more useful for your users.

Mapping this journey is extremely crucial as it helps you optimize the content formats for different stages.

B2B content is information rich but at the same time, it should also be engaging. Additionally, B2B content needs to have an extensive content approach because the marketing funnels for B2B are usually longer than B2C. So your content strategy should optimize the various touch points and effectively engage readers and create a positive consideration effect.