Content marketing involves using various forms of content such as blogs, case studies, videos, podcasts, etc., to meet multiple business goals. These goals include spreading brand awareness, generating leads, earning revenues and profit, etc. This blog will discuss the steps in developing effective B2B content marketing strategies.
The key to your digital marketing strategies’ success lies in creating the right content for the right audience on the right platform. Regardless of SEO, social media marketing, or other digital marketing methods, content is crucial in promoting a business to relevant audiences. You can consult a digital marketing agency about developing effective business marketing strategies. However, to ensure they help meet your goals, you must create appropriate content accordingly.
6 Steps to B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Marketers admitted that setting a content marketing strategy has helped them a great deal to promote their businesses and achieve various short-term and long-term goals. Let’s discuss further the basic steps in developing an effective B2B content marketing strategy.
Identify Your Audience
The first step to developing content marketing strategies for your business is identifying your audience. Unless you are clear about your audience types, you cannot create relevant content for them to pique their interest, engage them with your brand and eventually convert them into paying customers.
In this regard, you need to build a buyer persona. You can develop a buyer persona based on your existing customer database and competitive analysis. They are dummy characters that represent the characteristics of your ideal customers. The factors you should consider about creating a buyer persona are – demographics, behaviour, goals, challenges, interests, spending power and habits, etc. Once you determine these factors, you can create relevant and valuable content that resonates with your audience.
Fix Marketing Goals
When creating strategies, you need to fix goals against which you will measure the success of your marketing campaigns. Now that you have identified your audiences, it is time to decide on ‘What’ you wish them to perform. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletters on following you on social media? Do you want to get more ‘engagement’ for your content? Do you want to generate leads or improve sales and conversion? The answer to these questions will help you determine the content types you need to create for your audience.
Moreover, you need to set up a S.M.A.R.T goal to improve the efficiency of your content marketing strategy.
- Specific – you had to be clear about your goals. For instance, it can be a particular percentage increase in web traffic, subscribers, followers, etc.
- Measurable – Your goals should be measurable
- Attainable – You need to measure your past strategies to find out what has worked in your favour. For instance, if social media marketing has effectively helped increase web traffic or followers, create more social media content to achieve the ‘specific’ and ‘measurable’ goals. That way, your goals will be attainable, and you need no guessing.
- Relevant – You need to determine whether your content marketing strategy aligns with your goals.
- Time-bound – You need to set a deadline to achieve your goals.
Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
Now that you have a clear idea about your goals and audience types let’s focus on your audience’s location. By location, we mean their position in the sales funnel.
A typical sales funnel has three stages – awareness, consideration and conversion.
- Awareness – At this stage, you need to create content that addresses your audience’s pain points and drives audiences who are facing similar issues.
- Consideration – At this stage, you must create content that offers solutions to their problems.
- Conversion – At this stage, you must create brand-specific content to help your audiences understand how your products and services can solve their issues.
Understanding your buyer’s journey also helps you build your buyer persona. It enables you to offer your audiences the answers they are looking for through your content.
Content Types
You need to present a wide variety of content to use in different types of digital marketing methods for B2B. The most common content types that usually work in favour of B2B are – blogs, articles, infographics, videos, original research, case studies, webinars, podcasts, whitepaper, Ebooks, polls, quizzes, email newsletters, etc.
Along with various content formats, you need to focus on topics on which you need to create content. You can use content curation tools to identify popular topics in your niche and create content accordingly.
Moreover, competitor analysis also helps identify content gaps. You can check the topics on which your competitors are creating content, and you may add similar topics to your future content list.
An SEO agency Singaporecan perform keyword research for your business. They further can guide you in analysing the keywords to identify the popular ones in your niche. Additionally, they can use Google’s search console to find new search terms and phrases related to the keywords. It further will provide you with various topic ideas on which you can create your future content.
When creating content, besides selecting trending topics, you should also create content on evergreen topics. The reason is the latter stays relevant to drive traffic throughout the year.
Select Distribution Platforms
Next, you need to select platforms to promote your content. In this regard, along with your website, you can use various social media platforms to promote your content. In this regard, a social media marketing agency can help you develop proper business marketing strategies using different social media channels where your audiences are most active. Besides, depending on the type of platform and audience it caters to, they can guide you regarding the type of content you should create to improve engagement, generate leads, and even increase sales. Promoting the same content on cross-platform can also help drive more web traffic whom you can convert to leads and businesses.
Measure Your Content Performance
How will you know whether your B2B content marketing strategies are effective?
You need to measure their performance.
Did they succeed in achieving the S.M.A.R.T goals we discussed earlier? In this regard, you need to consider various metrics depending on the digital marketing methods for which you have created content.
Takeaway
Content Marketing allows you to establish your business as an authority in your industry and drive relevant audiences and potential leads. Your content plays a critical role in engaging your audience and earning their trust, which helps you gain a positive brand reputation, increase sales and grow your business. Therefore, following the steps mentioned above, you can develop effective B2B content marketing strategies.
Elevan August Media is a boutique digital marketing agency Singapore. They can help develop effective digital marketing strategies and create appropriate content to meet your various business goals. Feel free to consult them for your different digital marketing needs.
