If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, you know how important it is to have a content strategy that’s aligned with your company’s mission. If you’re just getting started with content marketing, it can be tough to know where to begin. Even for non-beginners, it can be a challenge to come up with new content marketing ideas to fill your editorial calendar month after month.
Not sure what type of content to create? You’ve come to the right place. Our guide below will help give you a starting point for creating a successful blog that achieves your business objectives while bringing heaps of value to your readers.
Don’t forget to follow Fullmoon Digital on LinkedIn to keep up with the latest industry news and updates to our B2B content marketing blog!
- What Is B2B Content Marketing?
- How to Get Started With a B2B Content Blog
- 5 Ways to Generate Content Marketing Ideas
Back to the Basics: What Is B2B Content Marketing?
If you clicked on this blog, you probably know what B2B content marketing is. At least, hypothetically. This type of marketing focuses on creating and distributing content that is relevant to other businesses, and the goal of a B2B content marketing strategy sets it apart from B2C content marketing, for example.
The goal of B2B content marketing is to build relationships and drive sales, and this is important to keep in mind when generating your content. It means that in order to be successful as a B2B content marketer, you must first understand the needs and pain points of your target audience. Then, your focus should be on creating content that addresses those needs. Finally, your B2B content must be distributed across the right channels so that your audience can discover it and gain value from it.
B2B content marketing can take many different forms, including blog posts, infographics, eBooks, white papers, and more. If this is your first venture into the world of content marketing, a blog is often the best place to start.
To go above and beyond with your B2B blog, you need to have a reliable strategy for coming up with topic ideas so that your content can be consistent and valuable to your audience. That’s why we’ve put together this list of content marketing ideas for B2B marketers, including types of content that will help you reach your objectives.
How to Get Started With a B2B Content Blog
When you are starting out with a B2B content blog, there are two pieces of information for you to determine. First, you need to choose a focus area for your blog. What industry trends or topics are you passionate about? What challenges do your target customers face?
The second big factor in creating your blog has to do with your brand. What sets you apart from your competitors? Do you approach problems in a unique way? Think about your voice, perspectives, and message that you and your team bring to the table.
Once you’ve chosen a focus area and the angle you want your brand to take, come up with a list of potential blog post topics that would be helpful for your target audience. Then, you can start creating high-quality content that will educate and engage your readers.
Easy, peasy, right? Not always.
Sometimes, brainstorming content marketing ideas is one of the hardest parts of the process, especially in certain niches where you may feel like there isn’t much to write about. If you’re feeling stuck, keep reading to see our top five methods for generating new ideas for B2B content. (And you can check out the rest of our content toolkit here!)
5 Ways to Generate Content Marketing Ideas for B2B Companies
To build trust and credibility with your readers, your blog needs to produce content on a reliable schedule and have a consistently high level of quality. In short, your content needs to be on brand, not too salesy, educational, entertaining, and ultimately, drive engagement on both your website and other platforms. That can put a lot of pressure on your content team to come up with topics that always deliver.
Here is our list of the top five ways we come up with content ideas at Fullmoon. Of course, this list is not exhaustive and it may not work for every brand. However, it will give you a jumping off point for getting your editorial calendar filled and your B2B content strategy into production.
1. Refer to Your Company Mission and Goals
Consider your mission statement your north star; if you are lost, it’s where you should turn to find your way back on the right path. Even if your values are more symbolic than tangible, you can use them to guide the story that you want your blog to tell.
At Fullmoon, for example, we have a short and sweet tagline that reads: “Passion. People. Performance.” When the route to our objective is clouded, we know we can refer to that motto to get us on track by asking questions related to those three words. What are our clients passionate about? How do we put the focus on people as an anti-agency agency? What kind of educational content can we provide to improve the performance of our clients?
If you have very specific goals, such as building your email list, think about directing your blog content toward getting readers to sign up. What can they expect from your email newsletter? What benefit is in it for them? Write a blog post about the special VIP treatment and special offers your email readers receive and provide a preview of the email format. Make sure to always include a call to action at the end for them to sign up right away!
2. Use Industry News to Inform New Topics
One of our favorite pastimes is scrolling LinkedIn to discover new trends and drama in the digital marketing industry. In fact, we have a weekly blog series all about the latest gossip–uhh, we mean, innovations–in our field called The Wolves Den. Because there is always news to talk about, it feels as though we will never be able to run out of content ideas for that blog series in particular.
Not only is there a treasure trove of potential topics, but blogging about news can help you position yourself as an industry expert who understands the moment, provides relevant info, is prepared for oncoming change, and more. Additionally, there is an SEO-related benefit to having both evergreen and time-sensitive keywords on your website. It’s truly a win all around for content teams.
3. Seek Feedback From Your Audience
If the purpose of your content is to engage your audience, why not go directly to your readers for input? If you already have a community built, whether on your socials, an email list, or even just frequent buyers on your site or clients that you’ve had for a long time, consider reaching out. You may be surprised by the topic ideas or questions they come back with.
You can gather feedback many different ways: an email survey, a form pop-up on your website, a poll on your Twitter account or Instagram story. If you have a comment section anywhere, like on Youtube or your online storefront, consider scanning it for content ideas.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that your content should deliver value, so focus on gaps in knowledge that new content can fill and help your readers use your product more effectively.
4. Refresh and Repurpose Old Content
Obviously if you are new to content marketing, it may take some time to populate your website with enough blog posts to be able to revisit past topics. However, even as you write new blogs, it can be incredibly helpful to keep your previous blogs in mind and determine ways to weave them all together.
Consider each blog post as an individual product that you have delivered to your audience. If a product is no longer satisfactory, it should be revisited and updated, and the same thing should go for your content. If the information in a former post is now out of date, take some time to make edits and relaunch the post with some refreshed graphics.
Even though refreshing a post takes some time, it may be less time overall than creating something brand new. Repurposing the old content helps you extend the reach of the hours spent on the product the first time around, giving you a better ROI for your content production. It also helps your backlog maintain cohesiveness with your brand as it evolves.
5. Measure Performance for Continued Growth
Finally, look at your blog analytics to figure out what is working, and then create a game plan to build upon that growth. One of the key pillars of our role as digital marketers is to analyze data, identify areas for improvement, and fine-tune our targeting to ensure the performance of our content remains at a satisfactory level.
You may be surprised by what topics are performing the best in search or which ones get the most clicks on your social channels. Are there ways you can expand on those well performing topics? Can you turn them into a series or into another form of content, like a downloadable infographic? These questions can be fun to play around with and are an integral part to a successful B2B content marketing strategy.
Supercharge Your B2B Content Marketing With Fullmoon Digital
When it comes to measuring and scaling the performance of your B2B content marketing, it can feel like a grind to sift through all the data and create a plan on your own. That’s why we partner with our clients to help make the roadmap clear.
Contact our team of experts today if you’re looking to take your content to the next level.
