- What Is B2B Content Marketing?
- What Is the Difference Between B2C and B2B Content Marketing?
- What Are the Benefits of B2B Content Marketing?
- How to Get the Best ROI for Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
When it comes to building your brand presence on the internet to attract valuable leads for your B2B business, content marketing offers a high return on your investment. Given that content production is not always a simple or easy task, this can feel like an upward climb. However, delivering a valuable message and making the effort to reach your audience effectively can skyrocket your lead generation for massive returns.
What is content marketing for B2B companies? What are the benefits of B2B content marketing, and how can you develop a successful strategy? We tackle these questions and more in this blog. For more about B2B content marketing at Fullmoon Digital, check out our approach here.
What Is B2B Content Marketing?
Although the term “content marketing” has been around for some time, there is still some confusion about what it actually means. “Content” is such a broad category that it can almost mean anything you want it to, and the practice of “marketing” itself has many faces. One of the key characteristics of content marketing is that it relies upon giving value at low-to-no cost to the consumer in order to secure their trust and eventually their business.
B2B content marketing isn’t the same as advertising. Sure, an ad helps get your name out there, but the viewer of the ad may not inherently gain any more knowledge or entertainment from viewing it. An ad is persuasive and sales-y by design, while content marketing is more informative. On the other hand, simply creating the content isn’t enough; you have to optimize it to show up in search and promote it in the spaces your brand occupies.
For some brands, the key role your content marketing plays is answering common search questions in your field. For others, it’s about providing quirky listicles that are easy to split up and share in Instagram stories, for example. Depending on the market, your content strategy may involve helping your audience recognize a problem (which, of course, your product solves).
There are many paths you can take for your content marketing, and we haven’t even touched the question of what types of content you may want to produce. It’s worth noting that B2B companies have an added layer of responsibility when it comes to effective content marketing, and that is the need to establish authority.
How Is B2B Content Marketing Different From B2C?
When you’re marketing directly to consumers, all you have to do in order to generate a lead is entertain or inform one person; with B2B content marketing, your audience is much more complex, usually a team (or multiple teams) of people with different interests and preferences who all have to agree that your service or product is the best fit.
Because of this, the strategy for B2B content marketing, while very similar in essence to B2C, carries some extra weight. Creating an audience or buyer persona is common practice in copywriting to determine your brand messaging, but in B2B content marketing it’s not as simple as brainstorming, say, what might motivate Tiffany the 34-year-old stay-at-home mom to purchase your fragrance-free all-purpose cleaner.
In order to best position your content for success in generating those B2B leads, your brand must appear as both trustworthy and authoritative. This is perhaps the primary reason why some of the best-performing content for B2B companies is long-form, well-researched blogs or articles. Once you’re positioned as an expert, it’s much easier to convince a B2B audience of their need to look into what your business has to offer.
What Are the Benefits of B2B Content Marketing?
There are many reasons why your B2B company should be prioritizing content marketing, all of which result in a boost to your bottom line. As with much in the world of digital marketing, this change may not happen overnight, but as better content improves your SEO, CTR, name recognition and more, we are confident in saying that you will be able to see a world of difference in your conversions over time.
Here are the three greatest benefits of B2B content marketing and what we see as a successful strategy.
Showing Up in Search
A significant feature of content marketing is SEO, or search engine optimization. Depending on the type of content you create, and where you distribute it (whether on your website, a platform like Youtube or your social media accounts) there are various methods for ensuring that your content will appear in search results when users type in the right keywords.
For most platforms, hitting these keywords strategically and being intentional with other factors like word count, is a big part of successful content marketing. SEO is the backbone of a content strategy, but it’s also essential for generating traffic to your ecommerce site. For more information about how working with the right SEO team creates a breakthrough for your business, be sure to get in touch with the SEO experts at Fullmoon.
Building Brand Awareness
Showing up in search is one thing; what comes next is perhaps even better. With high-quality content, you can expect to build a following over time that recognizes your name and expertise. The more people interact with and share your work, the better, and in order to keep the ball rolling, you can’t get complacent.
Not only does a good content marketing strategy involve creating the content, you have to promote it too. Additionally, you can’t just generate one longform article about your product, promote it for a year and call it good. Maintaining a high level of trust and awareness requires you to keep creating. Explore new angles your competitors are missing, show that you understand nuance, anticipate the needs of your audience and speak to them. Quality content marketing comes down to showing up again and again with the answers your audience is looking for, which brings us to our third and most important benefit.
Generating Quality Leads
You guessed it, the main reason to invest in content marketing is your bottom line. High quality leads for your business are sitting within reach, and you can both attract and convert them with the content you provide.
For example, content that is optimized for search is much more likely to draw in new viewers to your site or profile. Because of the nature of search, the viewers who discover your content this way are also some of the warmest leads you could leave an impression upon. They are searching for answers, and if your content provides them with what they need, you can bet that they will trust you over your competitor.
Most successful content also makes conversion easier for viewers by providing links, resources, CTAs encouraging them to get in touch, and more. For web content, adding backlinks (which take them to another piece of content on your site) helps the user stay on your website longer, developing a deeper understanding of your business and its values.
Content marketing is an excellent and highly sought-after avenue for growth, but to be successful, it requires a solid strategy, a dedicated team to keep the ball rolling, and the right insights and research. Which is why our recommendation comes down to making sure you work with an agency you can trust.
How to Get the Best ROI on Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy With Fullmoon Digital
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of B2B content marketing, you may be eager to get started. However, before we wrap up, there are a few factors worth considering before taking the plunge into content marketing:
- Focus on Quality. The internet is cluttered with content that fails to provide users with both the information and the value that they are looking for. If the content you create falls into this bucket, it’s likely to get lost in the mix and your content marketing strategy may not be as successful as you hoped.
- Promote Effectively. Distribution is an essential piece of the content puzzle. SEO is one way to ensure web searchers find your work, but your brand identity on social media and other platforms play a role here too. Creating content gives you something to post about; posting about your content will boost its performance. They work in tandem, so make sure you have the infrastructure to support both sides of the coin.
- Review and Adjust Constantly. Measuring the performance of your content is an integral part of your content marketing. How is your click-through rate? Do your titles need to be improved? Your graphics? Are you showing up in enough searches or do you need to revisit your keywords? All of these numbers can be a challenge to both measure and analyze without the right support, and that’s where we come in.
At Fullmoon Digital, we help you create and showcase content in a way that boosts your visibility, web traffic, clicks, ROAS and more. How? By working tirelessly from the ground up to study your brand and audience, create the content you need to reach them, and leaning on our experts to keep your content showing at the top of search again and again. Discover more about our process here.