March 29, 2022
Good quality content can help you boost awareness, build trust, and solve your current and potential customers’ problems. Nevertheless, don’t expect to generate any substantial results just by writing the occasional blog every now and then. What you need is a thoroughly-researched, well-designed, highly-targeted content marketing strategy to achieve your goals. A content strategy that is all about getting the right content, to the right people, at the right time and solving their problems. That way, they would want to learn more about your business and what you have to offer.
We all know how things in B2C (business to business) work: two people are usually responsible for a purchase, a seller and a customer. As a result, your targeting can be pretty straightforward as you’re addressing the decision-maker directly and trying to grab a single person’s attention for each sale.
In B2B (business to consumer) things can get a bit more complicated than that, as the decision-making process may include various employees, each specialising in a different field. And as you can imagine, impulse purchases are quite rare in the corporate world. As a result, B2B and B2C content marketing require entirely different strategies.
So how can you create a successful B2B content strategy to attract the right decision-makers and set your business apart from the competition?
It might sound quite obvious but clearly defining your goals is the first and most important step of a successful B2B content marketing strategy. First and foremost, your goals should be realistic. Be honest with yourself and your team about what you can actually achieve. Nevertheless, don’t sell yourself short; make your goals challenging but still possible to achieve.
Start by looking at current data and trends that will help you understand where are you now, how’s your competition is doing and what is actually achievable. Then write down everything. Have a detailed record of what you want to achieve and how you intend to achieve it, assign tasks and share the document with your team, so everyone knows who’s responsible for what. Also, it is of paramount importance to make your marketing goals measurable. You should always be able to track your progress in a specific way.
Finally, set realistic deadlines. Everyone would like to see results as soon as possible, but do you have the time and necessary resources to complete your goals within that time frame? At the same time, giving yourself too much time to achieve your goals could make you and your team lose focus.
The next step is to identify and get to know your ideal customers. The main point of creating content is to convert readers into customers, and for your content to do that, it must address their challenges and needs and provide specific advice that’ll help their businesses grow.
One of the best ways to identify your target audience is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s based on market research combined with data about your existing customers and a few educated guesses to fill the gaps. Buyer personas help you understand and relate to the challenges and problems facing the people you want to market your products or services. Google Analytics is an excellent tool that can help you start defining your target audience. You can use it to access your website’s audience data to find your prominent demographic groups. Google Analytics separates your audience into demographics and interests, which offers an excellent starting point for creating your buyer personas.
Most of the time, marketers are creating buyer personas based mainly on job titles. That’s not necessarily a bad practice, especially if you create your first-ever buyer personas. Building a buyer persona around a specific job title can help you fill in particular characteristics such as average income, age, education, interests, etc. But as we mentioned before, in B2B, there is not a single decision-maker most of the time. Let’s say you are a company making CRM software. I assume that your first buyer personas would be based on an imaginary sales manager or customer support lead. But what about those employees that could make use of a new CRM software but are not part of the sales or customer support team? Some CRM functionalities could be pretty handy to the marketing team as well.
Therefore, you should consider the broader business implications of a specific issue and all the interested parties within the company. Our advice is to base your buyer personas on particular challenges or objectives instead of job functions. That way, it will be easier to create a B2B content strategy that it’s built around your ideal customers’ specific day-to-day challenges and pain points and provide solutions.
After you have identified your target audience and understood their objectives, challenges, pain points and what matters to them in general it’s time to identify how your prospects search for what interests them online; i.e. the words and phrases they type into search engines to find content. It’s pointless to create content that no one is looking for, right? This is where keyword research comes to play.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing search terms that people enter into search engines. It can provide valuable insights into your target audience’s queries on search engines. That way, you can create content around what your target audience wants to discover. Start by compiling a list of all the long-tail terms you wish to be found for and cross-reference them with the pain points/challenges your buyer personas face. Then use one or several of the keyword research tools available to filter keywords by region, competition, volume, etc., and develop more keyword ideas.
As well as identifying the targeting terms and queries for your content you also need to understand the intent of each search. Search intent or query intent identifies and categorises what a user wishes to find when they type their search terms into a search engine. In other words, why did the person do this search?
There are four types of search intent. Terms starting with ‘how to’ are usually informational; the searcher’s intent is to acquire information about something. The second type is commercial searches, where the user is in the market for a specific product or service but has yet to make a final decision as they are still weighing up their options. Then you have transactional searches, where the intent is to perform some kind of activity or make a purchase. The fourth type is navigational searches, where the user is looking to find certain websites or pages.
Identifying the search intent will help you decide what content type is better for that specific query and ‘mould’ your content around the particular intent. Knowing the intent of your target keywords is a valuable data point to consider while creating your B2B content strategy as, just like any other keyword research metric, search intent gives you another perspective on your audience. You can use tools like SEMRush to immediately identify any keyword or search query’s intent.
Creating an effective B2B content strategy is all about providing the right content, to the right people, at the right time. Research your target audience to understand their objectives, the challenges they face, and their pain points and then create high-quality, keyword research-informed content designed to help solve those problems. That way, you’ll build trust in your company, establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche and place your brand at the top of your ideal customers’ minds when they are ready to purchase.
It’s important to remember that creating an effective content strategy is an ever-evolving process. You must remain proactive in constantly reviewing and updating your content, targeting keywords, buyer personas, and goals as decision-makers’ needs, challenges, and buying patterns change frequently.
Our digital marketing team is well-versed in data-informed, creative B2B content marketing that delivers visible, exceptional results. We’ll help you build awareness of your brand, drive relevant traffic to your site and convert readers into loyal paying customers. We’re firm believers in creating not necessarily more content but smarter, tailormade content that meets your audience’s specific needs.
Our B2B content marketing strategy spans site audits, keyword research, content creation, A/B testing, and performance measurement. Our team customises each step to suit your business, target audience, and goals precisely.
If you need help with creating consistently valuable B2B content that will drive customers to your site, get in touch with our digital marketing team.