Content consistency: The secret sauce for B2B demand gen
For decades, B2B marketers have leveraged content marketing to build brand awareness, trust and satisfy target audiences.
Why?
Good content marketing answers prospects’ biggest questions, solves their major pain points and showcases your brand subtly as experts in your field. All of this means when they are ready to buy, they naturally think of your business.
Essentially, it’s a super effective way to generate leads and convert them to sales. That’s why content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers.
But you can’t take a piecemeal approach to it. If you want to reap the rewards, long-term consistency is critical.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at how consistently sharing content generates demand, how to create best practice content marketing, and a handful of top tips…
Two ways consistency in content marketing drives demand
Fundamentally, your brand needs to be ever-present for potential customers to know your brand and remember you, above your competitors. Some businesses go down a product/sales-heavy route but those aiming for long-term, sustainable sales pipelines focus on a demand gen approach (more on this here).
This approach educates your prospects by introducing them to a challenge that exists for them, explores tips to solve it… and explains why it’s significant enough to invest in a solution. All while showing them why yours is the best.
Good content marketing enables you to do two things:
1) You will build a relationship with your audience
Consistently communicating helpful information with your target audience is proven to engage audiences and drive sales. We've literally seen this approach generate hundreds of thousands for businesses.
And you don't need a complicated, budget-intensive approach either.
Through a combination of marketing activities - like always posting regularly on social media, sending monthly newsletters, regularly blogging with Search Engine Optimised content, and guest blogging on key media publications sites - you can regularly get in front of your target audience. Moreover, with the right sales enablement collateral and email templates, you're better placed to then convert new leads.
2) You’ll be found on search engines
Search engines, like Google, love consistency. In fact, regularly producing high-quality content is Google’s top ranking factor. That’s why we always recommend that clients are consistent with creating and updating content that is Search Engine Optimised. We've literally seen our own ranking drop within a month of not putting out new content.
📕Further reading: What is demand generation content? And how to write it
Interesting side note: Watch out for “secret stalkers”
Measuring the impact of marketing is paramount today. But here’s a quick tip. It's easy to get caught up with metrics such as likes and comments and even clicks.
However, while LinkedIn has over half a billion users, only 1% actively engage on the platform, and less than 0.2% have published an article.
So what really matters is revenue. While engagement metrics can give you a general indication of performance, there are a lot of people still scanning content (without making a traceable footprint) who go on to contact you when they are ready.
As a case in point, we have one client who appears to have minimal engagement if we go by the traditional metrics. But they get an abundance of inbounds and have a high conversion rate.
The bottom line? Persevere! Those in the top 1% can expect an abundance of long-term, sustainable demand. There are a lot of ‘secret stalkers’ who are waiting for the right moment to get in touch! The key is to ensure consistency, always show up, and stay top of mind for when your ideal customers are ready to buy.
10 steps to creating best practice content marketing
🧩Step one: Build your strategy
Each piece of content should form part of an overarching content strategy. Before diving into writing, it can be worth checking your strategy to make sure your brief is aligned.
💻Step two: Create your brief
We always start with a content brief, which includes all key information such as audience, pain points, keywords, objectives, funnel stage, and key messages. Share for review and input.
🕵️Step three: Research
Find facts and data points, look into research studies, and source hard-to-find examples. Also check who is ranking for your chosen topic, to find a unique angle and how to stand a chance to compete.
📞Step four: Interview subject matter experts
Find unique angles, stories, and expert opinions to add weight and key insight to your piece.
📝Step five: Content outline
Next, create your content outline, include any H tags to your subtitles so that you ensure you embed the right amount of keywords, and start to add any call-out boxes and any links you’d like to embed. Share for review and input.
🕵️Step six: Research again
Check your outline against the top 10 ranking articles for your chosen long-tail keyword and see how you can improve yours. We use Frase.io to help us with this!
✍️Step seven: Do a full write-up
Armed with all your research, insight, and a solid outline you can start your first draft. Check that the word count, keyword density, and any other significant parameters are good enough to outperform any competing pieces.
👓Step eight: Full edit and review
At this point (before sharing) check for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Grammarly is great for this. As is ProWritingAid. Make any edits. Refer to your swipe file if you need inspiration.
🔗Step nine: Add internal links
Once you’re happy with your first draft go back through and add in any relevant internal links. Make sure you get a link in above the fold.
👉Step ten: Share first draft
Here, you want to get your subject matter expert to review and input to make sure that you haven’t taken anything out of context or to add more insight to the piece.
Pro tip: If you’re looking to outsource your content marketing, ask them to share their content creation process with you - it should look something like this. You’ll find some businesses can create content for less by cutting out these stages. But given your investment of time and money, and your goal to generate demand, we recommend paying for a more experienced marketer that follows this process. Or you risk your content not getting seen and likely won’t add the right value to your target audience.
Content marketing top tips
Here are a few tips to create attention-grabbing content marketing:
💡 Focus on solving a key problem.
Creating truly valuable insight to help solve your target audience’s challenges supports prospecting and nurtures existing customers - aiding retention and cross-selling.
💡Mix it up.
Share a mix of posts on social media – company news, your own blogs/guidance pieces, other industry news. These should all align to key topics you want to be known for. There are too many reasons why this is important!
💡Persevere.
Encourage employees to like, share and even comment on posts. Posts from your founders, Directors and MD’s are more likely to get engagement and responses.
💡Think visual.
Flipbooks/short animations have some of the highest engagements on LinkedIn. Just make sure they add value!
Case study: Consistent content marketing in action
PurplePatch offers a unique consultancy service supporting lenders to find the right data sources at a fair price - saving credit providers on average 35%.
The challenge? Most of the target audience hadn’t heard of PurplePatch before (or even know that such a service exists), so it needed to become more visible, and build trust and credibility.
The solution? Using zero media budget, we created a bespoke marketing strategy and a 12-month content plan to generate awareness and create demand. Tailored to all levels of the sales funnel, we focused on creating and executing thought leadership blogs, press releases, guides, and sharing curated industry content.
PurplePatch now has a monthly newsletter, regular social media posts shared across business and personal profiles, features in key media publications, and has a bank of sales collateral (emails, infographics, flipbooks) - supporting sales conversion.
After landing yet another major banking client: “Roo & Eve’s approach to demand generation has helped PurplePatch to significantly improve brand recognition and close sales. We now have a strong brand presence and excellent market positioning. In addition, we have a wealth of great collateral for our use in the sales process which has no doubt helped towards landing the bigger banking clients this year.”
Your next steps
Check out our other demand generation blogs here. This is a great starting point: What is demand generation? Your complete guide.
Ready to start generating demand? For a free marketing audit, get in touch with us today. You'll get personalised recommendations to drive demand. No fluff. Just actionable steps.