Demand generation: Tips, tricks and tools for hot content marketing

Written By Becca Warrington

If you follow us, you know we talk about content marketing A LOT!

And for good reason. It plays an essential role in demand generation as it enables B2Bs to provide their target audience with relevant content and helpful advice, like top tips and how-to steps to solve a burning problem.

Because today’s B2B buyers don’t like to feel sold to, this really is the best way to engage your audience. They want to educate themselves, do their own research, and find their own solutions – when they are ready.

So rather than forcing your buyers into sales funnels, your role is to empower the buyer by providing valuable information and build your demand gen engine with content marketing.

To do this, you’ll need to create various piece of content (blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, ebooks, white papers) and distribute them REGULARLY and consistently to get in front of your target audience, keep reminding them you are there, and to be present when they are ready to buy.

… But also, don’t neglect your product and sales marketing collateral – this helps convert the c.10% that are actively looking for a solution. We call this full-funnel marketing (more on this here).

This is what captures their interest, builds trust and ultimately drives demand for your products and services.

💸A content marketing strategy is one we’ve seen generate millions for multiple businesses. AND, it’s much more effective and cheaper than paid advertising.

So, what’s the secret to doing this well and delivering ROI and revenue? Let us share our tips, tricks and tools…

Quick recap: Why content marketing is essential today for B2B demand generation

Ultimately, if you’re looking to build sustained sales pipelines, you need high quality content marketing. It’s the best way to engage the majority of your target audience. On top of this, you should also do product/sales marketing to convert those that are actively in-market.

👍As a rule of thumb, you can work to 75% educational content and 25% product/sales collateral.

Content marketing is THE way for B2Bs to:

✅ Build and maintain brand awareness: Consistently posting helpful content builds trust and keeps you front-of-mind for when they are ready to buy. It makes selling much easier as you’ve differentiated and already proved worth and built trust.

✅ Generate high-quality leads: Leads that are aware of a problem, because you’ve provided valuable content that’s piqued their interest, and they’re likely interested in your products and services. With a content marketing approach, it's much easier to convert leads and build a loyal customer base… Because educational content should be shared with existing customers for retention too.

✅ Supports acquisition: Targeted content to the right audience = attracting more potential customers. To stand out, you really need to provide unique and sophisticated advice to help solve their challenges. Fluffy and regurgitated content doesn’t cut it! You just look like everyone else and can even annoy your prospects if they feel they’ve wasted time.

✅ Nurtures contacts: Delivering valuable content and nurturing leads creates long-term relationships. It increases customer loyalty. And it drives repeat business. This is because you’ve built a relationship and trust with the individual and this is key when making a purchase.

✅ Boost ROI: We’ve already mentioned that content marketing is much more effective AND cost-efficient. With board members and investors breathing down your neck about budgets and Key Performance Indicators, you need to limit wasteful budgets and focus on an area with measurable results – which is where content marketing comes in. So, it's a no-brainer for B2Bs 🧠

Keen to get these benefits? So there’s a bit of a knack for how you approach your content marketing strategy that allows you to get these results. And not many people know this – or, are in fact, using them. So, there’s a huge opportunity…

Demand generation content marketing strategy: Hacks, tips and tricks

So most B2Bs aren’t using content strategies to the fullest potential. While plenty of brands are good at creating content, very few are good at distributing it to maximise reach, gain ROI and ultimately meet their business goals. There’s a real opportunity here for you to stand out.

With this in mind, we’ll split this section into content creation and content distribution.

Demand generation content creation

We’ve written tons on this. But here are just a handful of top tips to help you write stella content – which people actually want to read and follow you for:

💡 Focus on your buyer persona: This allows you to hone in on the topics they’ll want to hear about and the pain points you focus on.

💡 Leverage the best content ideas: Start with desk research (looking at industry publications, new studies, and more), speak to your experts (this is key!), look at your own presentations, and even notes taken from meetings. There are so many places to find good ideas!

💡 Update content: If you have new ideas, something changes in the industry, or you have extra content to add (like FAQs are a good one), then update your blogs and change the publication date to show its fresher – it can rank better in Google because of this.

💡 Track performance: See how content is performing, for example, in Google Analytics, and make tweaks or do more on that topic. This one is a bit of fine art because there’s a particular content marketing strategy for it, so one for the more experienced B2Bs.

💡 Sector targeting: Rewrite content with a sector angle so it's hyper-relevant to those that you’re targeting. For example, we will rewrite this article for Fintechs and post it as a guest blog on Finextra. (More on this later).

📕Further reading:

Demand generation content distribution

And, once you’ve created this content, you want to get it in front of your audience.

👻Myth buster: Whilst you might know your content is in multiple places, your prospects and customers are not aware of this – they’ll see your content where they prefer to hang out. So don’t worry that you are overdoing it if you share a piece of content several times on social media channels, for example.

Let’s delve into the top tips:

💡 Recycle and reuse content: Use the same content and publish it in different formats, like convert a blog to a flipbook, or a webinar into multiple TikTok style videos. People have different learning preferences so for some a podcast may appeal, others may prefer to read a blog.

💡 Repost content: The same blog, for instance, can be shared on social media platforms as a link to the full blog, a link to the blog featured on a guest blogging site, as a long-form post providing tips in the actual post copy (no links). Remember, encouraging employees to like posts boosts visibility. So does tagging the guest blogging site in.

💡 Get personal: And get your senior stakeholders to share it with an additional tip or an opinion. This takes a blog from having one opportunity to be seen on social media channels, to having at least five.

💡 Go thought-leadership led for paid media opps: If you are looking to spend on paid media, we’d recommend promoting a guide or another piece of helpful content – it gets much better engagement than product promo.

📕Further reading:

Run successful content marketing strategies: Quick wrap-up and your next step

So, to sum up, content marketing is essential for driving Business to Business growth in 2023. Why? Because it allows you to communicate with prospects – and existing customers – in the way they like: you provide value with your helpful content and teaser solutions. There’s no hard-sell.

Plus, content marketing is organic and there’s really no need to spend big on paid media to promote it. Thanks to the audience actively seeking thought leadership, and thanks to marketing tactics like search engine optimisation (SEO) and guest blogging, it's easy for you to get your content right in front of your target audience. And, done right, you become seen as an industry leader.

Ultimately, this means that if you regularly put out content, you can consistently build brand awareness, generate high-quality leads, maximise ROI on content marketing efforts and generate revenue… All of which contributes to building sustained opportunity and sales pipelines.

And let’s face it, who doesn’t want this?

If you need support creating demand generating content to meet your business goals, and/or help with distributing it to get right in front of your target audience, get in touch.

P.S. You can find out more about our services here 🚀💸

Becca Warrington
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