How to strategically scale your B2B content marketing efforts in 2022
Content marketing is fundamental for a business of any size, with any budget, to build a consistent sales pipeline.
Here’s why:
Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don't blog. (DemandMetric)
Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don't. (HubSpot)
70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than advertisements. (DemandMetric)
It underpins all other communication and activity across your website, social media, email, search optimisation (ranking in Google), and more. And it’s how you stand out amongst your competitors by really adding value to your audience by sharing your knowledge (for free).
How does content marketing work?
Content marketing works because it starts with what your prospect needs to know - instead of what you want to tell them. For instance, if you package your company’s unique expertise to help your ideal customers do their jobs, you earn people’s attention instead of simply assuming you’ll get it. After all, people care much more about their own problems than they care about your products.
With a strong B2B content marketing strategy in place, a company can expand its reach, become a known and trusted industry authority, and ultimately set a strong foundation for new and ongoing client relationships.
That’s why content is key to succeeding in demand generation.
While every marketer will have their own approach to content marketing based on their unique experiences, we’ve distilled our top tips to move from slow, sporadic and low-volume content outputs to a well-oiled, consistent and strategic content machine…
1.) Laser-focus on your audience
Instead of trying to sell, we now have the luxury of creating useful, helpful, and valuable content as the gateway to happy readers and therefore sustainable demand and a sustainable sales pipeline.
Successful content is underpinned by this target audience’s needs, challenges, needs, pain points, and concerns and then basing your content around solving these points for them with tips and guidance (oh, and subtly mentioning you have a product/solution that can help). This is the difference between building a trusted, authoritative brand and being in sales. Great content always has a laser-focus on the target - this is what makes sure it resonates with your audience.
🔎Top tip: Once you understand each persona’s pain points, start to map topic ideas against them. A simple Google Doc is a great starting point.
2.) Be authoritative and confident
Great content is authoritative. Stay in your sweet spot, where the things you understand better than anyone else intersect with the things your ideal customers really care about. Confidence is also key. If you have something to say, don’t be shy - be strong and bold with your statements. Confidence is a powerful force in marketing - that and a bit of human personality go a long, long way.
🔎Top tip: Consider the overarching themes that you want to start ‘owning’, e.g. Explainable AI for mid-tier lenders.
3.) Be strategic
One-off tactical pieces don’t add up to a content strategy. Don’t just re-hash what everyone else is saying. Where are the gaps? How can you make your content stand out amongst the rest of the search results?
Reacting to hot topics is a great way to gain engagements but this should be separate to your content plan which should be forward-looking and anticipating upcoming needs and trends - thus helping to show you are the industry leader.
It’s also a great help in being prepared so that you can regularly share new pieces of content and across all the channels where your target audience visits.
🔎Top tip: Consider SEO keyphrases and niche headlines. Then research as much information, insight, and data as you can. It’s good to decide on your SEO keyphrases before you pick a topic - this ensures you talk about things that are regularly searched for and helps you rank for them in Google.
4.) Consistently create and distribute content
Whether you’re in software, Fintech, data consultancy, tech or logistics, it’s not enough to sell a product or service — people first have to know you exist. And also trust you before they consider buying. This is why we encourage our clients to keep their communications fresh and regularly flowing - whether that’s newsletter, social media or direct sales messages - as you never know who is ready to buy at any point in time.
Creating compelling and well-optimised content helps you to reach your target audience - and regularly reminds them that you are there (for when they have a need and are ready to buy your services). It also helps long-term relationships, instead of a one-time conversion, and cross-sell opportunities. For example, we have clients who buy particular marketing packages from us each month. When they see our new blogs or social media posts sharing top tips, it strikes up a conversation about additional marketing tactics and helps strengthen the relationship. We’ve seen our marketing and client's marketing rekindle a conversation with a prospect that had gone cold.
🔎Top tip: Set yourself goals to create and distribute a minimum amount of content each month. Two high-quality blog posts a month, and three social posts a week is a strong starting point.
5.) Make it engaging
If you don’t care about this stuff, why should anybody else? Unfortunately, the vast amount of content marketing is bland, muddy, and boring. Most content marketing reads as if it were written during secondary school detention. Yet when you meet the people in the companies they’re actually full of passion. If you believe in what you’re writing about - give it the passion it deserves and don’t be afraid to show your personality.
🔎Top tip: In a sea of lifeless content, using a more human tone of voice to stand out works wonders. It’s also more enjoyable to create 😍
6.) Distribute and repurpose
Pull out all the stops. Blog it. Share it on LinkedIn. Email it to your list. Look for guest blogging opportunities. Then capture and nurture any leads. And finally, morph it into other content types - it’s good to keep a mix of different media, it’s a lot more interesting than a resource section filled with hundreds of blogs.
🔎Top tip: When you repurpose content into different formats, think about how your audience likes to consume content, and the channel it will be distributed on. We’ve found carousel posts, webinars, podcasts, mini eBooks, slides, and breaking it out into a series of social posts all work well and are easy to repurpose.
7.) Measure and keep testing
When putting your metrics in place, start by deciding what’s worth tracking, and how frequently you’ll collect data. Then create a spreadsheet that documents and tracks your marketing goals and key performance indicators. If SEO success is critical, keep an eye on your page rankings as each piece of content within a cluster goes live. It’s the cumulative effect you’re looking out for here.
🔎Top tip: Algorithms and data practices change all the time. What worked in early 2021 on LinkedIn has now changed again. While measuring metrics can be helpful, don’t get too hung up on engagement rates. There are a lot of silent stalkers out there reading your content, yet not leaving a footprint.
Investing in content pays dividends
Content marketing enables a brand to become known for producing intelligent, useful, and engaging content that’s always worth consuming. In today’s highly competitive world, where nearly every software product has some element of AI or automation, standing out is even harder. The good news is a strategic content marketing engine will throw a bright, clear light on your products and services.
If your customers or visitors want to find out more about what you do but they can’t find the information they need on your site or blog, or you don’t post regularly to your social media, you’ll be put in the digital shade by competitors who have a strong content strategy.
But there is a content marketing skills gap and bands struggle with efficiency, ideation, time, and budget issues when it comes to content creation. And speed is essential. Content will only remain timely for so long. Businesses need to be proactive and react quickly.
You don’t have to have a big marketing team to do content marketing effectively
Larger businesses will often have different roles within the marketing team to focus on content marketing and content design and distribution. But that’s not your only option.
If you or your team don’t have the time to invest in content marketing, you can outsource. Using marketing and content professionals (like us) will probably cost you less than you think. And content experts can achieve much more in a limited time scale than you might be able to do alone.
The writing is clearly on the wall 🤣: Brands that want to remain relevant in this dynamic content creation and marketing world must adapt fast.
Fuel your brand and drive results with strategic content marketing backed by over 25 years’ experience and Roo & Eve’s best practice rigorous methodology, content creation, strategy, and distribution approach. Get your free, personalised B2B marketing audit today.