Introduction to content marketing for B2B marketing leaders

Content has for a long time been a real cornerstone of many B2B marketing strategies, and it’s use continues to grow – according to the FT, over 90% of B2B marketers make use of content marketing. It’s an essential tool for businesses looking to grow and engage with their audience. Like most tools, the effectiveness is down to the user. In this blog post, we'll be giving you a refresher on the basics of content marketing, its importance, and how to do it well.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the practice of creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. The key point here is that content marketing is about providing value to your audience, not just promoting your products or services.

Why is content marketing important for B2B companies?

One of the things that makes content marketing strategy complex is that it can be used to deliver such a vast range of benefits for a B2B company. Many fall into the trap of consigning it to a single, narrow purpose, whether that’s brand building, lead generation, or SEO, but the most effective companies harness the breadth of its possibilities. The following are some of the key benefits it can bring:

Building positive brand associations

Content marketing can help to build trust and credibility. By consistently providing valuable content, you can establish yourself as a trusted advisor or thought leader in your industry and build trust with your audience.

Driving awareness and enabling discovery

Good content can be an effective way to increase the visibility of your brand and attract people to your website who may not have found you otherwise. When content is optimised for search engines, it can help improve your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

Lead generation

When planned correctly, content marketing can be used for effective lead generation. By creating valuable content, you can attract people who are interested in your products or services and turn them into leads.

How to use content marketing effectively in a B2B business

There are many ways to do content marketing well. One approach will not suit all and it’s important, as with most things in marketing, to remain wary of ‘silver bullet’ approaches that promise impossibly strong results for minimal effort. Whilst there are certainly many technical points of best practice, excelling in content marketing is as much an art as a science.

One way of looking at it is that content marketing is about saying something interesting, in an interesting way, in an interesting place. The best content will hit all three points, but every piece should be hitting at least one of the three.

Whilst the triple interest measure is a maxim to bear in mind when creating content, there are still some fundamentals that need to be followed whenever creating content.

1: Know your audience

Before you start creating content, you need to know who you're creating it for. This should be based on research – you don’t necessarily need to be commissioning vast quantitative surveys, but you should be speaking with representatives from your audience and listening to what they have to say. When it comes to directing content, it can be helpful to develop audience personas to which you can map pain points, challenges, and interests.

2: Create a content strategy

Develop a content strategy that aligns your long and short business goals and your audience's needs and interests. This should include the type of content you'll create, the topics you'll cover, and how you'll promote it. Having a strategy, and then creating a content plan that is aligned to it, is necessary to ensure that effort and resource is expended in the most valuable places.

3: Focus on quality

There’s always a temptation to create content for the sake of it. Perhaps you know that you should be putting out x number of articles a month, so you get them written to hit the target. Or perhaps you are making content for SEO and you know you need to hit certain keywords. However, on the whole, if your content isn’t high-quality, informative, and engaging, it’s not going to deliver value to your audience or to you. Don't just create content for the sake of creating content.

4: Vary your formats

The suitability of content format varies from person to person as well as from topic to topic. It is important to serve your audience a variety of different content formats as no single format will be effective for everything. Don't just stick to one type of content. Experiment with blog posts, videos, infographics, and podcasts, and keep an ear to the ground for new and innovative formats that you can test as they arise.

5: Promote your content

It’s too easy to become totally absorbed with creating the content, but it is vital to remember that creating great content is just the first step. You also need to promote it to ensure it reaches your target audience. Creation is only one part of content marketing- even if your content is the best in the world, if it never reaches the audience, it is worthless.

Pitfalls to avoid in content marketing for B2B companies

Just because there are numerous ‘right ways’ to do content marketing, doesn’t mean every approach is as effective as the next. With its meteoric rise in popularity and diversity of practice, a series of common pitfalls have become apparent. Bear the following risks in mind:

1: Creating content that is too promotional

Remember, content marketing is about providing value to your audience, not just promoting your products or services. Some short-term sales-focused content is fine (and can be highly effective when done right), but if everything you put out could fairly be seen as a pitch, you will be missing a trick.

2: Not making and sticking to content strategy

One of the most common issues marketers have with content is lack of consistency. Without a content strategy, you'll end up creating content that doesn't align with your business goals or your audience's needs- wasting time and resource whilst putting a messy message into the market.

3: Over-indexing on quantity

Don’t get sucked into focusing too much on quantity over quality: It's better to create fewer pieces of high-quality content than a lot of mediocre content. What’s appropriate will depend on your strategy – if the role of content for you is discovery, then there is often a need for quite a high volume. However, if the role of content for you is also brand building and the establishing of thought-leader status, then quality will almost always trump quantity.

4: Focusing too much on the creation and not enough on promotion

This is possibly the most common content mistake made by B2B marketers. Creating good content is often challenging, takes time and resource, and when it’s done it is all too easy to pat yourself on the back and blast it out using the closest distribution channel to hand. But much of that time, effort and resource is wasted if you don’t put at least as much weight on promotion as you do on creation. For most your content, if it doesn’t get in front of the eyeballs of your target audience, it is serving very limited purpose.

Conclusion

Content marketing is an essential tool for all B2B marketers. By providing valuable, relevant, and consistent content, you can build trust, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and improve your SEO. To do it well, you need to know your audience, create a content strategy, focus on quality, use different formats, and promote your content.

At Nyala Marketing we’re experts in supporting B2B marketing leaders to develop and implement content strategies that work. Please feel free to get in touch using the form below if you ever need a hand with your content or just want to bounce around an idea.