How to Adapt Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Sophie Dsouza
7 min readApr 6, 2021

A scheduled content marketing plan is always better than an ad hoc approach. 41% of top B2B players have a registered strategy for 2020. Of those with a registered plan, 69% have been so successful in their efforts and this number has been rising over the years.

When it comes to digital content, it’s important that you get the basics right — before you start your content creation process, make sure you follow SEO best practices. Search engine algorithms are constantly updated to give people more accurate results and taking care of this broad aspect of all your content ensures that your content is successful online with design. Your content strategy is going to work well online only after the SEO process has been incorporated into every form of content you create.

Social media algorithms tend to favor visual content, use that to better promote your content. Good strategies such as those described below have common features.

Who are you talking to?
The first step in designing a strategy is to work out who will find the product or service you find most useful. It is not as simple as saying that you are targeting a particular business. A detailed personality must be created with background, will, interests, life goals, and annual income.

Remember that a buyer’s personality is different from a target audience in that it enters a detailed profile of the best customer from your largest audience. You can go a step further and divide this person into different types of buyers.

Just as a B2B buyer journey is not always linear, the B2B customer base is often diverse. From here, you can narrow down your personality and identify which one can help your business grow optimally and focus on each one in order.

Explain your goals
To create a complete B2B content strategy, you can only identify one end goal. Each stage of the buyer’s journey will have a specific goal that needs to be achieved and KPIs that are unique to a level. This is especially important when creating content for the purpose of the buyer’s visit.

When a customer enters a search term into Google, they want a detailed answer. Sometimes they look for a website, sometimes it’s just informative, and the intention can also be to buy something. Instead of trying to figure out the search term they are using, try to understand why finding the answer to it is important to their business.

Make sure there is no profiteering involved in this process and sometimes you can understand this by simply asking your audience through a poll or survey. Getting personal information from your audience can have a huge impact on creating the right KPIs. It will also help in developing the right brand voice that will appeal to your audience and help you create content that is truly engaging.

Learn from Your Peers

The content marketing landscape has become such a crowded place that there are more than enough mistakes if you keep your eyes open. There are also a large number of successful content marketing campaigns that have used unique approaches to reach customers. Watching competitors doesn’t mean you have to report their approach. You can use it as an opportunity to separate yourself from each other.

Evaluate the maturity of your content marketing effort — whether it’s at an advanced stage of being a process, success measures are becoming more advanced, or if it’s a full-scale business strategy which is scalable.

Use Apt circulation channels
Make sure the medium you use to align your brand messages with your brand image and voice. Marshall McLuhan was a communication theorist who said that the message is central and that this is still true today.

The distribution channel you choose to communicate with customers will affect how the message is received. It’s a good idea to be present on different platforms but choose wisely when, where, and how you choose to interact with customers on those platforms. The messages need to be consistent so that customers associate a sense of trust with your brand. This strategy can also have a positive impact on the value of each customer’s life.

User-generated B2B content
Custom times are probably the best time to test user-generated content (UGC) in your industry. Most social interactions take place through technology so the potential is high. There are excellent content marketing examples like how IBM made them work so why not?

Promotes value-added content
LinkedIn is undoubtedly the premier place to promote B2B content. It still tops the list as your favorite social media channel. Using their sponsored posts with an indigenous advertising method can surprise your business if they are targeting the right audience. However, as a marketer, you can also use social media experimentally.

Verification of social media content
Digital content marketing involves a number of platforms and when used appropriately you can use social platforms to evaluate the effectiveness of your content.

Ever since it became almost impossible to get views for your social media content organically on Facebook, Twitter allows the modern marketer to find out if a particular topic has the potential to generate interest. reach the audience through social media communication metrics.

Instagram for Preview
You can even use Instagram to share new content to your followers through a story. Due to the location of this feature on the app, your content will be highly visible. The basic principle of any B2B content you share is that it needs to be useful to the viewer and Instagram Stories can help you assess that need.

Instagram is also a working platform to get in touch with your audience by asking me about any experiences (AMA). If you get enough communication for your latest white paper or blog post, chances are high that AMA on the subject will help you generate more leads for your business.

Content syndication as a strategy
Once you have created all this valuable content, syndication is an effective way to get more ideas for your blog post. In addition to expanding your reach, you can get the by-products from spreading brand awareness and driving more sales leads into your funnel.

If you start the process of regular content synthesis you can create a consistent online presence on platforms in addition to your website and social channels. You can then drive traffic to your website by using CTAs appropriately, creating a strategic loop.

High performance content formats
There are four types of content:

  • Sound
  • Video
  • Image
  • Written

Within all types of content, some formats work well with B2B audiences. Quality content incorporates a few elements of each format into the other to bring out the best of the covered topic, combining visual content with text for a better experience. . B2B marketing is mostly about social media content on LinkedIn and Facebook with blog post and newsletter formats following closely.

Video B2B capability
The next best format was to deliver content through personal events but with that on the back burn videos the marketer has the best alliance. Video marketing is growing at a rapid pace and yielding successful results for 41% of bloggers. Videos allow customers to see people’s faces, give it a personal touch, have a high memory value, are highly visual, and have a certain level of clarity attached to this format as you see it and so you believe it.

The New Conference Webinar
To counter postponed or reduced conferences and corporate conferences, web conferencing has emerged as a great way to connect with your audience and network. Although recently ranked eighth on the list of content formats used by B2B businesses, they have become the best venue for personal events. Deck 7 has run successful email marketing campaigns promoting webinars for business leaders in computer hardware, SaaS companies, and webcast platforms to reach a global audience.

Email newsletters for the department
Sending your latest or contemporary content via an email newsletter to your subscribers is a great way to showcase a variety of content forms you’ve created for your business. Whether it’s a white paper or your latest podcast, your newsletter will find the content you’ve created closest to an interested customer.

At the end of all this make sure you have a way to contact your webinar server or website visitor. If your sales and marketing teams work together, you would have figured out a way to get the customer’s email address before they leave your website. Your ultimate goal is to get your content to reach your bottom line, not just gain readers and followers.

Projected content marketing bias
The global sanitation crisis has had a major impact on the future of marketing but there is also hope for innovation and new ways to use existing platforms to achieve your business goals. Here are the Deck 7 trends predicted earlier this year.
While not much has changed, the pivot to a sleek and flexible design that has been delayed during better days is inevitable. Some of the key studies from Gartner, Forrester, and the Content Marketing Institute are outlined below.

Invest in videos
41% of B2B marketers are aware of the inclusion of video formats in their sales and marketing strategies for the year 2020. Online video consumption is expected to increase more than ever with pre- predict that people will spend nearly 7% of their day watching videos online in 2021, which is 100 minutes spent each day dedicated to watching whatever you have to offer.

Offline media will take a back seat
With fewer people traveling to work, above the line marketing like billboards will reduce brand authority. Out-of-home advertising will be less important while digital displays that give brands flexibility are the preferred option so that messages can be adapted appropriately. However, it is a good time to go offline to online changes to create a unified and omnichannel ecosystem for your business.

Marketing technology benefits
A heavy reliance on marketing automation is particularly evident in measuring the effectiveness of messaging in a number of markets. Because performing manual tasks does not offer the same reliability as before, critical communications and revised health protocols are delivered through automation.

--

--

Sophie Dsouza

Expert in B2B Marketing Services. Expertise in account-based marketing, Event marketing, webinar marketing and more