A B2B content strategy is a pivotal necessity for any B2B business today. So, how do you make one?
The B2B industry is said to be worth around $6.7 trillion. So, you can imagine the competition in a market with such potential. Today, we will analyze key factors that allow you to stand out with a good content strategy. So, let’s dive right into it.
What Is B2B Content Strategy?
A B2B content strategy is a strategic content marketing plan designed to provide value to the customer. It is a process that aims to generate, create and distribute valuable information for prospective customers.
A B2B content strategy can be implemented through a variety of channels that are most appropriate for the company. For example, it can be executed through:
- social media posts;
- blogs & websites;
- email campaigns;
- video marketing;
- or any other channel that works best in the given industry.
It’s important to understand that B2B content needs to be about solving the issues of your target customers. So, the content must be directed at common issues, challenges, and other aspects.
Compared to B2C (business-to-customer) strategies, B2B deals with organizations of all shapes and sizes. Thus, the content needs to be on a premium level, and the strategy needs to fulfill a few key aspects, such as:
- thoroughly laid-out customer personas;
- an extensive content calendar for frequent posting;
- analyzing the right platforms, i.e., blogs, emails, etc.
- detailed use of social media networks;
- use of video marketing and visual content in general.
These factors need to play a vital role in your B2B content strategy to make it work seamlessly.
5 Steps Guide to A Complete B2B Content Strategy
Creating a complete B2B content strategy requires an understanding of a few key factors. However, important methods vary in vast categories, such as creating content with a purpose, understanding your audience, conducting a plagiarism check, or using a paraphraser.
In this section, we’re going to analyze those aspects. So, let’s dive right into it.
1. Figure Out Your Target Audience: Buyer Personas
Finding the right target audience is important and understanding their challenges and requirements is even more essential. The success of any sort of content strategy depends on how well the creator understands their audiences.
So, figuring out your target audience isn’t just important; it’s necessary. But how do you do that? In order to figure out your target customers, you need to:
- Learn key demographics;
- Learn the key job titles, i.e., managers, directors, SEO experts;
- Learn key limitations, challenges, concerns, and worries;
- Find their commonly used platforms, i.e., social media, emails, blogs;
- Figure how your product benefits their cause.
Now, it’s about understanding the age group or job title and the key matters they face daily. Your product or service should come across as the best decision they can make. For that to happen, you need to figure out what their challenges are.
This allows you to grasp the general idea of your target audience. However, it’s equally important that you go into depth about researching your audience.
So, make thorough customer personas and follow the tactics mentioned in this section. It’ll allow you to comprehensively create content for your audience.
2. Sell Benefits, Not Features
The one common mistake among many content strategies today seems to be a self-centered approach. In other words, instead of helping the audience, the content focuses more on the features. So, it doesn’t talk about benefits but rather what it does better than other products.
This approach kills many content strategies before they even have a chance to take off. This sort of approach draws the audience away, and you need to avoid it at all costs. So, how do you rather approach it? Your content needs to sell benefits, not features.
So, let’s say you’re talking about a SaaS product that’ll improve teamwork across an organization. Now, which of the following options seems better?
- The software has an in-built chat, content-posting, and thorough collaborative options.
- Ensure swift communication and teamwork with this tool.
The answer is B because it talks about the potential pain of your target audience. Teamwork is one of the most challenging aspects of any organization. And by showing the benefit, it picks on that pain point and sells the key benefit instead of talking boorishly about the features.
That’s why you need to follow the same approach, ensure that you’re targeting benefits in your content, and not over-the-top talking about features.
3. Use The Right Platforms
In content marketing for customers, a marketer has the liberty to use whichever platform they can. Granted, there are limitations there too. However, those limitations aren’t much compared to the ones faced by a B2B marketer.
You’d think you could simply go on a platform like TikTok and start posting your ads, but it doesn’t work that way. You won’t find many people in charge of their businesses swiping through TikTok. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Once again, customer personas come into play. If they help you identify that your target audience uses platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, etc., then you need to use that platform. Once you figure out the platform, you have plenty of choices for content, such as:
- Creating unique posts about your industry on Instagram or Facebook;
- Posting an image daily with a fun fact about your niche on Snapchat or Instagram;
- Creating short videos to use for stories on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
Now, it’s important to understand which platform is best. But, the constant between all niches are websites, blogs, and emails. But, identifying the right social media platform is equally important.
The idea behind doing this is to ensure that you’re using the platform to its full potential. Thus, identifying the right platform to use is necessary.
4. Formulate A Content-Creation Method
Content-creation method is something you need to focus on thoroughly. That’s why it’s important to understand which content types are ideal for your business. In most cases, it’ll be blog posts, social media posts, videos, images, etc.
However, you need to have a thorough content-creation strategy for each. Here’s how:
Blog Posts & Social Media:
- Unique topics;
- Writing an outline;
- Conducting a plagiarism check;
- Tending to on-page SEO, like backlinking, structure, etc.;
- Citing the source to avoid plagiarism;
- Using a paraphraser to remove plagiarism or alter content tone;
- Ensuring grammatical quality before posting.
Videos:
- Writing a script;
- Filming or animating a video;
- Delivering a key message;
- Focusing on the benefits, not features;
- Targeting customer/success stories.
Image:
- Creating statistical images;
- Creating infographics;
- Making flowcharts.
These are some of the ways you can stand out with quality content. Therefore, ensure you have a viable strategy to produce good content and ensure its equality before posting.
5. Focusing On Optimization and Analysis
When you post content, it’s important to optimize it for SEO and your audience before. However, it’s equally important to analyze how it performed afterward. This means analyzing the factors that contributed to your content’s success, such as:
- Time spent on a particular area of your blog or the most replayed section of your video;
- Most responded emails;
- CTAs with the most clicks on your website or social media;
- Rank in SERP (Search engine results page);
- Bounce rate.
These factors will help you understand your strategy moving forward. Therefore, it’s important to figure out these factors before and after you post content.
Conclusion
These are the key factors of creating a B2B content strategy. It’s important that you focus on the essentials like creating content, analyzing your audience and using the right platforms. So, follow the methods mentioned in this article to stand out against your B2B competitors.
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