6 Powerful Steps to Creating a Killer B2B Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Content marketing is often associated with viral Reels and snappy social media carousels aimed at targeting the customer base; but that’s just half the story. 

Ever wondered how businesses market to other businesses? That’s exactly where we realise that B2B (Business-to-Business) content marketing is a thing, too.

Now before we read into the details, here’s the core of this B2B content marketing: It’s different. It’s clad with high stakes and deliberate decisions. It’s more than just a three-word tagline; it’s about educating the audience. According to 84% of B2B marketers, content marketing helps build brand awareness among the target groups. 

What’s the deal with B2B content marketing after all? And how do you ensure the right ingredients to rustle up a strategy for your own business? Keep reading to know.

What is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B content marketing is a branch of content marketing that focuses on attracting, engaging, and converting other businesses into leads. Here, your audience is other businesses that might want the solutions you’re offering. In B2B, the attention is on more data-driven and detailed content compared to the B2C domain. 

Here’s one catch: It doesn’t have to be boring or mundane; In fact, you must strive to create something out of the box and still digestible, however niche your topic of content may be.

The B2B content marketing majorly includes the same assets as its B2C counterpart, namely blogs, articles, podcasts and videos. Add to that, the detailed case studies and white papers. The intent? It is to inform and guide your target group—the content, in the end, should connect to the decision makers and inform them of all the reasons why they should consider using your services or products.

Importance of B2B Content Marketing

Before we dive right into the strategy section, let’s first understand the benefits of B2B content marketing in today’s crowded market:

• Helps businesses know YOU: Decision-makers don’t just randomly call the shots on the business they would like to buy products/services from. It takes extensive research for them to get there. In fact, 40% of B2B buyers catch up on 3-5 pieces of content before making a purchase. Before investing, they would want to know things like your offerings, your position in the market, how effective your operations are, etc. Bottom line: your content should encompass these checkpoints. 
• Adds value: In B2B dynamics, sales don’t happen overnight—it can take months. Reason? B2B purchases involve several meetings, research, and involve multiple stakeholders, all contributing to a decision. The benefit of content here is that it would help keep your business top-of-mind of the potential buyers throughout the decision phase.
• Builds Trust: B2B buyers don’t just look for a product or a service that brings value; they also look for expertise. 95% of buyers see content as a trust metric when evaluating a brand. They want to take help from the experts that they can trust enough for resolution. Content can prove to be a magical way to show why you would be the right choice. You can share insights, testimonials and various sorts of information to boost the credibility of your brand.

How to Create a Winning B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

Now that the basics like What is ‘B2B content marketing’ and ’what are the benefits of B2B content marketing’ are clear, let’s come to the most important question:

What does it take to create a solid B2B content marketing strategy? Here are the steps:

1. Know Your Goals

The idea is to imagine the end at the start; make goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

You must figure out what you want to achieve from writing a set of blogs or banner copy or creating videos. There could be several reasons behind that, such as:

• Lead generation
• Attract organic traffic
• Build brand awareness
• Establish your brand as a go-to for target businesses

With a clear, measurable objective in sight, you will be able to seamlessly plan your content in synergy with your end goal.

2. Learn All That You Can (and Should) About Your Audience

When marketing to businesses, keep this in mind: you are selling to the people who will make the final call—the decision-makers. Now, conduct a thorough research on those people. Make sure you know:

• Who these people are
• What are they looking to achieve
• What pain points are they facing
• What challenges are they planning to eliminate
• What information would they need

And the list can go on. The more in-depth study you have on your target audience, the more focused—and effective—your strategy will be.

3. Create a Buyer’s Journey

In B2B content marketing, mapping out a buyer’s journey can be more complex, compared to B2C. 41% of B2B content marketers consider the buyer’s journey to strategise and craft their content. It is typically split into three phases:

• Awareness: The buyer is looking for useful information to solve a problem.
• Consideration: The buyer is exploring potential solutions. 
• Decision: The buyer is choosing among the options shortlisted and is about to make a choice.

The golden rule of the best B2B content marketing strategy is to address all of these stages. For example, you can build awareness with blogs and white papers. Then, you can highlight the solutions they are looking for through product comparisons and case studies. 

4. Decide on Content Formats

One of the businesses you are targeting would want to read blogs, while the other would want something more engaging, like a webinar. Even when you target a specific industry, your audiences might have different approaches to considering a product. So, diversify your B2B content marketing strategy.

Here’s how and why:

• Publish blog posts to educate your customers and drive more traffic.
• Produce podcasts to reach out to the concerned people on a broader level.
• Write eBooks and white papers to provide them with in-depth insights; this will help position you as a thought leader.
• Make engaging videos to explain something complex easily.
• Create case studies to show the real-world outcomes of your offerings and build credibility.
• If and when you can, bring in those testimonials.

Using a variety of content formats will unlock more potential opportunities for you to maximise your strategy.

5. Put Search Engine Optimization to Use

The effort to prepare various content formats will only make sense once you have made sure that people can find it easily. That’s how SEO comes into the scene. It’s an integral part of a B2B content marketing strategy which will push your content to appear on top when your target audience is browsing the answers.

Here’s all that you need to keep in mind: 

• Do your keyword research: Use long-tail keywords that address the audience’s pain points.
• Focus on On-page SEO: Optimise your content with meta descriptions, internal links, and — titles.
• Create content clusters: Prepare a pillar of content around the core topic and then link related topics.

6. Analyse Your Content (and Tweak Accordingly)

After your content is live, you must catch up on its performance to see what works and what doesn’t. Google Analytics, SEMrush, HubSpot and other such tools will help you track metrics like:

• Traffic to check how many people are visiting your content
• Engagement to see if they read it or just skim; and
• Leads to analyse if/how your content is converting to leads.

Once you have data based on these points, you can adjust/refine your strategy. You can involve sales and marketing teams in a feedback loop to together create content basis the insights and analysis.

Top B2B Content Marketing Trends that Are Hot Right Now

On your way to create the best B2B content marketing strategy, you sure would like to have an edge in the market.

How do you do it? By staying ahead of the curve.

How do you stay ahead of the curve? By first getting a hang of the ongoing (and upcoming) trends.

Let’s quickly catch up on the following roundup of 5 standout B2B contributing marketing trends that can not only help make your strategy effective, but also super engaging:

1. The demand for a personality

The years of dry, jargon-clad B2B content is now fading, fast real quick. Like any other audience, B2B audiences are looking for something fresh, authentic. The core human personality is becoming a thing in the content marketing world, provided the fact that people nowadays would rather engage in conversational content. Even the witty tone will win the game. Look at Instagram—or LinkedIn for that matter—where businesses are not just listing down the features but are telling a story which makes people want to stop and read.

2. Short-form videos

TikTok days may be behind us, but this once-the-reigning-platform has left us all wanting more of short-form videos. 95% of B2B buyers find videos to be a helpful factor in determining if they should move forward with a purchase. From YouTube to LinkedIn to Instagram, B2B brands are utilising all types of social platforms to embrace their audience’s newfound love for fast, engaging clips. The winning factor about this content format is its ability to quickly deliver the message while keeping the audience hooked. So, if you’d like to share the insights across, make the most of bite-sized videos.

3. Data with a story

In B2B, data has always been and always will be a marketing staple. What makes it a trend now is the way businesses are presenting it. From infographics to visual storytelling, they have got a lot of options to put the numbers in the limelight without putting anyone to sleep. The data-driven approach to create a story instead of just showing a number-packed chart is driving in more audiences. 

4. Sustainability is BIG deal

B2B buyers are focusing on more than just revenues. They are on the lookout for businesses that value sustainability. Brands that are bold enough to share their take on environmental impact and operate responsibly are leading with customer loyalty and engaging audiences who value such factors.

The Bottom Line: B2B Content Marketing is Essential for Success

It has become the need of the hour for B2B brands to have a content strategy that’s both: effective and intriguing. The definition of the best B2B content marketing is not just the art of pumping out a feel-good concept and words—it’s rather about sharing a value and guiding the audience. So, what’s the wait for? Start from the basics (read: audience research) and follow up with the trends to stay on the top of B2B content marketing in your field.