Content marketing has evolved to become the cornerstone of B2B marketing. With businesses having more control over the types of content they want to receive, marketers have to find ways to get their messages across without seeming intrusive, irrelevant or outright disturbing. With a smart content marketing strategy, it is easy to reach qualified leads, cement relationships and increase sales.
However, creating content alone is not content marketing. More than this, your clients have to get the content in front of their target business contacts and lead them to enter the sales funnel. Let’s look at five smart strategies they should incorporate to get their brand message to the right people:
1. Produce Content for Market
Produce content that your market wants. Don’t try to be clever or egoistic when showing your expertise. The aim of producing content is to communicate a message that will augment brand awareness and position you as a thought leader in your industry. However, if you are only communicating to yourself, you are failing miserably.
Great content should be geared towards your business customers--not you. Your prospects may not care about the tech specifications of your application, but they will want to know how it will help them or their customers solve their problems. When creating content, ask yourself, “Is this content useful and does it solve the problem of my target market?”
2. Engage With Email
Regardless of what you hear from some marketing “gurus” about the death of emails, concrete data paints a completely different picture. Reports indicate that email convert better than both search and social media. If you are not using email in your content marketing, you are losing conversion opportunities.
Your email content should be an extension of your blog content. The content should provide more value to your subscribers. Give your prospects a reason to stay on your list. Perhaps they will get your product at a discount or get an early bird invitation? Make sure the email content is valuable, inspiring and educational and has a call to action.
TIP: Include social media buttons at the bottom of the emails for quick response and amplified engagement.
3. Get Your Content Found
B2B companies have tendency of produce jargon-full content (see No. 1 above) since they assume their target market is well versed with what they are talking about. However, even worse, they do not make efforts to get their content found. No matter how great your content is, if it cannot be found, it will be like putting a billboard in a desert.
Your content should be found by your target market and at the right time. Research the keywords that your market uses when searching for information in your industry and create content around these target keywords. Apart from this, distribute the content at the avenues where your prospects are. Leading industry blogs and niche focuses LinkedIn groups are great places to distribute your content.
4. Optimize for Mobile
More people are searching for information using smartphones, tablets and other devices. Recent reports from Pew Internet show that 46 percent of Americans have a smartphone. You need your content accessible through the medium that your prospects are using. Make sure your content is optimized to be displayed in multiple platforms. Responsive web design technology is therefore crucial for today’s B2B companies.
If you are sending email, make sure it is optimized to be displayed properly on mobile phones. Avoid using images or JavaScript that will disrupt the user experience of your recipient.
5. Get Visual
B2B customers are more interested in numbers and percentages. The business owners like to see how they can save, improve productivity or get any other benefit in terms of numbers. It is only logical that visual content should be part of your B2B content strategy.
Share charts and infographics to make sense of different numbers for your prospects. Videos and presentations should also be part of your visual content mix. Use videos for step by step instructions or product demos. Sometimes, the best way to convey a message is to show something in action. No other content accomplishes this as good as video does.
B2B content should excite and engage your clients' prospects. Through engagement, they can discover their prospects’ intentions and provide more targeted content that will educate and help them take the next step to become customers.
