Content marketing is a core part of B2B marketers’ core strategy. 98% B2B marketers confirmed content marketing as an integral part of their marketing strategy (Source - State of B2B Content Marketing in 2015 by Regalix). The same report showed that 70% of B2B marketers are concentrating on content creation more than one year ago.
B2b marketers are producing more content now, and it’s expected to increase. But do these content pieces meet the goals of the business? In a nutshell – are they successful?
Over here we’ll discuss 5 elements of a successful B2B content marketing.
5 elements of a successful B2B content marketing
Identify your niche: It’s true for every business.
If you fail to address the pain-points of your audience with your content, your content marketing is not working. Remember every industry is different in every geo-location. For example, if you are a finance software seller in the UK, your target audience behavior might be very different from that of in the US. Let’s see how Think with Google can help us in determining this.
* Buyer journey in the UK
* Buyer journey in the US
This is just an example. You must analyze the buying cycle along with your buyer persona before investing your time and money on it.
Basically, you need to understand how your audience thinks before buying a service or product from a business. So, research well on your niche to know what content to create and how to promote them to drive the desired results.
Let’s go through some inspiring B2B content marketing case-studies.
SunGard’s content big data utilization: Sungard offers IT operations support to over 70% of all Fortune 100 companies. As a part of their content marketing strategy, they created a series of fun videos on holidays. The idea is to add humor in educational content while addressing the pain-points of their customers.
They earlier analyzed the content consumption behavior of their TG and utilized the data to create a multiple-platform campaign for promoting the videos.
This campaign generated more than 3,000 leads in just 3 days. For emails, the click and click to open rates accelerated by 2 and 3 times respectively. At the end of the video, they added a few CTA buttons to offer a provision to download a white paper. These buttons got an average CTR of 87.4%.
Glassdoor eBook formulation for lead generation: Glassdoor is a network for employees and ex-employees to anonymously review organizations and the management body.
They created an eBook, “Employer Branding for Dummies” to establish the brand as the industry thought-leader in the human resource industry. This eBook generated 27% of total leads in 2014.
Trapit’s white paper on social selling strategy: Trapit is a leading platform for B2B social selling. They created a white paper to showcase the benefits of social selling. They collated all relevant research papers from analyst companies including Forrester Research.
The white paper generated over 10,000 leads in the sales funnel that made up to 70% of their entire leads.
Cision’s influencer outreach program on SlideShare: Cision partnered with Brian Solis to create an eBook, “What If PR Stood for People and Relationships?” on SlideShare. The main objective was to create a tool for reaching out to their target audience.
The presentation generated 209,673 views on SlideShare alone. However, the overall reach went up to 2 million as a result of some Twitter shares by 11 industry influencers. The single piece of content garnered 600 sales-ready leads for the brand.
Create and distribute content campaigns: Once you can confidently say that you have understood your audience, it’s time to create content. Remember, B2B marketing can prove costlier than B2C marketing.
For example, let’s assume that you are sending emails to your audience. You first need to think of your audience and their time, as they are businessmen or the higher officials of an organization. You need to offer something that would offer value to their time spent on your content.
Let’s take a look at a fine example of B2B email campaign.
Hoovers ran this campaign with a very clear subject line. It was crisp to the point, so the target audience immediately takes the desired action. Another great B2B email campaign by The Expert Institute, a NYC-based legal service provider company, led to increase the conversion rate by 200%.
Spend on ads: It’s essential to spend on B2B content marketing, when you want a specific audience to see your content. According to a latest B2B content marketing stat, 58% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing budget in the coming year.
If you are one of those B2B marketers, who think that spending on content marketing would take you nowhere, here is an eye-opening stat for you. A Content Marketing Institute study showed that the most effective B2B content marketing needs a significant budget. According to the study, the most effective content marketing is backed by 39% of their entire marketing budget.
Let’s go through an example to understand it better.
Edmund Optics that manufactures optical components for various B2B industries, always seeks to educate their B2B audience with different measures from catalogue marketing to digital. To do this effectively, the brand runs search engine marketing campaigns on Google and Bing. Apart from that, they also ensured localization by translating their website in 7 languages.
Nurture your leads: As you get leads from your content marketing efforts, make sure you reach out to them immediately. It’s not a passive approach. If you take time to talk back, your leads would forget you.
In the words of Brian Carroll, the Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS said,
“The easiest way to conduct lead nurturing is to look at the relationships that you already have,. How can you carry the conversation forward? Think of lead nurturing as being an extension of the conversation you started with lead generation.”
There are several ways to do it. For example, let’s say that you gathered email ids from your potential customers. Now it’s time to initiate dialogue with them, which falls under lead nurturing. You can send them a personalized email and offer them your most popular content that would benefit them in their business. You can also repurpose your content to fit the bill.
Moreover, a properly planned lead nurturing procedure can also guide your leads to the sales funnel. Here is how:
Set a goal and create a report at the end of the campaign: This is a no-brainer. Any successful content marketer would know the importance of having a practical goal in pen and paper. As soon as the campaign is over, make sure you make a performance assessment as against your goal.
Creating a detailed report would help, as you can find out where you went right and where you went wrong in the process. This way, you can get rid of all your miscalculations and misjudgments.
Over to you:
Are you a B2B organization? Do you have a documented content marketing strategy? If you don’t have anything yet, it’s time to have one. Look at the Content Marketing Institute stat once again. 66% successful B2B content marketers said that they have documented strategy for content marketing.
Not sure where to start? We can help. Fill in the no-obligation form below. We will let you know how it can work for your business too.
Category