“Content is King!” You’ll hear that saying repeatedly; however, your B2B marketing team must understand that not all content is created equal. A B2B content marketing strategy is quite different from a typical B2C strategy, given the distinct differences between audience members.
Before diving into building an effective B2B content marketing strategy, it’s essential to define what B2B content marketing is and why it differs from B2C content marketing.
When it comes to a B2B audience, it is vital that marketing teams narrow their focus significantly. Again, the goal is to reach a very strictly defined group of people. An excellent example of a B2B brand that may target a similar yet more defined audience is the AGCO Corporation.
AGCO Corporation is a B2B brand that manufactures agricultural solutions for farmers, particularly large-scale farming centers. Instead of trying to target home growers, they create and share content relevant to a very niche community.
They don’t focus their content on selling specific products. They highlight important topics such as sustainable farming, animal welfare, and responsible farming practices. You will notice that they do not share much promotional content on their pages. Instead, the focus is on becoming a thought leader within the agricultural community.
By positioning themselves as thought leaders in the agricultural industry, brands seeking farming solutions to get their products to everyday consumers will start to trust the AGCO name and its associated brands. The more trust that is built, the more likely they will turn to AGCO’s many solutions.
While B2B and B2C content marketing strategies will look surprisingly similar at first, it’s this understanding that a B2B audience is very different from a B2C audience that will help you see genuine success.
Here are some steps for building a strong B2B marketing strategy:
As with any business strategy, you need to begin by identifying and outlining your B2B content marketing goals. What is it that you hope to accomplish by providing content? If you struggle with goal setting, here are a few common places to start:
Of course, you’ll need to break each of these goals into detailed steps. You need to identify the goal, how you plan to reach it, what constitutes success, etc. One of the best ways to outline your goals is by using the SMART goal-setting method, where you break each goal down by defining:
Specifics
Identify the who, what, where, when, and why of your goal.
Measurability
How will you track your goal and define what is considered a success or failure?
Attainability
Just how realistic is your goal? Do you have the necessary tools/resources to accomplish it?
Relevancy
How well do each of these goals align with your company’s mission/values?
Timeframe
You need to assign a specific deadline to each goal.
With your goals ready to go, it’s time to talk about your ideal target audience. Don’t forget – this is one of the most important steps in building a B2B content marketing strategy, because your audience isn’t nearly as broad as a B2C audience’s.
To help with this, you’ll want to think about what your brand is, what products/services you are offering, and who would most likely need them.
For example, AGCO isn’t going to be selling its combine harvesters and application equipment to a small-town gardener. Instead, they need to focus on who would be interested in their large-scale machinery and innovative farming solutions. An example of a potential B2B customer for AGCO might be Tyson, as they would likely benefit from the brand’s aviary systems for raising their chickens.
To help you identify your ideal target audience, start by creating a detailed customer/buyer persona. This can be done using several different approaches, including:
Once you have enough information about who makes up both the industry’s audience and your current network, you can start outlining what a typical buyer may look like. You’ll want to make sure you’re not only addressing important demographics but also how potential buyers like to interact with brands, what information they enjoy consuming, and where they go to research it.
With your audience defined, turn your attention to the content you’ve already started producing (if any). If you have a website, you’ll want to count each of these pages as content, as well as any social media posts you may have started sharing.
Performing a content audit simply means taking a detailed look at your current numbers. When monitoring your website, you’ll need to pay attention to key performance indicators such as time spent on page, clicks, click-throughs, and the number of visitors to your website. For social media, you will want to pay careful attention to engagement numbers and reach.
Once you’ve collected enough information, you’ll start to get an idea of what has worked and what hasn’t up to this point, which will allow you to start building your content strategy further.
With an idea of what has worked before and what has not, it’s time to sit your content marketing team down and discuss your options. Content ideation meetings are an excellent opportunity to get all the options out on the table.
Not only should you have an idea of what has and hasn’t worked for you in the past, but if you’ve already conducted an industry/competitor analysis, you should have an even greater idea of what sorts of content have worked for your competitors.
It’s important to note that while B2B content should be more educational, there is a time and place for promotional content. So, you want to make sure you are considering all viable options during the content ideation stage.
The next step after you begin content ideation is identifying which digital channel will best suit your brand and its audience. Once you start creating shareworthy content, you need a place to share it. Your website is where it will likely be published; however, you need to take further action to put it right in front of your audience.
If you haven’t already, this would be an excellent time to invest in researching your marketing channels. This process will help you better understand where your audience is spending their time online, which will tell you precisely where your content needs to be shared. With the average individual spending approximately 10 hours a day consuming content, you want to take every action you can to put your content in the right place.
If you’ve already built a website and have begun to establish yourself on social media or online business listings, then you’ll want to make sure you are optimizing your online presence as much as possible. This becomes even more vital once you start regularly publishing your content, as proper search engine optimization ensures your content is placed in front of the right audience at the right time.
You need to make sure you conduct keyword research and use these words and phrases throughout your content and on your online profiles. Otherwise, you will have a hard time attracting the ideal audience.
Finally, once you have all your ducks lined up, you need to be revising your analytics. Whether it’s your social media or website analytics, you need to be paying careful attention to what is working and what isn’t.
If you don’t, you’ll continue shooting blanks into the dark. When you conscientiously monitor your content’s success, you’ll not only know that people are interested in what you have to say but also be able to start tweaking your content to suit their customer journey better.
