B2B content strategies are the key to strong customer engagement and positive brand association in the market. Reaching a point where your business is fully equipped to produce top-quality content that is seen by your existing clients and engaging potential customers, is a challenging task and one that takes time to master.

There are many benefits of a well-planned B2B content campaign, therefore organisations that get it wrong, miss opportunities as a result. So, what is the significance of B2B content, and what can it do for your business?

The importance of B2B content

B2B marketing has a lot of benefits and ways that it can engage your target audience and clients effectively. Here are some of the key ways that it can benefit you.

  • It allows you to engage with key decision-makers within businesses that you are working with, in a way that will properly pique their interest.
  • You can go into in-depth detail around key topics in your market, and give your informed opinion of how things have happened or will unfold in the future.
  • It is an effective lead generation tool, which can pull clients or potential clients further down the marketing funnel.

Even though content marketing has an abundance of positives for businesses, the way that it is executed is crucial to ensure that it lands with the audience that you have created it for. If you aren’t targeting properly or thinking carefully enough about what your audience wants to hear, then your attempts to create thought-provoking content will likely fail.

Furthermore, if you haven’t planned and understood how your B2B content fits into your lead generation, sales process, and marketing pipeline process, then you might not get the most value from it. Aligning your teams within your marketing department can help to boost engagement, as it will be likely more valuable if you get input from multiple perspectives.

How can B2B content drive business success?

Content marketing has the ability, if executed well, to help position your company as a thought leader in your field. It can be a great tool to show your clients and people that you want to do business with that you are knowledgeable, and therefore have the experience to help them with your services. If you position your content strategy effectively, you can produce things that are currently affecting potential clients.

The content that you produce should be varied and tailored to what you want to achieve from the project. Depending on the type of business and the market in which you operate, through your content, you can show off your business personality and culture, and this will help bring your business to life. You can do this through utilising different mediums of content such as video, explainer videos, infographics, and more. This builds out your brand image in a way that is informative and engaging, rather than plain and stale.

Optimal channels to promote your messaging

The way that you distribute your B2B content should be a key part of your strategy, planning this out ahead of time is a good way to ensure that you are reaching as many people as possible. Here are some of the tools you should be using.

  • Social media: LinkedIn is a crucial tool to use alongside other social channels as this is the place that key decision-makers look with business on their mind.
  • Key industry media websites can offer PR opportunities, and a lot of the specialist media websites need a lot of content for traffic purposes. This allows for link building and helps to build website authority.
  • Writing content specifically for Google using SEO is crucial to ensure that your content is being seen through the search engine.

The professionals you need on your team

The business heads should be an integral part of pushing your B2B content and driving it through to their networks. This will have a huge impact on the rest of the business and their approach to what you’re producing. Hiring talented and skilled content managers, thought leadership specialists, digital marketing managers, copywriters, and social media managers will help to drive your B2B content marketing plan forward.

It is important that your team has the knowledge and skills you need to promote success in this area of the business. Here are some of the key skills you should be looking for when hiring in these areas.

  • Digital skills.
  • Distribution knowledge.
  • Understanding of audience targeting and segmentation.
  • Key understanding of driving the marketing and sales funnel. Including the initial introduction and all the steps involved there.
  • An interest and understanding of the commercial goals of the business.
  • Reporting abilities so they can track the performance and ROI.
  • Presenting so that they can report back the KPIs and business value of what they are producing.

Developing the skills in your team can help to drive a better B2B marketing programme that will engage your clients and present yourselves as thought leaders. If you are interested in hiring top talent to your marketing department, get in touch with one of our specialist recruitment consultants today. Alternatively, create a MyPage account to make the most of our job match tool to explore the opportunities best suited to your skill set.

Matthew Scarfe
Manager, Michael Page Marketing