Content Marketing Strategy

Top 6 Elements Without Which B2B Content Marketing Strategy Is Incomplete

Content marketing is the original content developed to promote products or services in order to build brand awareness, compel the target audience to take the desired action, and finally drive traffic to the business. In B2B business, content is produced to appeal to other businesses. Content marketing is not as easy as it seems. It needs efforts, time, and the right strategy. Over the years, web marketing has witnessed tremendous changes. Online marketers no longer use the same old methods, particularly the ones that work in the B2B market. B2B is the segment that requires constant marketing experimentation because each cycle is different. It means, as per the target audience, marketing methods need to be tailored. It is when content marketing plays its role, as it helps B2B marketers in achieving their objectives within an approximate timeline.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 89% of B2B marketers are using content marketing. It makes the entire selling part easier for B2B businesses. Companies find it easy to communicate with the potential audience without making use of any influential messaging. As customers are getting the advantage of having complete control of the kind of messages they receive, B2B content marketing makes the perfect sense. In addition to that, creating and distributing valuable content will help your business to grow in the long run.
To create an effective content marketing strategy, here are top 6 elements without which B2B content marketing strategy is incomplete:

  • Define Objectives/Goals:

Before you start with any planning process, it’s essential to have clarity about your goals and objectives. You need to figure out the goal that you wish to achieve through content marketing. Do you want customers to share your content? Do you want them to sign-up for newsletters? Do you want them to purchase?

Define Objectives

Many companies set vague goals. They don’t have the idea what to achieve, how to achieve and in what timeframe to achieve. For instance, a company sets its goal that they want to increase their search traffic. Now, in this situation, how will you define success? Will 5% increase in the search traffic be a success? Well, it may be or may not be. So it’s essential to have a clear goal as your entire strategies and planning will solely depend on your objectives.

  • Understand your audience:

Most of the companies tend to overlook the idea of knowing their target audience. The success of a content marketing strategy depends on the audience as you are creating content for them. To know your audience, there are three actions you need to take:

Understand your audience

  • Collect demographic data: Email subscriber analytics, web analytics, social media analytics will help you in knowing the age, gender, income, etc. of the audience. You can get the insights of their interests as well.
  • Get customer feedback: To know more about your audience, its best to take their feedback. This will help you in identifying their needs, their problems, and most importantly how they are reacting to your current content.
  • Create buyer personas: Once you have demographic data and customer feedback, you can create buyer personas (fictional customer avatar). It will give you a better understanding of how your audience will react to particular content.
  • Optimize for High Conversion: It is another essential element without which B2B content marketing strategy is incomplete. Even if you are clear with your goals, know your audience. You also need to have a platform where you can engage them and turn them to loyal customers. This platform can be a website, blog or a web page that is created for a specific purpose. The designing of these platforms should be in such a way that it gives you concrete results. Here are a few areas that need to be pondered :

Optimize for High Conversion

  • Page Design: It covers everything—from logo placement to colors to font styles. It is one of the key conversion drivers.
  • Email List: You are continuously creating content but is it turning into leads and email lists? The design of the page should make email subscription easier. Also, make sure that visitors have a clear view of the opt-in box.
  • Page Content: In addition to the website content, the content you create to attract opt-in is also essential. It includes free giveaways such as email courses, the trial for 30 days, eBooks, etc.
  • Be a Great Storyteller:

Storytelling is an art that is increasingly become popular in B2B businesses. Being a marketer, you should know how to make use of this art.  Storytelling is a great way to separate the content from competitors. You need to create a story in such a way that customers easily get connected with your brand. It’s not compulsory to always create serious content. Sometimes the entertaining yet informative content can also help companies to generate leads.

  • Endorse Rigorously:

Creating unique content is not enough. You need to put more efforts in promoting the content as you do in writing it. When it comes to content promotions, many businesses restrict themselves to promoting content on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But if you seriously want to spread your content to a broader audience base, then you have to move beyond this. Here are some tips for content promotion:

  • Guest blogging: It is an act of contributing a blog to other websites that are visited by your target audience as well. You add relevant links to the content for promotion. Quality content helps in getting more traffic, brings credibility, and benefits SEO all at the same time.
  • Email list content: Email lists are essential for getting tangible results from content marketing. A good email list can help you in promoting content and generating leads.
  • Business cards: Apart from giving information, business cards can do a lot more than you can think of. Though blogs, videos, and websites are a great way to promote content, getting customers to view them is a challenge. By adding a QR code to your business card design, you can overcome this challenge.
  • Forums and Groups: These are a great way to interact with the target audience and marketers of other companies. You can either promote your products or services directly by answering the new queries. Or you can participate in the ongoing conversation and give a relevant link that redirects the members to the desired page.

If you are not tight on budget, then you can also go for sponsored ads, posts, etc.

  • Measure results:

Once you are done with all your content marketing efforts, it necessary to measure results. Measuring and analyzing reports will help you in knowing what is working and where you need to improve. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of companies measure content marketing ROI. There are content measuring marketing tools like Buffer, Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, etc. that can help you tracking and measuring each content you have written or published.

Great Storyteller

Conclusion:

You may find other elements that can help you in the content marketing strategy. But the elements as mentioned above will undoubtedly take your efforts to the next level. Hope this article will help you in creating a content strategy that is not only innovative but also aligns with your company goals.
Since the article explains how business cards can help you with your content marketing efforts, we think you may be interested in creating it. Designhill is one of the leading graphic design platforms where you can hire professional graphic designers for all your designing needs.

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