Understand your Customers
B2B content marketing strategy involves understanding your target audience. There are two types that business strategizes their customers. One is the customer persona or the buyer. The buyer persona is the one opted as your ideal customer. It is not depicted as a real person but a caricature of the preferred ideal customer. While you create your buyer persona you would define their company type, job title, and their challenges faced.
You could refer to year real customers in case you don’t want to create an imaginary customer. You will include the similar type of information about your real customer as mentioned for the customer persona. In this you gather the customers data that are very similar as done for the customer persona.
You will review all your customers and will identify their shared characteristics. You can even pick one or more customers to fit your target audience. All of the available information about the customers should be analyzed. Interviews must be conducted with your customers for understanding why they prefer your services.
By creating a buyer persona or using information of a real customer will make you understand who tends to purchase your services or goods you offer. Understanding your target audience will eventually add value and profit to your company.
The customer’s information can be given to your copywriters and sales team for using it while creating your sales pages also referring to this information on creating your B2B content marketing strategies. This may lead to an understanding of customers problems and motivations to identify the marketing channels and topic to cover.
How to map your customers journey
As you understand your customer, you want to review the customer journey for building an established business. There involves a complex process while tracking your customer’s journey. Your customer might have undergone multiple touchpoints before making a purchase.
Many customers generally engage with your company using different channels of their customer journey. For instance, they would find you through your website blog and check your Tweet on the social media. After two months they would purchase your product and accord your company on their mind.
The customers would visit your site and would indulge to engage with your chatbot. After researching the product on your review site they do purchase. This sounds a little complicated customer journey, though it’s a lot simpler than the one your customers go through.
Tracking your customer’s journey amidst multiple channels brings a headache. Many companies don’t intervene to track their customer’s journey. Few companies use specific expensive tools to track the customer across a multitude of channels. The minority track the major portion of the customer’s journey.
With the available information you can bring the pieces together for your customer’s journey. This renders to be the easiest for achieving through interviews. Another way is to access the data for utilizing the customer’s journey.
Perform Competitor Analysis
The research for your B2B content marketing strategies usually spys on your competition. It serves to give a more business-friendly name by opting for an undertaking competitor intelligence.
Competitor intelligence guides you to understand the fact about where your competition is gaining success. By understanding the concept of what is doing right or identifying what serves long, that leads to improve your business planning.
You have to list the ideal outcomes from the research you made, before accessing your competitor intelligence. Few points to explore such as :
- Channels they use to share your content.
- The highest level of engagements in specific channels.
- Do they publish more often ?
- Does their site exhibit more traffic or popularity in important pages?
- By these features you would get an idea.
Insights can make you get customers more quickly or it may even sidestep the blunder mistakes to cost your company’s valuable resources. If your competitor has made an expensive mistake that would cost them thousands of dollars to spend, this is considered to be pretty silly if you repeat the same kind of mistake.
B2B Content Marketing Strategy creation
After the completion of your research you can strategize your B2B marketing plan. The strategies involved in the content marketing should be based on the insights you gathered through your research.
There are many content marketing strategies that incorporate a part of digital marketing. You might have even paid advertising budgets for television, newspapers and magazines. Whatever channels you use for advertising the end goal still remains the same. You have to create a B2B content marketing strategy for making everyone understand through sharing.
There are few questions to answer at the end of the planning stage :
- The marketing channels which you use?
- What kind of content do you publish?
- How often do you publish content on every channel?
- Ways to promote the content?
- Ways to convert the leads into customers?
- Who can do the assigned work?
You should justify the answers for the insights you obtained through your research. The above mentioned questions are just the top-level questions to answer. There’s lot more work before prioritizing your B2B content marketing strategies.
For instance, If you are destined to develop a blog content, then you have to work on specific keywords that are rich to rank higher in SEO. You have to ensure who will be writing the content and the ways to improve the blog.
For the quarter first you have to create a comprehensive plan and for the later layer you go with the broad brushstrokes. It consumes enough time to create a comprehensive B2B content marketing plan. But it ensures to significantly pay off later after developing an appropriate strategy.
The Key Performance Indicators
The content marketing plan leads you to track your campaign’s success. Most of the companies use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track their success.
The financial target serves as a primary KPI for your content marketing plan. For example, If you have to generate $100,000 this quarter through content marketing. You have to put a system that tracks attribution to split that $100,000 towards various marketing channels you use. For instance you can generate $40,000 from advertising in the magazines and $60,000 from your blog.
You can then understand how a department member of staff will help you to hit that goal. Lets consider the blog’s revenue as an example. There are few hypothetical performance metrics you can use like:
- Publishing one blog article per week.
- Publishing 20 guest posts on authority blogs per month.
- Gaining 500 new subscribers in your email list per month.
- Increasing the number of website visitors as 3k per month.
These goals must align with your primary B2B content marketing goal. This can logically break your KPIs down and imparts suitable plans falling in place.
Revenue serves as an essential goal in the B2B business. Besides are some additional factors crucial to be considered to your business:
- Showcasing the quality of your service or products.
- Gaining audience trust.
- Pertaining the customers on reliability and making them your brand ambassadors.
- Practising to overcome sales objections.
Prioritizing your resources as they are limited or precious. The goals you keenly focus on.
Once you decide your priorities then you can utilize the available data to track relevant metrics and look if you succeed in your content marketing strategy.
Some features may work for other brands that might not necessarily work for your industry or business. You have to look out for your business goals and must focus on relevant metrics.
Ways to create and promote your content
Strategizing your content creation and maintaining a timeline can lead to creating effective content. Team collaboration plays a vital role for creating content with setting deadlines.
The ways you promote your services or products usually vary on the basis of your business. LinkedIn presence is maintained for most of the B2B business and decision- makers at the companies. Based on the ratio of Content Marketing Institute, 66% of content marketers rate LinkedIn as the effective B2B social platform along with Twitter being 55% and Youtube as 51%.
LinkedIn serves the best way to reach influential people like senior executives aimed at decision-makers. You can connect with other people related to your industry and join groups relevant to your niche. Apart from LinkedIn you can promote your content on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube channel and email marketing communications if you owe one.
Besides Social media, you can opt for direct outreach to put your content for producing in front of key decision-makers at the company you work with. This goes a three- step process:
- A list of relevant decision-makers are created for the companies you want to work with.
- Obtaining the contact details of these decision-makers.
- Showcasing your work by sending a short informative introductory email.
It implies to be a straightforward strategy that may however seem to be an abstract or ineffective. You can run the campaign without using any paid tools. But if you have a budget, it’s worth it to invest in some premium tools. For instance, you can use the Right Inbox for scheduling recurring emails.
This renders as a big timesaver when you run the outreach campaigns. You can even set up a series of automated emails that can be sent out overtime. Multiple emails can be mailed to a person that maximizes the response rate over a set time period.
Engage with your Audience
Content marketing provides your audience with valuable content also engages them to share, like and make comments on your content. If you are new to content marketing, people won’t trust your brand immediately. People will trust it with their friends, peers, colleagues or influencers they follow on social media. They usually trust the content shared by those whom they know. Here comes B2B influencer marketing lively.
The user- generated content is commonly associated with your business-to-customer (B2C)marketing for using the B2B brand. An example from tech giant IBM LinkedIn page, The IBM features projects and content from its users, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This kind of story is related to the COVID-19 pandemic that’s the current issue going on every person’s mind.
Engage with your users through giveaways and contests besides featuring product use cases. Cisco imparts the Innovation Challenge that grabs the attention of a diverse set of entries across the globe.
Method to track trends and review the results
Digital marketing is fast paced, hence it is mandatory to have a pulse of relevant trends for your content and must stay currently updated. Tracking trends adapts your strategy to remain relevant down the line.
You should continually review the results apart from tracking the content marketing trends. The content marketing strategy should sustainably evolve as a landscape and market change. Quick adaptability is the key to ensure that your brand remains competitive and relevant.
