B2B is competitive and every business in this space thrives to excel by building excellent products backed by a strong marketing strategy.
But is that all a business needs?
Short Answer? NO
I repeat, B2B is competitive; which makes it difficult for buyers to decide without going through a complete decision-making process.
Is content marketing the right marketing strategy to implement? Yes
Adding value is important in B2B marketing.
When your marketing content is fueled with comprehensive keyword research and is based on intent. You can achieve your targeted content marketing goals.
Content Marketing has proven to be one of the top lead magnets for B2B businesses.
It can also influence the buyer’s decision-making process when aligned with your B2B sales process, help build trust and relationships through ABM Campaigns - when used with great storytelling, it can ramp up open rates in your email marketing campaigns and help you.
You can create educational and informational blogs based on intent data for your website. They can be long-form or short-form content based on the keyword and the searcher’s intent.
E-books are gated content that you can create for your readers, your sales process, and your ABM campaigns.
E-books can be five pages to even 40 pages, as long as they are informational and resourceful enough to help build credibility and trust for your brand.
Whitepapers are more sophisticated than other types of content as they include problems and solutions with data, insights, and interviews on a particular subject.
They can help you build thought leadership and are great for lead generation.
They are the most visually digestible form of content as they provide lots of information and data packed into images.
Infographics are great for building backlinks for your website which can influence your website’s SEO growth.
The most downloadable form of content are checklists and templates.
You can add checklists and templates in your blogs as a lead magnet on your website in exchange for email subscription sign-up to build your email marketing list and maximize your website traffic.
Read More: How to Scale Your B2B Sales Pipeline with Digital Marketing?
You can tap into a wider audience through consistent content marketing on your website.
Creating informational and educational content can attract relevant traffic to your website.
When your content provides value to the users they come back for more content which builds influence and helps you retain as well as grow your traffic.
SEO takes a lot of time to grow visibility on search engines.
However, when your content marketing efforts are aligned with SEO techniques; you can easily gain visibility on the web.
But your content should be consistent, valuable, and of high quality.
The right place at the right time is what influences your audience’s trust-building process.
When your content is optimized as per intent data and it offers a valuable solution to the readers, they are more likely to trust your advice and recommendations.
Content marketing can be great lead magnets. A reader who comes back to read your content is more likely to purchase from you in the future.
To influence this decision you can also include CTA’s in your blogs to help guide your readers on what to do next.
Lindsay Kolowich says content is, ”a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, bottom-of-post, in the hero, or even on the side panel. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page."
Content Marketing efforts work the best when combined with SEO practices, aligned with sales processes and ABM campaigns, and based on intent data.