Content marketing isn't solely a great tool for B2C businesses. Get it right, and you can achieve incredible results by driving engagement, aligning your brand values with your prospective clients, and setting yourself apart as an expert in your field.
While there are multiple factors (not least creating content that keeps the search engine algorithms happy), there are countless opportunities to make B2B content marketing a core revenue centre.
Today, the Tiga team has collected our top 10 B2B content marketing ideas to inspire you to get creative.
The first step is to look at your content marketing strategy - or start developing one - and fine-tuning the goals you're hoping to reach.
With numerous ways to leverage content marketing in the B2B space, those objectives will determine things like which types of content you focus on, where you place them for maximum visibility, or how you distribute content to your target audience.
There's no right or wrong aim, but knowing where the goalposts lie makes your chances of success considerably higher:
Content marketing isn't solely a great tool for B2C businesses.”
The final aim you may want to build into your content marketing strategy is customer loyalty - pivotal for B2B enterprises that rely on ongoing customer relationships.
Great content marketing isn't about selling a product but about enhancing every element of the customer journey by solving problems, providing support and generating interactions to keep the conversation flowing.
The next step is to learn about your audience, understand their pain points, and use that knowledge to craft a content marketing approach that meets those needs - even if they aren't requirements your customers already know about.
Again, the choices are vast, but a simple solution can be to sit down with your sales teams and ask them about the questions they receive the most or the issues that are most commonly raised, so you can be proactive in addressing them.
Analysing your core demographic can be as technical or intuitive as you wish, but some of the stages might involve:
This list is a brief overview and by no means exhaustive, but hopefully gives you a flavour of the research tools at your disposal to help build a solid customer persona to influence your selected B2B content marketing strategy.
By now, we've got a defined audience, a list of areas to focus on, and have started to develop an approach.
The trick to successful content marketing in a B2B context is to concentrate on adding value and sharing important information - we're not selling an individual item to a standalone consumer, so marketing should be more specific than in B2C.
Any content you publish should do one of two things (if not both):
For the latter, that's because most content recipients won't be sole decision-makers.
If they think you have something to offer that would benefit their business, they'll need to run it up the ladder, so stats and figures supporting the shared content are high-value.
Onto the B2B content marketing suggestions we promised.
A business blog is a perfect place to share diverse content and cover a huge range of areas where you see the opportunity to improve customer experiences and share quality content.
That could be advice about using a product, solving common integration challenges, general industry updates, advice about end-customer needs, or company-specific blogs, such as:
Blogs are a superb content marketing resource, as refreshing your online assets helps engage better with your audience while contributing to SEO performance as a bonus.
While most products will come with basic information, the more content you can provide to make it a seamless delivery, the better.
If you commonly receive questions about a specific function, how to use a feature, or using your product alongside another, this is where you can bring additional customer benefits through content marketing.
You could produce assembly instructions or data sheets to help customers understand how to use, assemble, integrate or optimise your product to achieve the best results.
Although a lot depends on the product or service you sell, you can encourage customers to stick with you and trust your advice by delivering as much detail as possible to make their lives easier.
For example, let's say we're a dropship retailer, selling a curated range of products for online sellers to stock in their shops.
Each product might have a technical description of materials, testing standards and dimensions.
If you can provide more specific product information sheets or listings, you help customers make faster decisions, feel confident that the product is right for them, and, crucially, support them in driving revenues by providing base content to feed into their own marketing.
Publishing gold standard blogs on your site is great - but if you can insert your content somewhere where it'll reach a wider audience, you're onto a good thing.
Whether that's a chat with a respected industry leader, a technical article to clear up common myths, or an interview on market-wide events, it's all adding to your reputation and brand awareness.
There is a world of opportunity to enhance your lead-gen statistics and garner interest through carefully placed case studies.
Before and after examples, interviews with client account managers, and examples showing how your product has transformed the profits of a B2B customer are all-powerful.
You can also showcase diverse uses of your product or service, with application examples that make it easier to see how this might slot into a prospective new business customer and give them similar benefits.
Learning materials return some of the best engagement metrics going, as people and businesses continually try to stay up to date, streamline their processes and raise productivity.
Free resources are an impactful form of content marketing, which could look like:
Your online learning materials can be complex and highly technical or a fun way to engage but ultimately need to make your customer feel valued and supported by increasing their understanding.
We mentioned earlier the importance of statistics - and here's how it slots into content marketing.
If you have researched the market, analysed feedback, assessed product performance or conducted customer surveys, you need to share that data with your audience to solidify your position.
You can also double the visibility of this sort of research-based content by cross-posting on industry publications and inviting customers to contact you for more insights.
Most B2B clients want the assurance that the procurement decisions they make will benefit their business - and offer the best value for money.
If you want to cement that belief, then product reviews, live performance testing or comparisons with rival products are great solutions.
Perhaps publish your findings in a blog or on product pages to showcase the best characteristics you want to highlight to your audience.
Videos are an excellent medium for sharing information in an accessible, more personal way than relying solely on text or written content marketing.
As a quick example, content on social media gets about 54% of engagements because it's fast and requires little to no effort on the part of your audience.
Sharing tutorials or instructions from your team makes the brand more individual. You can increase visibility by optimising videos and posting them on YouTube to start building a video bank your customers can refer to at any time.
A webinar is a useful tool and can be used for pretty much anything. You might invite customers to attend a live 'ask the team' webinar and run through some direct Q&A sessions or host a trouble-shooting webinar where you respond to a pre-submitted list of queries.
If you make a webinar live, your audience can fully engage, but it's also wise to have an on-demand download option so the event acts as an ongoing content marketing asset.
We hope these ideas have inspired you to start working on your B2B content creation - but we appreciate that with so many choices, it can be tricky to pin down your objectives and select the right place to invest your marketing budget.
If you'd like any further advice or tailored guidance for your business, please get in touch with the B2B content marketing team at Tiga to arrange a good time to talk.
This post was written by:
Tanya is the Marketing Services Manager of Tiga Creative Marketing and manages the content, search, paid advertising and Marketing Automation team.
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