Let’s be honest— for busy B2B marketers, content creation may just feel like another checkbox. But, when leveraged effectively, it can give your company the edge it needs to appeal to and secure greater numbers of clients. However, effective content creation & personalized outreach requires more than just a generalized blast of content across your social channels or a lengthy newsletter.
Be strategic about your content. Think about which channels are best for video, versus text posts. Look holistically at the content you produce, and think about which audiences will find the most value in it. Multiple touchpoints are a must, to ensure a good breadth for your audience. Most importantly, content does not have to be long— even newsletters should be punchy and to the point. You’ll want to ensure that your content is carefully planned, personalized and evaluated at every step, in order to ensure your success.
Personalized Outreach
The most important element of all content marketing is remembering that the decision-makers you’re trying to reach are people, at the heart of things. For B2B endeavors, personalized outreach is key. You’ll want to consider these people’s unique business needs and formulate your content marketing strategy around them. This often includes incorporating multiple mediums in order to get your message across, as the optimum channels for B2B outreach can vary, over time.
Where DTC marketing can rely on some emotional tactics in appealing to consumers, B2B marketing by nature must be more factual and requires a deeper understanding of the technical terms in play. With that in mind, it is more important than ever to make sure that your B2B-facing content is staying up to date on the most relevant trends in your space. You’ll want to craft your content— be it long- or short-form — to showcase the value that your brand can bring to other companies, both within the context of the current moment and well into the future.
Plan Effectively
As a general rule, B2B content marketing strategies may take longer than other advertising methods. However, when done effectively, consistent content marketing can be 3 times more effective than traditional outbound marketing— while also being 62% less expensive.
When you’re looking to create a content marketing strategy to last, it will be vital to consider your best marketing channels. For example, consider your audience preferences— many B2B decision-makers will reference a business website or social media above a personal blog. Or look into what time you want to reach these audiences: radio is far more popular in the early morning hours, whereas television is a more dominant platform in the evenings. Again, personalized outreach is a major factor to consider when creating your content.
If you’re looking for ways to ensure your content will stand out, there is always value in taking a look at the competition. Consider where your competitors’ weak spots are, and curate your content to fill those gaps in the market. Once you have found your specific marketing niche, it’s important to maintain consistency. Consider a social media calendar or other organizational system to ensure that your content runs on a schedule. Of course, like any kind of marketing, you’ll want to keep a monitor of the current trends, allowing your content to stay relevant.
Ensure Thorough Evaluation
As with any kind of marketing, you’ll want to make sure that you have metrics in place to keep a monitor of how your content is performing. Impressions and clicks are one way to measure your content performance. However, in order to make the most of your content marketing, consider the value of including backlinks within articles. These can be especially valuable as a call-to-action— and they provide another touchpoint to monitor, providing data on consumer responses.
You’ll also want to ensure that you have a robust platform suited to keeping all of this data organized. Be conscious of the kinds of data that you are collecting from consumers and the capabilities you’ll need to tweak your strategy and make your insights actionable for future marketing efforts.
B2B marketing certainly has its own unique vocabulary, but at the end of the day, you are still marketing to people. With that in mind, personalized outreach is critical to your goals. You’ll want to optimize your audience and choose consistent marketing channels, to ensure a steady supply of informative, easily-digestible content. Finally, with the proper evaluation measures in place, you’ll be able to see the impact of your content in real-time, allowing for necessary adjustments to your strategy.
By Janine Pollack, Executive Director of Growth & Content, at MNI Targeted Media
