Author: MONIQUE OLAN, Marketing Supervisor You hear it tossed around a lot when people talk about marketing for B2B – you need to use content marketing. They’re right, you know? Content marketing is a very important component when trying to reach your target market in the B2B field. So what is content marketing? It’s not necessarily a
Author: MONIQUE OLAN, Marketing Supervisor
You hear it tossed around a lot when people talk about marketing for B2B – you need to use content marketing. They’re right, you know? Content marketing is a very important component when trying to reach your target market in the B2B field. So what is content marketing? It’s not necessarily a new concept.
>>>Content marketing is the creation and sharing of information and education from you to your target audience in an attempt to engage them and motivate them to want to do business with you.<<<
From websites, blogs, e-newsletters, social media, video, and more, content marketing is a cost-effective technique to reach a vast amount of people. However, keep in mind that content marketing isn’t an approach that results directly in sales. This marketing tool is a bit harder to measure the results for. It’s more a way to condition the potential customers to purchase.
To make the most out of this type of marketing approach, here are 6 best practices for using content marketing for your B2B company, in both creating the content and delivering it.
CREATING THE CONTENT
1. Solve Their Pain Points
You should know your customers and the problems they need solved. Focus on topics for your content that focus around these. What are their pain points; what information related to these pains do they tend to look for? From this you will find plenty of topics to focus your content on. The more useful information you can provide, the more current and potential customers come to rely on this information you share, and in turn will be more inclined to choose you to do business with when the time comes.
FOR EXAMPLE: Your company provides pet grooming services. Your customers’ pain points are related to taking care of their pets and learning as much information about doing so. If you center your topics for content around their key pain points and related information, your topics may be:
- “When and How Often You Need to Groom Your Pet”
- “Differences Between Pet and Human Shampoos”
- “Shaving Your Dog for Summer? Consider This First”
2. Leave the Sales Pitch Out of This
After sharing all this wonderful insight, you might find yourself tempted to shout out at the end of it “And here at Company ABC, we can do XYZ to solve these issues for you.” Don’t. Avoid pulling the sales pitch into your content. The point of your content marketing efforts is to provide your customers with the insights they need from an expert in the industry, without being bombarded with sales attempts. The more information you share, the better of an expert you appear, and without the sales pitches you build trust with these potential customers. Trust goes a LONG way in helping to condition these prospects for the future.
3. Your Title Means More Than You Think
You put a lot of effort into the content for your company to be shared, so don’t forget to do the same amount of effort into developing the title you choose to give it! Your title needs to immediately provoke the audience to want to read it. It needs to clearly address why the content is relevant, which means it’ll usually call to attention the pain point(s) and/or solutions the content will provide.
But it doesn’t need to just appeal to the reader; your title needs to be strategically written to include the right keywords for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. It’s a fine balance between relevant keywords and compelling and interesting words to make the most of both search engines and potential customers. Think carefully when developing your title for each content marketing piece you create.
4. Good Grammar is Still Essential
Just because this isn’t an essay that’ll be published in your next industry leading magazine or something selling your product or service doesn’t mean that punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, and other grammar components go over looked. You can easily turn your audience away from your content if these are off or poorly written. While it isn’t selling your product, the content marketing you do DOES reflect upon your brand, so proof and edit your content thoroughly before you share it.
DELIVERING THE CONTENT
5. Create a Company Blog
A blog is a great way to share your content to your target audience, direct people through your company website, and optimize your presence on relevant search topics. Creating a blog that is hosted through your website will help ensure that each read and each engagement from the audience is attributed to your company website, helping with SEO at the same time you’re providing information for interested readers.
Having a blog hosted on your website will also connect your potential customers who are reading the content you share directly to your company website without the sales pitch! With good content being shared at a regular basis, at some point each reader will become curious about who this “guru” with all this industry knowledge is. Once again, this is prepping them for potential sales, building the trust a B2B company really needs to have with customers before they even realize they want or need your product or service.
6. Repurpose Your Content Wherever You Can
The best way to keep your content alive once created? Repurpose it into other marketing efforts.
E-NEWSLETTERS: Take blog posts and accumulate them into an e-newsletter. Depending on how often you share content, you can do a monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly e-newsletter to current and potential customers. As long as the information is still needed by those individuals, the newsletter will be a hit!
WHITE PAPERS: White papers are a great way to dive deeper into a topic and really help to push that expert image of your company. Take topics you may have addressed in blog posts and expand upon them. These can then be used in various ways – attached at the end of the blog post for more details, shared on a landing page in your PPC efforts, submit them to industry publications, and more.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Share all your posts and content you create on your social media. You have a new blog post? Announce it. You have white papers? Share them too. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, or whatever social networks you may be a part of are all great places to share content. With the right techniques, you can use keywords in your social post that grab attention on Twitter or use LinkedIn Sponsored Posts to share your content with your exact target audience.
One thing we always stress, and that becomes evident here in developing content marketing strategies >>> KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS
Your marketing efforts are only as good as your grasp on who your customers are, what their pain points are, and what key features of your product or service connect with the customer and solve these pains. Knowing these things, your content marketing can be efficiently developed around core topics that your target audience wants to read, and condition them for actual sales through other marketing methods.
