The New Rules of B2B Content Marketing

The information overload, coupled with the multitude of channels, has opened up new opportunities for marketers to interact with customers, cross their paths over and over again, and create innovative experiences. Marketing disruptions through innovative use of Content Marketing have become common.

Maintaining brand messaging and consistent content marketing efforts require revisiting your content strategies, and as customers’ ways of interaction change, it is necessary to evolve Content Marketing to stay ahead of them.

Traditionally, marketers have focused sharply on building content as per marketing funnels, creating tons of gated content, SEO-optimizing posts, and being consistent over social media. However, as the marketing landscape evolves, marketers need to evaluate these strategies and see if they are working or if they might require mini-strategies linked to each one of them.

The competition is really tough and the only way out is continuously upping the Content Marketing game. Content marketers need to be agile and keep their eyes open to see what’s working for their competitors, where their audience is heading, and what tactics would help in building a brand in the long term.

1. Integrated Story Telling Approach: We have all heard of the Integrated Marketing Approach where a brand delivers a unified and holistic message across all of the marketing channels that the brand uses. I would suggest the same while writing content for your service offerings, employer branding, customer testimonials, and other thought leadership forums. Maybe your next question is how and why to do Integrated Story Telling?

Here’s the answer – The best way to start an integrated storytelling approach is to prepare a messaging house for your products and service offerings. Fine-tune this messaging based on feedback from various stakeholders and try out a variety of messages on your landing pages, ad copies, blogs, thought leadership articles, and more. As you and your team communicate on various brand channels, make sure the right story comes out. Just an example, a cyber-security firm that keeps customer-centricity as the primary theme of their messaging should publish case studies that talk about how they prevented X USD for their customers, while their CEO must be applauding the client CISO for his outstanding achievements in the industry, their support team must be working towards keeping 100% SLAs, and their sales team must be talking about the latest features of the product that helps CISOs in achieving their organization’s security goals.

Actionable Tip: Select a handful of people who have been in the system for more than 2 years and can provide deep insights about their segment. Creating holistic and proper messaging for your products and services requires the contribution of various stakeholders like Sales, Product, Marketing, C-suite, Customers, and more.

2. Create Engaging Content: The simple message is – Engage First, Sell Later, Delight Always. Content marketers are constantly churning content in short form as well as long forms. For both of them to succeed, it is very essential to engage with the audience. The very first step in creating engaging content is to gain a deep insight into the audience that content marketers are writing for, but having said that, most content marketers are dependent on SEO-focused, high intent keywords that lead to a biased picture of what their target audience might be searching for.

Actionable Tip: Try to involve your Content Marketers in sales calls, project stand-ups, and customer review meetings, and create a constant idea channel for them. Create a Teams or Slack channel to drop pointers from your latest sales review meeting or leadership catch-up. Once you have an idea, do backward math on integrating SEO and other best practices related to your branding guidelines and service offerings.

3. Organize Engaging Content – As your brand starts its Content Marketing Journey, it is very important to create a flow and complete structure for it. Even search engines love organized content with relevant link juice flows and connected topics interlinked with each other. While B2B marketers are just writing content based on high volume keywords, trending searches, and high business intent search queries, it is very important to create a Content Calendar where each topic is sub-divided and branched with a proper structure. A B2B lead that comes to your website should be able to navigate and connect the dots of all your website blogs, service offerings, and thought leadership articles.

Actionable Tip – If you have a good amount of blogs on your website, create an excel sheet and categorize them based on user-persona and offerings they are trying to solve. Think of content topics that are left out and can be a good addition to someone who is trying to gain a complete understanding of your business model, service offerings, and modes of engagement. A very good example can be of IoT Product Company which is educating the industry about possible use-cases of their product in scaling the pilot IoT projects. An introductory blog must be followed by an immediate business benefits blog supported by a case study and a testimonial from a customer.

4. Make Paid Media Investments – Best things in marketing are not for free but their returns are high. As per research by the Content Marketing Institute, more than 50 percent of marketers are planning to increase their budgets in areas of paid media, owned media assets, events, and video spending. And why? Paid Marketing is one of the best ROI mediums if done correctly. If you are wondering if Content Marketing and Paid Media are oxymorons, give this post by Aaron Agius a read – PPC and Content Marketing: The Perfect Combo for Immediate ROI.

Actionable Tip – Marketers who do not have big budgets for paid marketing can start small, even one lead from your campaign would give you a starting point to convince management to provide you the required budget and scale it slowly. Refrain from having short-sightedness in making one campaign successful, work with your content team and other staff to understand how several campaigns can be linked together to create nurturing flow for your B2B personas.

5. Make Content Marketing your Revenue Center, Carefully! - As Marketers want to make Content Marketing the revenue center, they have to be very careful about the communication part of it. – It is so tempting to say our designs are great, our campaign planning is commendable, but our content is not working. As soon as your campaign fails or website visits drop, don’t blame your Content Writers. Do an introspection about apart from giving them an editorial calendar, how you are helping them write the right messaging for your audience, have you created the right buyer personas, bought a paid subscription to thought-leading technology magazines, have you tried creating a channel for other subject matter experts to connect with writers? If not, you have to look at the bigger picture of creating a documented content marketing strategy. Having a tunnel vision of getting more rankings and attaching forms filled and leads per blog would not lead you to a sustainable content marketing strategy.

For example – A start-up began outbound efforts in 2018, their team reached close to 400 prospects in a year, and then the same company started some inbound marketing efforts by revamping the website, blogging, putting case studies, and more. Out of those 400 prospects, one B2B buyer keeps on visiting the start-up website, and one fine day, he dropped his details with the services that he has been looking for. He later signed a contract and during the sales call, he mentioned that he has been impressed with the company’s thought leadership articles. As you can see there is an actual lead nurturing that has happened but since there was no tracking system involved, the lead was attributed to one blog.

Actionable Tip – Content Marketing is not Content Writing and if you are expecting to give an excel sheet to your Content Writers without discussing the personas, your current clients, and current sales prospects you are talking to. If someone is putting together a content calendar without having deeper insights about these things, I would call it a red flag for your Content Strategy. Make sure to visit your content calendar to address any questions around it. Be mindful that highly scripted manual sheets don’t cost you out-of-the-box ideas.

The Rules Will Change Again

Nothing is constant and constant gets stagnant, the same applies to the world of Content Marketing. There’s constant pressure to outperform competitors, win great deals, and build loyal customers for B2B Marketers. B2B marketing teams are already stretched in various directions right from Employer Branding to ensuring Customer Success. Surrounded by these, it’s natural for marketers to just finish the tasks on their plate and keep churning more and more content. However, a monthly or fortnightly retrospection of how your people and processes are doing can help you in discovering new paths and building your rules of Content Marketing.