5 Successful Examples of B2B Content Marketing
The term B2B content marketing refers to the procedure of creating and promoting content to other businesses that happen to be your target customers.
You aim to enforce content marketing to foster traffic, leads, and eventually, sales, Duh!
Yet, knowing that a specific strategy works, is something, while learning how to rock it, is a totally different thing.
There’s no one way of producing B2B content marketing. Your resources, goals and target customers contribute to planning your content strategy.
Hence, the followings are the essential hints and tricks for creating B2B content marketing, with several examples of famous successful businesses.
What are the steps of creating B2B content marketing?
1. Think about the tools your target customers need
Search for keywords that are related to your field to incorporate them in your B2B content marketing. You can use any of the keyword tools to assist you in the process. Thus, you’ll find relevant tools that people in your industry search for on Google.
35% of marketers come up with content ideas through keyword analysis, as Databox stated.
2. Create free tools
After getting to know your customers’ needs, integrate one or a couple of free tools in your website. Bear in mind that you have to keep rejuvenating them from time to time to ensure they’re top-ranked.
According to Databox, 40% of B2B companies evaluate their content weekly, while 25% asses their content on a daily basis.
It’d be best to observe the analytics to know what’s good about them and what needs to be improved.
Content Marketing Institute found that 88% of B2B companies use analytics tools such as
Google Analytics and Google Search Console to alter their content.
3. Optimize it
After adjusting your tools, staying high-ranked in google is a challenging task.
One effective way to do so is through adding links to your content as internal and external links veritably impact your Google rank.
However, integrating videos has proven to be the most effective in optimizing B2B content marketing.
The following info graphic shows the top perceived content formats according to Marketing Charts Website.
Likewise, Isoline Comms asserts that 53% of B2B companies believe that videos are the best type of content marketing.
4. Blog
Include the top-ranked relevant keywords in your blog posts. Consequently, your whole website will rank higher if you’re consistent enough and systematic.
In addition, promote your products or services all the time in your posts, so it’s a win-win situation for you and the readers. Nevertheless, don’t overdo it in order to maintain a natural language
“Your writing doesn’t have to be boring just because it’s for other businesses. Businesses have people who read stuff,” said Valeria Maltoni, Founder, Conversation Agent LLC.
5. Promote the content
Similarly, promote your blog posts on all possible channels, including your email list and social media accounts.
“Perhaps one of the more understated benefits of social media in B2B is the ability to establish and foster expertise within a given industry or niche. The same tools and services that new influencers leverage to construct prominence and demonstrate awareness are also readily available to anyone with wisdom and vision to share,” said Brian Solis, author and anthropologist
You can create Facebook paid ads as well, but you have to combine them with organic traffic.
Data collected by Growth Badger advises B2B businesses to focus on both unpaid and organic traffic.
According to Databox, 35% of content marketers claim that online communities are great promotion tools.
Online community, aka internet community or web community, is a group of people sharing the same interests and interacting only through the Internet such as Growth Hackers, Quora and Reddit.
Examples of companies that prospered in B2B content marketing
Therefore, in order to better understand B2B content marketing techniques, here’s an idea of the content marketing strategies of 5 successful businesses in this field.
1.Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce website for businesses selling online, trusted by over 1,000,000 companies worldwide.
Check Digiutm’s article on How to Create a Store on Shopify.
Shopify’s Senior Global Content Marketing Lead, Mark Macdonald, said that Shopify has always been investing in content marketing since day one.
It has invested in all types of B2B content marketing, including blogs, guides, courses and podcasts. It also offers about 20 free tools available for anyone on the web.
As mentioned earlier, free tools are vital in order to rank high in google. Shopify’s tools do generate thousands of searches every month.
On the other side, these tools aid plenty of entrepreneurs who wish to solve simple problems like coming up with a slogan or a logo.
2.Ahrefs’ Blog
Ahrefs has focused on blog writing since it was founded in 2010. It is considered an SEO tool that enables you to research your competitors, optimize your website, find the high ranked keywords and many more features.
Want to know more? Check Digiutm’s article on How to get to #1 on Google with Blogging.
3.HubSpot
HubSpot is the role model for any small business as it blazed the path for B2B content marketing.
It’s no exaggeration to say it’s a company that shaped today’s marketing. For instance, the term “inbound marketing” was coined by HubSpot CEO to be the leader of the whole industry.
While HubSpot has grown amazingly fast, the main reason behind its success is its content marketing strategy.
Blogging, divided into marketing and sales, is an integral part of the HubSpot website.
The posts discuss SEO, social media and blogging in order to help small businesses while maintaining traffic.
HubSpot provides various resources such as webinars, eBooks, case studies, and a marketing kit, all contributing to yielding leads.
Founded in 2006 and has been entirely dependent on B2B content marketing, HubSpot currently has over 100,000 customers in 120 Countries, besides 330,000 trained and certified inbound professionals.
4.SAP
SAP is a powerful enterprise software vendor dealing with lots of industries worldwide. Though, the ability to satisfy the needs of such miscellaneous customers is SAP’s unique characteristic.
It provides assistance for 19 customer segments, allowing each company to find the desired service.
Furthermore, SAP’s B2B content marketing extends to many formats, including:
- Blog posts
- Tweeter
- SAP Community Network
- Virtual events
- Face to face events
- Radio ads
In the meantime, SAP has established that free services don’t always mean less profit.
“Many of our tactics were absolutely free. You do not have to register to get this information. Then we would just hold close to our vest some information so that we had a way of determining who was really interested so we can put them in a nurture queue,” explained Ginger Shimp, marketing director, SAP North America
5.SecureWorks
Cybersecurity is a serious issue nowadays. Every business, no matter what size, should be concerned with its online presence.
Prevention is better than the cure. Detecting hacking attacks, before taking place and acting in accordance, is the linchpin to secure your company’s online platforms.
SecureWorks offers content marketing tailored for diverse personas in order to aid them in achieving cybersecurity.
It has 2 main channels to attract traffic and leads, namely blogs and resources.
The blog merely answers FAQs about online security, while the resources feature webinars, case studies, reports, datasheets, solution briefs, videos and many more.
This way, SecureWorks uses the content marketing strategy to streamline marketing and sales teams.
“We’ve been able to double the conversion rate. We went from, essentially, having one out of every 200 unknown visitors become known to. Now one out of every 97. We also see that nearly one out of every two qualified leads that marketing sends to sales becomes an opportunity,” said Kira Mondrus, director of global Marketing, SecureWorks.
In a nutshell, Shopify, Arhefs, SAP, HubSpot and SecureWorks, are great examples for how B2B content marketing works. If you’re still wondering whether you’ve enough knowledge, 2 significant steps are recommended at this point.
The first is to learn more. Dozens of online academies offer courses in a such hot topic, such as:
- The Strategy of Content Marketing by Coursera
- Content Marketing by HubSpot Academy
- Content Marketing for B2B Enterprises by Udemy
- Marketing in a Digital World by Coursera
The second is to practice while learning. Please do your research, develop a content marketing strategy and modify it as you observe the results.
Moreover, consult professionals in the field whose businesses are ahead of the pack. Exploit your connections to the maximum, so you don’t only learn from your mistakes but also from others’.
Go ahead and start working on your B2B content marketing strategy. Hopefully, you’ll find it very rewarding and valuable for your business.
Hooray! with constant preservation, your business will thrive in this cut-throat industry.
Good Luck!
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