It doesn’t matter whether you are strictly an online company or an international enterprise with retail storefronts across the globe. In either situation, B2B marketing plays a major role in your ongoing growth.
However, improving on the B2B marketing foundation can be difficult, especially with growing competition and a break-neck pace of changing trends.
According to Twitter, only 35% of marketers claim to be able to measure their marketing RoI. In fact, 38% of total responders to the survey reported that they don’t need any form of formal tracking or analysis.
Without a focus on success metrics, marketers will find it difficult to iterate on B2B marketing solutions in light of constant market change.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at several guidelines on how to improve your B2B content marketing strategy, in pursuit of higher engagement and better conversion rates.
Create a Target Profile
While you don’t have to create a specific customer profile or persona (as in B2C marketing), you should still have an idea of who your target audience is.
In that respect, start with the following questions as a baseline for your optimal B2B stakeholder:
- What industry and niche does your B2B stakeholder operate in?
- What does their product and service portfolio look like?
- How much value do they put in B2B collaboration and industry networking?
- Which core values should they have and which of their goals should align with yours?
- Are you looking for long-term or short-term collaboration?
These questions can be used as a guidepost for what company profile would best suit your business for collaboration.
This will also help you narrow your content’s audience to a niche with whom you can network down the line.
Take Advantage of Your Blog
Your dedicated company blog is one of the best ways to approach potential B2B prospects.
There, you can share your thoughts on pressing industry matters, offer how-to guides, and present your audience with discussion and opinion pieces on a regular basis.
Some of the content types to explore include:
- Articles and blog posts
- Case studies and analysis pieces
- Interviews
- Podcasts
- Video demonstrations
- Reviews
- Industry or company-related visualized data (infographics)
- Guest posts from prolific industry experts and B2B partners
Make sure that potential B2B partners know about your internal culture and the vision you share inside your company.
You can blog about your business and industry personally. Or you can use professional content creators and copywriters if you / your team lacks time to generate the content internally.
According to HubSpot, 43% of B2B marketers claim that blogging is their top content priority. Within that content, they also report that case studies are the best way to convert B2B partners.
No matter the path you choose, blogging should be a pivotal part of your B2B content marketing strategy going forward.
Reinvent Your Landing Pages
Depending on your industry and niche, you may be well served to add widgets to your landing pages showing content from elsewhere on the website.
If you want to engage B2B partners who visit your website, you should highlight content marketing materials in easy-to-find places on landing pages.
Ideally, you will place sections such as company blog, B2B networking opportunities, and contact information front and center, where they simply cannot be overlooked.
You can also highlight testimonials and reviews from other B2B companies. Testimonials can greatly enhance your odds at lining up new projects and business associates.
Don’t Overlook Social Media
Although it may not seem intuitive at first, social media platforms can add a lot of value to your B2B networking efforts.
Sites such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have become staples of global brands looking for B2B opportunities.
How do you get started? The easy first step is to create social media pages with your business’ name on them, and then start sharing your content on those pages.
Your blog posts and marketing materials will carry just as much weight on social media as they do on your company blog itself.
So social media is first a great place to promote content marketing efforts on your own site. And secondly, it is very effective in helping you engage with target audiences and uncover B2B opportunities.
Partner & Collaborate
There’s no better way to showcase your B2B networking efforts than by working with industry experts and influential personalities on new content.
You can produce live video sessions with representatives of your partner companies. If that doesn’t work for them, you could even ask for guest blog posts.
These will not only show your partnership, but it will provide you new content and an SEO-friendly link back to their own domain. You can do the same for other companies to extend your own exposure over to their target audience.
Look for opportunities to incorporate your existing B2B contacts into your marketing content. You will quickly find that this is an efficient method to help both brands succeed.
And even better — once other companies notice your already successful B2B network, they will be more likely to engage you proactively requesting yet another potentially valuable partnership.
Be Ready to Engage
When all is said and done, the main purpose of B2B content marketing is to attract more corporate entities to your business.
As the word starts to circulate about your company, new prospects will approach you with collaboration opportunities.
Make sure that you are available to answer any questions and to respond to their networking offers diligently.
Don’t make other companies wait for your response – be there when the inevitable message pops up and build your B2B network further.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain, sourced from pexels.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Emma Robertson
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- How To Improve Your B2B Content Marketing - May 2, 2019
