5 Ways To Zoom Ahead With Content in B2B Marketing

The goal of content marketing is to create conversations about your company, products, and services.

It is also a terrific way to engage your customers and build a community.

It also benefits your SEO.

Research shows that 70% of B2B marketers are generating more content this year than last.

It can, however, be daunting to jump right in and start your own content marketing campaign, even though most small businesses and startups do understand its value.

There are a lot of blogs, podcasts, and videos that your competitors or people you look up to are regularly post on the web.

Often, this might seem excessive.

A content marketing plan outlines the following:
1. The content you’ll generate
2. The stage of the buyer journey that you need to target
3. The media formats that you’ll use
4. The promotion plan to leverage the content – how you will acquire, engage, and monetize your content

Every facet of your content marketing has its own unique details. This is something that you don’t want to overlook.

This blog covers:

Clarify Your Content Marketing Objective
Explore And Comprehend Your Target Audience
Develop Audience Personas
Craft Your Content
Promote Content
It’s a Wrap!

#1. Clarify Your Content Marketing Objectives

When you create content, you should ask yourself why first.

The objective of content marketing is to reach a specific audience, build authority for your brand and instil the trust needed for prospects to buy from you.

But how would you know if any of these objectives have been reached?

Before you begin, ask these questions:

How will you measure the success of your campaign?
Will you measure traffic? Will you track new subscribers? Will you monitor app downloads?
How about conversions? Would this be engagement on social media? Video views? Podcast downloads? Leads? Nurture metrics? Sales booked?

Content marketing is full of strategies. However, without a compelling why, no matter what you do, it will fail.

When it comes to developing a content marketing strategy, knowing your objectives will help you make the right decisions.

For instance, what are you trying to accomplish?
Which stage of the buyer journey are you addressing?
What formats will the content be in?
What channels will the content reside in?
How will the content be promoted?

The ultimate goal of content marketing is to generate signups for free trials and/or nurture emails.

The minimum goal is to attract new readers to your content and convert them into a list of email subscribers.

The list opens up the opportunity for structured dialog.

Your marketing team now has the means to establish relationships with your subscribers and convert them into customers.

It’s easier to estimate how many readers, listeners, viewers, and users you need to attract to your content once you have this larger goal defined.

In other words, your traffic goal is the number of people you want to attract to your blog.

To bring in enough targeted traffic to hit your conversion rates, you’ll need to promote your content sing a variety of tactics

Get it syndicated
Get mentions in industry blogs, news
Be shared by influencers, fans, followers

There is no exact science to this as it is dynamically evolving. It is based on the collective actions of the industry, ingenuity of some brands, and on new technology.

However, the more content you generate, the more you will understand what you should be tweaking and experimenting with.

The real magic formula is in doing, analyzing what’s working for you, and in testing ideas all the time.

#2. Explore and Know Your Target Audience

After you know why you’re making content, the next step in content marketing is to know who will consume it: read, hear, or watch it.

A successful piece of content isn’t written or spoken out of a vacuum. It’s a dynamic process that involves the attention, feedback, and active participation of your audience.

To educate and transform, the most effective content marketing strategies answer the most pressing questions the audience has.

It is only by speaking directly to them that your content will connect with them. This gets them to share it, comment on it, like it – all steps to help you succeed.

Understand their context and empathize with them.

Here are some of the best practices from the top companies:

Understand the demographics, psychographics, and behavior of your ideal audience.
Quantitative characteristics are traits that can be analysed and measured.For example, age, gender, location, and job title. Perhaps you’d like to speak to executives between the ages of 30-45, or young job seekers just out of college with your content marketing.Knowing this helps your better with targeting in media as well as with your content.
Psychographics are qualitative and therefore variable. These are attributes such as attitudes, belief systems, values, and interests.For our example, we may be able to further define our content as of interest to executives who want to grow their business but aren’t sure how.Perhaps they value family and moral values and believe in hard work.
Behavioral characteristics are to do with how your audience thinks, feels and acts towards brands in your category.

#3. Developing Audience Personas

In this section, we’ll explore audience personas — fictional, generalised avatars of your target audience.

Personas are used to determine who your ideal customer is and how to relate to them.

You should create a bulleted list of the attributes (demographic, psychographic, and behavioral) of each of the audience personas you create.

To get you started with personas use Dave Grey’s Empathy Map Canvas.

Next, you need to visualise the exact person you’re dealing with.

Find a photo of the person you describe. Experts suggest using a stock photography site such as Unsplash or Pexels for this.

Despite its apparent silliness, this will help you define your vision and establish better connections with prospective customers.

As a final step, you should take your photo and bulleted list and write a paragraph describing how your persona feels and what the environment is like.

Give them a name and explain their daily routine.

What do you do to make sure your content not only fits in, but also is found in this person’s search?

Do they search for answers and ideas on Google or on community sites like Quora, Pinterest, Linkedin, FB, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or Reddit?
How much time do they spend on social media or on apps like Snapchat and TikTok?
Would they rather attend in-person events, industry conferences, or group discussions than spend much time online?

It is important to be present where your potential audience gathers.

As soon as you start a content marketing campaign, you need to ask these questions.

This will help you to maximise opportunities to reach out to your ideal audience, where they already spend their time.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that you may have multiple audiences.

It’s wise not to have a broad and diverse target audience in the early days of your business. It’s better to focus on a niche.

In any case, you can create compelling content for your audience if you know who they are and follow this process.

#4. Create Content

Write content to the Buyer Journey

The infographic from HubSpot shows the types of content you should focus on at different stages of the customer journey.
Decide on the content formats and channels

Content can be combined and varied endlessly. How-to content can be an article, image, video, infographic, or slideshow. All these formats give you a wide variety of content to share.

Consider the many ways to promote a video: YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Website, Vimeo, Instagram, E-mail, Partners, Syndication, Reddit, Guest Posts, PR, Partners

One company’s strategy may not work for another. Try to balance your target group’s customer journey phase, content type, format, and distribution channel. Use marketing results to fine-tune future campaigns.
Take charge of technology

The time has come for your content marketing efforts to shift from tactical to technical.

Now is the time to set up a website and find a place to host your content.

Several options are available to you.

Fortunately, there are lots of effective options for building your own website, from ready-to-use platforms to fully customisable templates.

Let’s start by answering an age-old question for content creators.

What is more important to you:
- Building your own platform
- Or in using someone else’s
Do you want to establish your own site on a CMS: WordPress, or HubSpot, or use a ready-to-go CMS like Squarespace?

Or perhaps start it on an external domain like Medium, YouTube, or Apple?

All of these approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

Lets say: Creating your own site gives you flexibility and freedom.

But, it also means you have to invest more time and money up-front and on an ongoing basis to maintain it.

#5. Promote your content

There are several ways to do this.

Share the content in Social Media.
Parcel your content as email broadcasts using Newsletters, Cold Emails, Retention Sequences
Feature it on your blog
With a rewards or referral program.
As grist in online communities.
As part of paid ads or content syndication
As Guest Posts

#6. It’s a Wrap!

Content marketing promotes your products, services, and company.

Each aspect of your content marketing has its own distinct details that you should not overlook.

Once you’ve determined why you’re creating content, the next step is to determine who will see, hear, or watch it. First thing’s first, figure out who your ideal audience is.

Following that, you must visualise the specific person with whom you are dealing. If you want to launch a content marketing campaign, you must first identify your target audience.

This will allow you to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible to reach out to them where they already spend their time.

It’s time to shift your content marketing efforts from tactical to technical.

And lastly, promote it.

There are numerous viable options for creating your own website.