5 Keys to Effective B2B Content Marketing

“Your customers don’t care about you, your products, your services…they care about themselves, their wants and their needs. Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about so they actually pay attention to you.”

The sales megaphone is dead: selling begins with developing interest and trust, and building a relationship on that foundation. While B2B websites can have many aims, from lowering the cost of customer service to increasing customer loyalty, lead generation should be a primary goal and content marketing can be the vehicle to achieve it. Much has been written about content marketing for small businesses, but what about content marketing for the B2B enterprise? Key differences between the two include the volume and complexity of content, and the processes and people required to support content for large enterprises.

You carefully designed your website to bring your brand to life, crafted an exceptional user experience, and powered it all with a robust technology platform, so getting the content right is key. Unlike your websites’ design or technology platform, which you may revisit periodically (as in, years), content needs to remain fresh and relevant to your target audience. That means it needs to be actively managed, and more frequently than you might think. So, what are the keys to effective content marketing?

Have a plan
Have a content marketing plan that starts with clearly articulated engagement and conversion goals and KPIs. These might include traffic, time on site, specific call to action conversions, and lead generation. The content marketing funnel starts with traffic at the wide end of the funnel, drives engagement and call to action conversions in the middle (engagement value), and ends with achieving your ultimate goals, for example, lead generation.

Know your audience
Your content marketing plan must also delineate specific audience segments, with clearly defined personas that will guide you in developing relevant, personalized content strategies. It’s important to remember that content should be related to your products or services, but shouldn’t be focused directly on selling your products or services. The initial goal is to engage your audience with content that’s of interest to them, in areas where your organization can be perceived as an expert. Positioning your company’s solutions comes later. Once you have their attention, drive them to calls to action that present higher value offers in exchange for more information. The ultimate goal is to generate marketing qualified leads for your sales force, who are already educated and interested in what you have to offer.

Establish an owner of the program
Although many people will be involved in the content creation process, designate a content quarterback to bring it all together. The shelf life of your content depends on customer expectations of your website. For example, you may only revisit your About Us page once a year, but need to refresh your blog weekly. Content should be planned with a common calendar, and managed on an ongoing basis.

Engage your content contributors.
To create content that customers will find insightful and relevant, it is imperative to engage the experts and thought leaders in your organization. With many content owners and contributors involved, content governance becomes critical. Tools like a common content calendar, automated publishing authorization workflows, and content auditing are required. The right technology can help you strike the delicate balance between control, consistency, and flexibility.

Measure and refine.
The KPIs outlined in your content marketing plan should be complemented and tracked with analytics. Experiment with different calls to action and A/B testing. When you find approaches that work in one area, try them in others. This should include monitoring the method by which your audience visits your websites. If a large portion of your audience is on a mobile device, short form content and videos will work better than long form content and whitepaper downloads. Analyze the data and optimize your approach.

Content marketing is not something you implement and watch from the sidelines. To work effectively, it requires active management and organizational buy-in. Effective B2B content marketing brings together the right people in the right structure, using the right common set of tools.