8 Must-have Habits to Be Successful in B2B Content Marketing

As an atypical teen, I headed to the mall with my mom to shop for clothes. Teen? Shopping? Atypical? Yes, I hated clothes shopping. do.

While trying on clothes, I overheard a conversation. Being deaf, I could make out voices with my hearing aids, but I couldn't translate them. Much like someone who doesn't know Spanish who can read a sentence in Spanish yet not understand what it means.

After I finished my latest round of trying on clothes, I opened the door to find my mom and the salesperson talking.

Mom introduced me to the salesperson. Apparently, while I was in the changing room, she had been trying to talk to me, asking if I needed help. At the time, Mom was roaming the store. When Mom returned, she explained I was deaf and couldn't hear through the door.

The salesperson apologized and was as nice as could be. We had a pleasant conversation where she admitted she thought me a snob because I didn't respond. And here I am remembering the conversation all these years later.

We don't want to buy from companies we don't know. Unlike shopping for clothes, B2B purchases require more trust and a bigger commitment. We're not talking about a $50 outfit. B2B purchases easily run into thousands of dollars.

In the prospects' eyes, content marketing takes your company from being a stranger to being familiar. However, content marketing success varies widely from company to company. And to boost your success rate for achieving your goals, you need these eight habits. For each of these habits, B2B content marketing experts share what it takes to stand out in a noisy digital world.

1. Know your audience

The clothing store I visited targeted girls. No doubt, the saleslady knew her audience. When I didn't respond, she figured I was just one of those teenagers who had an attitude. I know that's stereotyping. Remembering back to my high-school years, she was right. She could've walked off and let me shop my way. Rather, she stuck around and eventually met my mom, who clarified the situation.

"Even B2B is person-to-person, really," says Sara Speicher, founder president, Sara Oblak Speicher. "So, know who the decision-makers are, how they make decisions, what they need and want, and address that. Also, don't be afraid to skip all the noise and go to them directly. Twitter and LinkedIn are two of the most powerful tools to help you can get in touch directly with the person you need."

2. Document your content marketing strategy

Again and again, research shows companies with a documented content marketing strategy are more effective than those without one. In fact, this is the key finding in "B2B Content Marketing," a research report from Content Marketing Institute.

The research found that of those companies with a documented content marketing strategy, 60 percent are effective at content marketing. Of those without a documented strategy, only 7 percent are effective at content marketing. The difference is huge.

Maybe your struggle to create a documented strategy results from feeling overwhelmed, not knowing where to begin.

Joe Pulizzi, of Content Marketing Institute, outlines the minimum requirements for an effective documented content marketing strategy:

• Business objective.
• Specific audience target — be as niche as possible.
• Editorial mission. (How is your story different, and what is the audience outcome?)
• Focus platform.
• Content type.
• Execution plan.
• Basic content ideation.
• How the content will be marketed and integrated with the rest of marketing.
• Distribution strategy.
• Metrics to use to show performance.

If you don't know your destination, how can you go straight there? The documented content marketing strategy is your map and prevents you from flailing or going in too many directions.

3. Create value

When I go clothes shopping, sometimes I go in, find exactly what I need, pay and leave as fast I can. Back when I was a teen, since the salesperson made me feel comfortable, my mom and I spent more time in her store. We most likely bought more than we would have had we not encountered her.

She spent time with us, making suggestions and going out of her way to exchange colors and sizes as needed. B2B companies can do the same for their clients as prospects. While you may not be able to give simple clothing advice, you have plenty of ways to share your expertise.

Remember promoting your company in content is not content marketing. It's advertising. According to the Content Marketing Institute, "Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action."

Notice it says "valuable, relevant and consistent." Promoting company products and services is not valuable or relevant. Two of the must-haves for successful content marketing creating value and answering prospects' questions. What does it mean to create value? Where are marketers failing here?

The best marketers make sure their content adds value to their target audience, even if it means they don't make a connection between the content and their own products or services, explains Michael Gerard, CMO of e-Spirit Inc. They know their audience's biggest pain points and provide the cure by answering their most pressing questions.

"When you start working with new clients — or even before — it's a great idea to set up some saved searches [using a tool like Google Alerts or Scoop.it] to bring you the latest news in their industry," says Judy Schramm, CEO of Proresource. "We often subscribe to blogs and industry newsletters as well. That helps us better understand the issues in their market and gives us early notice of new hot topics that we can leverage in our content marketing."

Gerard lists the following ideas to help uncover these needs to help create more valuable content:

• Ask them! When is the last time that you had a conversation with your buyers? What keeps them up at night? How is their success measured by their boss? What are their career aspirations? (e.g., attend local events and meetups where you'll find your buyers; frequent the relevant LinkedIn communities.)
• Know where they go for information. Which blog posts, publications, and other content sources do they tap into for knowledge? This fuels your content syndication and promotion strategy.
• Determine the type of content that will most grab their attention. Figure out what types of content draws your audience.
• Speak to your sales team. Keep in mind that you're most likely getting second-hand information. Your effective salespeople can provide you with invaluable insight. Talking to them helps you identify how to improve the impact of your content marketing to support sales.
• Analyze the impact of your content. Determine what content works and what doesn't work. Develop a list of metrics that you can evaluate now and identify what metrics you'd like to have as part of a longer-term performance measurement strategy. Marketing automation platforms can generate actionable information to save you time.

"Incorporating these activities as part of developing and updating your content strategy will help optimize the impact of your content marketing efforts," Gerard says. 

4. Always be testing and measuring

Not only does Jason Miller, head of content and social media marketing, LinkedIn sales, and marketing solutions EMEA, reinforce the importance of being patient, he also stresses the need for testing your content marketing efforts.

Miller says, "According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70 percent of B2B marketers are producing more content this year than last year, but only 21 percent of these marketers are successful at measuring the ROI of their efforts. The latter number is frightening. With all of the marketing technology available, there's really no excuse for not giving your content the proper credit for driving results and ultimately revenue.

"I think the root of the problem is that marketers are not getting as much value out of the content they produce as they can and should be. Many times, they give up too early by following a post-one-and-done approach and then failing to repurpose said content. Quality will always trump quantity, and it's important to keep in mind that content marketing is no longer a numbers game; it's now a game of relevance.

"The next step in the process is to test, refine and scale your efforts. The importance of testing cannot be overstated. For example, I've seen an increase in CTR as much as 66 percent by A/B testing headlines using LinkedIn Sponsored Updates. That's just one example, of course, but A/B testing should be applied to every aspect of your campaigns including email subject lines, social messaging, display, landing pages, blog titles, etc."

Testing doesn't have to be complicated. Here's a simple example that I use. Twitter is a great tool to use for testing. I create two tweets for a blog post with a different headline. I tweet both at the same time, a day apart. This way, I know I'm getting the same general crowd. If one performs better than the other, I use it again and see how it plays. Oftentimes, the better-performing one turns out to be the stronger headline.

5. Learn from others, but be yourself

I'll be straight

I. Am. Sick. Of. Clickbait.

You know, the headlines that psych you out and suck you in like a vacuum.

Unfortunately, they work. They get people to read (me included). But I'm learning to stop clicking them because the articles disappoint most of the time. I've stopped reading several well-known, well-visited websites guilty of this. Why do people keep coming back? The content is vacuous. I don't walk away with anything useful.

Gini Dietrich, CEO, Arment Dietrich and author of "Spin Sucks," feels the same way:

"Content Marketing Institute just asked me what my biggest content marketing pet peeve is and why. I said it's that everyone complains about the onslaught of content that is so bad, but then to work, behind computer screens and out crappy content that contributes to the one thing everyone hates.

"We all hate it. You hate getting emails in your inbox that have no value. You hate clicking on a story, only to find it's just fluff. You hate giving a company your email address to download an ebook, only to discover it's a big sales pitch. But that's how the majority of companies operate. We are so stuck in the old way of doing things — using marketing to sell, controlling the message, keeping our secret sauce secret, being buttoned up and professional, and not showing our human side — but it doesn't work in marketing. 

"There is absolutely something that is unique to you, and only you. The thing that competitors can copy and never do as well as you do because it's YOUR thing. So, yes, pay attention to what others are doing so you can learn and take away best practices, but be yourself. When you become human and you talk about your unique thing, you create kinship. And kinship is what drives purpose because people buy from people. They don't buy from robots that sell your products or services through content."

There's one thing I do differently from the early days of being the editor of Professional Services Journal: I tell more stories. No one can copy these stories unless it's someone who is in the story. And that person isn't likely to tell it in the same way I do because we have different perspectives.

6. Maintain an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar ensures your company produces relevant content on a consistent basis. No one will be off creating his or her own thing.

In Content Calendar Template, Michael Gerard provides these six reasons to have an editorial calendar:

1. Align team members around a common content strategy, cadence,
2. Track the operational tasks and metrics needed to streamline content creation.
3. Attribute an explicit set of labels or meta tags to individual pieces of content which will provide the foundation for subsequent analyses of content performance and ROI.
4. Provide a "parking lot" for great content creation ideas.
5. Facilitate better reuse and repurposing of existing content.
6. Manage the contribution of internal and external contributors, reviewers and writers.

An editorial calendar keeps all employees on in all their content communications and creations. Let's say you're a B2B professional services company that develops and installs enterprise software. You might plan a webinar on how to choose the right CRM software. This could be your topic for the month in which you're having the webinar.

Have all tweets, social media status updates, blog posts, presentations and any other content revolve around this topic. This assigned topic will align all content and keep everyone on the same page. There's no confusing your audience with multiple topics.

7. Diversify tactics

One of my kids prefers texting to phone calls, while another prefers phone calls to texting. I love email. (Maybe too much, as I check it way too often.) It doesn't matter who your target audience is, people's preferences for receiving content differ.

"Does your content marketing meet your prospects where they are?" says Michael Stelzner, founder, Social Media Examiner. "For example, not everyone travels by car. Some take the bus, others go by taxi, and a few like to bike or even walk. With content, different people have different content preferences: blogging, podcasting, video and so on. If you focus on just one content medium, you could be missing out on big opportunities."

8. Be patient

InternetVIZ founder Hank Stroll started a B2B email newsletter in 2002. (That's not a typo.) It took a few years to build up the newsletter to more than six figures of subscribers.

Michael Brenner, of B2B Marketing Insider, explains why you need patience in content marketing:

"One of the best habits a content marketer can have is patience. Success in content marketing doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. It takes a commitment. And it takes persistence.

"Many marketing leaders are looking for that breakout viral hit. But the simple truth is that most successful pieces of content happen almost by accident. Through a ton of trial and error. And the 80/20 rule applies where 20 percent of your content efforts will deliver 80 percent of your results. And it's very difficult to know ahead of time which pieces of content will turn into the winners.

"My best advice is to pick a schedule. Commit to creating, publishing and sharing a specific volume of high-quality content each and every day. One blog post won't make much of a difference. But one blog a day for 200 business days in a year can turn your tired company blog into a digital media asset that attracts a qualified audience for your business."

One company's flagship email newsletter started out as a different newsletter. It evolved based on current trends and readers' changing preferences. Success is the result of patience, documented editorial guidelines, testing and measuring, being ourselves, knowing our audience and, most of all, always delivering value. That was rule No. 1 from the beginning.

When you deliver value, you earn trust. And eventually, people will buy from you.

Over to you

What must-have habits would you add or modify? Thank you for reading, commenting, and sharing.

About Meryl Evans

Meryl is a digital marketer, author, tech writer, native Texan, and founder of meryl.net. Clients come to Meryl for help with their website content, email campaigns, tech writing, website and process management, blog posts, and social media. She's most passionate about getting results for clients and delighting her clients' customers. Connect with Meryl to talk digital marketing, Orangetheory, gadgets, or your favorite things.