The Best B2B Marketing Content Tools for 2020

It is a common problem. What content should be produced suitable for a B2B digital campaign!? The common question we regularly face is:

"How can we be sure that the content being created is what the B2B audience genuinely want to read?"

Whether that is content for your blog, content amplification or social media, it is important to create inspiring content and content formats for your audience.

Creating the very best content is absolutely crucial to the success of your digital strategy. By deploying practical techniques you can discover content ideas your niche target audience will not only like, but engage with, share and drive brand awareness and lead capture opportunities.

In this guide, you will discover tools that will allow you to research the best ideas for B2B content marketing and discover content formats that will increase lead opportunities and B2B campaign success.

Inspiration for B2B Content Creation

There is a lot of valuable content on the internet about B2B marketing and content for B2B marketing campaigns, however it is hard to navigate through the noise with so much content being indexed everyday.

Optima have developed a simple approach, one that has not been over complicated and one based on more than 10 years refinement.

And the fundamental formula is very simple: 

“Answer the questions your audience are asking about your industry, service type or topic”

Across the internet there are many tools which can help you uncover the insights to determine what sort of content is performing well so that you can answer your audience questions with utmost confidence.

Here are 4 great tools to help you with content inspiration:

1) Reddit

Reddit is an extremely powerful news and content sharing site. If you have not heard of it before, Reddit ranks #20 in the world based on traffic rankings. What this means is the website receives an approximated 1.37 billion visits every 6 months.

The layout of Reddit is quite unusual and can seem a little daunting at first; it might even look irrelevant to your business at first glance. However, we recommend you stick at it, as there are more than 330 million users to tap into. 

Reddit works using Subreddits which operate across many topics. Currently there are more than 1 million Subreddits which means no matter what industry you operate in there is likely a community ready made to target.

Check out this very useful Guide to using Reddit created by Mashable:

https://mashable.com/2012/06/06/reddit-for-beginners/

After you have registered with Reddit, you need to find the most relevant Subreddit related to your industry. Once you have found those Subreddits, you can start to tap into the community and see what they are talking about. From there you can start to analyse what questions are being asked and what questions/topics are getting the most engagement and comments.

If it is marketing information you need, then THIS LIST which was created by Contently is a great place to start.

If it is data or creative inspiration you need, then the Subreddit https://r/dataisbeautiful/ is where you want to head too and is also one of the most popular Subreddits in the platform. 

Essentially there is something for every topic and requirement type.

Let’s say you are looking for a content idea around Real Estate. Go to Reddit and type “real estate” into the search bar at the top of the home page. Reddit will not show you a list of all the Subreddits and content currently trending under that search query.

You can now start to explore the content, the questions, images, links and articles within the Real Estate Subreddit and develop content ideas:

You can now start to dissect the results from the community. 

Some content ideas which spring to mind from this snippet of chatter:

1. A blog post: Is property investment still what is used to be?
2. An infographic: Showing the most popular places to buy a property in London
3. An infographic: Showing the transition of house prices across the various districts in London over the past 25 years
4. A blog post: How to invest wisely in property in 2020

And so on…

Each Subreddit provides a wealth of real data, real questions, real concerns and real ideas currently being talked about on a mass scale by your potential target audience. 

2) AnswerThePublic

If you have not heard of AnswerThePublic, this is an extremely powerful and innovative tool which gives you real life, live questions which are being asked about any topic you request the system to research.

The systems provides a beautiful representation of the questions and topics being asked and discussed in your chosen industry.

For example, Real Estate below:

The searches you make can be geo-targeted and refined show alphabetically or by preposition OR visually as per the example above.

Each thread feeding from the image is a link which clicks through to a live search engine view of the question/topic.

Instantly you have access to dozens of high value B2B content ideas which answer real questions posed by your target audience. Of course some of the questions will not be relevant but the relevant will outweigh the non-relevant.

3) Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a tool very commonly used in Search Strategy such as Search Engine Optimisation and has a very useful Content Explorer tool which shows content that has previously been trending and successful.

Simply enter your chosen topic and you will see an easy to digest list of popular content that has been written about your topic.

Let’s say you were an architecture firm looking for content ideas and for an up to date snapshot of what the market was talking about; below is what you would see:

What you can see here is:

• How many social media shares a piece of content has
• How much organic traffic a post has received
• The amount of links a piece of content has acquired
• The domain score (DA and Trust Factor) of the site

It is a lot of very useful information.

You can refine the data by any of these fields, by publishing date and language. 

What we love about Ahrefs, is that the system will also allow you to see everyone that has tweeted about a particular post. This means you can actually see how people have engaged, what their responses were and how they reacted to a piece of content.

Ahrefs Content Explorer will provide you with essential insight into trending content and help create those high clicked content titles that influential sites are attracted too before they feature your content.

4) BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is quite similar to the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool with some nuances in the way that data is captured and displayed.

BuzzSumo is in fact a search engine that will show data around content shares and trend score across multiple networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

The system will provide insight into who shared a piece of content, which sites have linked to it and also multiple comparison data values such as content length, content type, publishing date and related topics.

An additional feature which we find very useful allows you to search your own content. You can put your content into the system, via the searching of your URLs, and it will show you a broad range of data about how your content is performing.

When it comes to managing your Content and SEO Strategy, this tool is very useful.

Let’s say you are a Web Design Agency and you are looking for popular content and questions to enhance your content and SEO approach. 

Navigate to the Topic Explorer section of the dashboard:

Type in a term related to your industry, for example, I will search for “Web Design and lists of popular content will be presented.

You can refine your search by various demographics and geographically parameters. For example; you could search, “Web Design Sunshine Coast”, which would produce much more specific content that is popular in a target location.

What you will get back is something like this:

You can then source deeper insight into what the figures actually mean:

Here are some B2B Content Types that drive success

B2B marketing should focus on your target audience, which will allow you to drive the right actions, from the right people at the right time.

There are many content formats to utilise in your B2B content production, such as:

• Thought leadership articles
• Podcasts
• White papers
• Guides
• Case studies
• Product demonstrations
• Videos

And many more.

Remember, content does not always have to be super cool. Content needs to be effective. Product demonstrations and guides are extremely effective forms of B2B content which you should take advantage of.

Anthony Godley | Digital Innovation, Digital Governance & Digital Transformation for 2020

For more trending digital content and to learn how to outrank your competitors in 2020 join me on LinkedIn.