How to make sure your B2B brand content cuts through in 2022

Is your branded content serving its purpose? Is it informing and persuading audiences? Is it driving traffic, inbound links, and sales opportunities? Content marketing is continually evolving, so here are some key questions to challenge yourself with when planning your content strategy in 2022.

Business-focussed brands often struggle to create cut-through with their content marketing. So, here’s a quick breakdown of our thinking at Grayling when we formulate our clients’ content marketing strategies.

Do you need to adapt your voice or messaging?

First up, who are you hoping to talk to? Who’s going to buy your product or service? This is the very first consideration. Being able to communicate at the right level as your audience is the platform on which to build your content marketing. The broader your audience, the more you will have to adapt it to suit different personas.

Are you pitching your content at the right technical level? Are you assuming knowledge among your audience? Are you using too much industry jargon? These factors can all put people off engaging with your content, so low dwell times and engagement rates could hint that your content is not resonating.

Brands should already have a tone-of-voice and messaging guidance document. It may well need to evolve as market and societal circumstances change. According to 2021 research from the Content Marketing Institute , nearly six in ten (58%) B2B organisations have altered their content strategy due to the pandemic.

If you are looking to revisit your company’s messaging and tone-of-voice in 2022, this is something Grayling can help you with.

Does your content meet a need or solve a problem?

When creating online, we have two audiences in mind – humans and algorithms. We need to make sure content meets people’s need that led them to search for, or engage with, the topic. It’s not just about what people are looking for, but why. Content planning involves thorough research around topics and keywords that people are using related to your product or service, so that you can focus on specifics around those questions in detail.

We need to understand search intent and business intent. So, we use intelligence gained from search tools to understand the context around a search and map it against the audience depending on where they are in their decision journey. Search engines are where 93% of online experiences start and they drive 300% more traffic to content sites than social media [source ].

This detailed, diligent, data-led approach to content planning helps your content resonate better on social media and, more importantly, search engines.

Does your content format suit the audience’s intent??

We are so lucky in 2022 to have so many different content options open to us, so we can be really creative. However, we must ensure that content format matches the user’s needs. For example, would a video tutorial be more suitable for ‘how-to’ content than an article? Would a series of blog posts be more appropriate than simply publishing a one-off report? Formats like video and audio enable us to communicate more complex messaging and concepts in a more human and engaging way – when done well.

Content format is also dictated somewhat by the environment; nearly two thirds of the Content Marketing Institute survey respondents (64%) are using webinars, often due to the pandemic limiting in-person events. Webinars also have wider reach. Read Grayling’s post on how to make a B2B webinar truly stand out .

I am surprised that just two thirds (66%) of Content Marketing Institute survey respondents say they use video. This format is essential for every brand; it’s almost expected by customers and provides a critical platform to showcase the organisation’s people and products or services. Another great thing about video formats is that they are prioritised by social media platform algorithms, because they keep people engaged and active on their site for longer. So, richer, more dynamic content formats can go much further that written content.

Another surprise is that just 61% of the same study field say they use customer case studies . Case studies are absolutely critical, because people buy from people, so decision-makers want to see ‘people like them’ experiencing and overcoming the same challenges with your product or service. Case studies work well online in video or written format and can provide your sales teams with valuable proof-points to show to their prospects.

How will your content translate on social media?

B2B organisations are increasingly seeing the value of content hosted within social media itself. Social platforms want their visitors to stay on their platform and engage, rather than linking out to other sites.

Take LinkedIn, for example. Company page updates can be 700 characters long, while individuals can use up to 3,000 characters in their post. LinkedIn articles can give scope for high-quality long reads, and the optimum seems to be around 2,000 words. As of 2021, articles are also open to brand pages. Another bonus of LinkedIn is that it you can promote your content with really targeted paid campaigns, so that your content gets in front of the right decision-makers.

But B2B social media marketing doesn’t start and stop at LinkedIn! Your target audience may not even be that active on LinkedIn. Many smaller B2B companies are also active on Facebook, which is great for raising profile in your local area through paid and organic marketing, and Instagram, which – while not great for linking out organically?– is a key platform for visual engagement and brand recall. Some B2B brands are even experimenting with TikTok as a less formal, less manicured way to tell the company story.

Although it’s key to create B2B branded content that lives on social networks, there is still scope to drive traffic back to our company website via linking from social media.

The key thing is to attract the target audience with enough reason for them to click through and learn more. This is where B2B brands could learn from the consumer sector to help humanise the stories they tell; we’re still talking to humans, after all. Thinking like a consumer-focussed doesn’t mean risking going off-brand; it just means adapting the intel you have already and repackaging it in a more engaging way.

How will you measure the results?

For content marketing to be effective, it needs to be a consistent, long-term project. You need to be focussed on your objectives and decide how and what to measure before you begin. Content marketing is an iterative process, you’ll learn through testing and experience what works and what doesn’t.

As content marketing is a long-term project, plan it out in different stages of objective rather than tackling everything at once. Regularly A/B test your social campaigns so you can understand what works best.

Grayling measures essential data throughout the content creation process, from planning through to execution and performance analysis. If you’re looking to revisit your B2B content strategy in 2022, we’d be delighted to talk with you.

By Chris Lee , Content and Digital Consultant, Grayling UK.

If you would like to discuss your brand’s content marketing strategy, please contact us to see how we could help