B2B content marketing is a significant factor in growing a company’s brand and bumping up ROI.
- 87% of B2B marketers find success using content marketing
- 76% use blogs to bump their bottom lines
- 81% use articles on their website to draw traffic and sales
A good B2B content marketing campaign will create loyalty with prospects and existing customers. It will also build your firm’s credibility as an industry leader. Being able to emotionally connect with prospects is an added bonus.
There are 7 key benefits of using B2B content marketing to build your company’s brand:
1) B2B Content Marketing Creates Value for Your Target Buyers
Delivering significant value to your prospects before they ever engage in a sales conversation with your company is the first priority.
To achieve this you need to focus your content topics on the top 30% of the buying pyramid. This obviously includes the top 5% who are “ready to buy”. However, the next 25% are in research mode for an upcoming purchase sometime in the next few months. These are the buyers you want to concentrate on. Content tailored for these “pre-buyers” and their unique needs indoctrinates and captures future customers. This is essential to position your brand and offerings before they are in the final buying stage.
The essential element of a successful B2B content marketing campaign is delivering “value-added knowledge”. A blog post or article needs to present a unique perspective on the customer’s pain or problem that adds value. Dull run-of-the-mill content doesn’t cut it anymore.
This is much easier said than done. After all, how many offerings out there are truly unique?
You can get ahead of your competition and build engagement with material that is relevant, accurate and helpful. Weaving in a true unique selling proposition (USP) will elevate the impact of your content substantially.
2) Business Visibility is Expanded in Searches
To drive clear ROI from your B2B content marketing, you must produce and distribute high-quality content consistently.
Consistent, keyword-driven content creation will place your business in a better search engine ranking position.
According to Aberdeen, YoY site traffic is almost 8x higher for content marketing leaders than followers.
3) You Develop a Strong Audience
Engagement with your prospects on your website and social media platforms creates a strong audience. The combined effort of writing deep “pillar” content, distributing it across the web, and engaging B2B buyers with the best topics on LinkedIn and other platforms drives significant long term brand engagement.
Younger generations are your B2B buyers of the future. Developing your brand to appeal to younger generations’ digital nature will also prepare your company for the future.
4) B2B Content Marketing Builds Awareness and Loyalty
It costs a lot less to retain a current customer than to go out and find a new one. That rule applies to B2B content marketing the same way.
In fact, Gallup reports that two thirds of existing B2B customer base are willing to look elsewhere in the digital age. The wide availability of competitor information means you can’t sit on your laurels. You MUST continually engage both your prospects and existing customers with solid content.
Content marketing (supported with email and social media marketing) is an excellent way to create a personal bond between your business and customers. Strengthening client relationships with blogs and social media fosters emotional ties. This bond can create enough loyalty to offset the potential to jump ship.
So how to you uncover what makes your customers loyal? Ask them what they are gaining from your existing relationship and where they want to take it. Then build content and your brand around these things.
5) Advertising Costs are Reduced
Online advertising costs have become a major concern. The amount of ad spend required to attract and convert leads into sales opportunities has risen substantially. Part of this is increased competition for ad space. Part of it is concentrated effort from major ad platforms like Google AdWords to reduce inventory and require “enhanced” ads. Either way, the cost impact is significant.
B2B content marketing is an investment in future targeted traffic. A committed investment in quality authority content progressively reduces the amount of advertising costs required to drive leads into your business.
Content marketing is also less labor intensive and simpler than print, radio and television advertising. Yet, content can still be used for mass market advertising by promoting it on platforms like Taboola and Outbrain. You can also run promoted content ads in the news feed of B2B social media sites like LinkedIn for less cost than more traditional mediums. This gives your content a double use for both SEO and ad traffic, reducing the net costs overall.
6) ROI is Increased
A survey by the Content Marketing Institute found that B2B content marketers expanded their investment in content creation by 56% the last 12 months. But what about the ROI? Can we just assume it’s positive?
There are multiple components of an ROI calculation for content marketing. One essential element is setting up analytics and a structured “funnel” process to track traffic metrics and leads over time.
Then you have to look at the investment and promotion costs. How much did it cost to create the content, whether it’s a blog post or video? Did we promote it with a PPC campaign on Taboola, or simply put it out there on the website to be found by Google? Did we repurpose and distribute the same piece of content on multiple platforms? What about the social posts promoting it — are those considered part of the same content?
Despite these complexities, the overall verdict among profit-driven businesses is content marketing has a very high long term ROI. The ROI is not as visible as an ad-driven campaign run on shorter time periods. But the long tail of content creates substantial positive value long after the initial content investment.
7) You Control Where Your Content Goes
One of the biggest advantages to using B2B content marketing strategies is the control you have over where your content shows up.
Analytics help monitor your target customer’s behavior and identify where they’re coming from. Once you know this, it’s relatively easy to place targeted content in front of those customers on the right channels. You can tweak the times articles and posts are released on different platforms to coincide with your customer’s behavior.
LinkedIn is a great content platform for targeting executives. Facebook might be best if you’re targeting Millennials looking for mortgage services. You can control paid content placements on Taboola, Fortune, Fast Company, ESPN and other mass media platforms visited by business professionals.
An added bonus of B2B content marketing is the ability to retarget visitors who read a page or blog post on your site. The initial visit from a Google search or referral link can be converted into an ongoing engagement by displaying banner ads to the visitor for 30-60 days. This substantially increases the brand exposure to that prospect from a single visit to your site.
B2B Content Marketing Across Digital Platforms
Integrating brand strategies across digital platforms and social media requires a well-thought-out strategy and diverse toolbox of skills.
Despite the growth in marketing channels over the years, you still need to deliver a clear message in the digital world. Using content marketing to grow your brand is about more than just getting prospects to select your goods and services over the competition.
Differentiating your value proposition is essential. Your content needs to create significant value in the mind of target readers. You need to deliver it across multiple digital channels where business readers spend time. This is the only way to drive real impact in terms of brand recognition and inbound leads.