6 B2B Content Marketing Rules to Follow

6 B2B Content Marketing Rules to Follow

B2B content marketing has become an invaluable part of brand development. It provides a way for businesses to reach other businesses via organic search. It is a strategic approach to distributing relevant information to your target audience. With it, you can capture and retain potential clients and ultimately convert them into loyal paying customers.

When it comes to creating a content strategy for B2B, you need to keep in mind that the content should be industry-related and provide valuable expert information. It is tailored to satisfy the specific needs of business clients.

B2B content is less emotional and focuses on lead generation and building long-lasting relationships with business buyers.

In this article, we are going to introduce you to some of the most important B2B content marketing rules to follow in order to execute your strategy in the best possible way. 

1. Establish the Right Content Marketing Strategy

All of your marketing efforts may go to waste if you do not back them up with the appropriate tactics. In order to distribute your content optimally, you need to develop the right content marketing strategy and approach your audience accordingly. 

To do so, you need to organize your workflow into a specific set of goals. Define what they are and how you plan to achieve them.

Determining your objectives will help you prepare an answer for your readers, despite where they are on their journey through the marketing funnel.

Leading goals achieved with help of content marketing among B2B marketers
Source: Statista.com

SEO Is Crucial for Ranking Well

Doing a Search-Engine-Optimization (SEO) is essential to your organic traffic. It allows you to rank well on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a specific question that your target audience may be searching for. 

With technology advancing at such a fast pace, it comes as no surprise that the guidelines for a successful SEO are ever-changing. However, there are some key components to keep track of like keywords, content, and backlinks

Choosing the Right Set of Keywords

Starting by doing some thorough keyword research is how you begin your SEO journey. Keywords are the questions of your audience. They are the words they use when they do a Google search. Think about what problems your target readers are facing and how they are addressing them on search engines.

You may consider using a tool for keyword research such as Ubersuggest. With them, you can measure how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. Also, when quoting information from other sources, don’t forget to paraphrase. Plagiarism and duplicate content can get your website penalized and you’d have to build your content again from the ground up.

The metrics to look out for are search volume and SEO difficulty.

Shorter keywords have higher search volumes and apply to a broader range of topics. That makes them difficult to rank for. We recommend going for long-tail keywords instead. They address a particular problem which makes them easier to appear as a top search result.  

Make Your Website Crawlable 

A big part of SEO is optimizing for search robots. These robots are called spiders or crawlers and they are constantly scanning and indexing websites to rank search result pages. 

As of March 2021, all of Google’s crawlers will primarily index the mobile versions of websites.

In fact, If your business’s website is only optimized for desktop, you need to hurry up and implement a mobile version of your site.  Google has prepared for you a nice list of practices you can use to adapt your content accordingly. 

WordPress websites have a very good advantage with mobile-first indexing because their design is responsive, which means that you don’t have to look after mobile and a desktop version of your site separately. 

Build Backlinks

Backlinks are another very important ranking factor. Their function is to redirect your readers to other pages for additional information about the topic you are covering.

Google will place your page in a higher position on the SERPs If your website gets linked to high authority web pages. They can also increase the credibility of your website and prove that it is a relevant and valuable source of information.

2. Know Your Audience and Develop Detailed Buyer Personas

Get familiar with who you want to target with your content before creating it. B2B content creation revolves around an audience that is seeking to extract value from it. You need to understand what problems your clients are facing and how your product can help them. The aim is to attract, indulge and convert target customers so you can move them through the sales funnel.

Build a well-crafted buyer persona

Who Is Your Dream Client?

One very important B2B content marketing rule is to establish accurate buyer personas. Having a detailed psychographic description of your dream customers can help you tremendously when providing the ultimate user experience. 

Тhink about what drives people’s decision-making processes, and what obstacles impede the accomplishment of their objectives. Ask yourself what are the questions they ask when they need help. And finally, evaluate how your products can successfully help them reach their goals.   

Be as Detailed as Possible

Having a more precise psychographic profile of your target group means giving them less irrelevant and potentially annoying content.

In fact, a more concise and specific audience will greatly improve the cost-per-lead and the ROI index. Consider what your buyer persona’s job role is. Are they employees or do they manage other people and what would be important to them when discussing your product? 

3. Tell Your Story in an Engaging Way

Upload new content as regularly as possible but never choose quantity over quality.

Dishing out tons of content that is irrelevant to your audience will backfire and will cause more harm than good. 

Your content should provide expertise on topics that intrigue your readers. For example, businesses are going to examine your content looking to reduce production costs and ensure company growth.

Tell a Story That Will Inspire 

B2B content should be straightforward and educational, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be engaging. Content marketing is the art of telling powerful and relatable stories that can inspire trust in your audience.

Every business has a story and a mission. Sharing what problems you faced on your journey, how you overcame them, and found a solution for them – will make your materials captivating for the reader. 

Try Not to Make Your Content Feel Like a Self-Promoting Commercial

In other words, first, sell your story and then go on about selling your products. If your product is a really good solution for a certain problem, try not to turn your content into self-promotion. It could irritate the reader and make him feel more like he is reading an ad, rather than an educating source of information.

Another good tactic for encouraging engagement is to always use a Call-To-Action (CTA) button at the end of your articles.  CTAs help out with lead generation. Whenever readers find your content to be relevant to them, chances are that they will further investigate your services if there is a CTA for them to interact with.

Strongly engaging CTAs will ultimately boost sales and revenue gains. They are a perfect tool for your audience to subscribe to your marketing campaigns or to reach out to a certain service your business offers. 

4. Make Your Content Visually Appealing and Interactive

The human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than written text. It is only natural that images and videos take less time to get your audience’s attention and are way more appealing. 

95% of B2B clients prefer shorter, more visual content instead of plain text.

If you can show something, that would normally take you several paragraphs of text to explain, through an image or a video – do it. A great way to showcase statistics or comparisons is to use infographics.

Visual content marketing will generate more views and targeted online visitors will stay longer on your site because of it. 

Focus on High-Quality Visual Content

Quality and alt tags are things to look out for when optimizing the visual content on your page.

Images with low resolution or ones that are too small and unclear will have a negative result on your SEO. If that is the case, Google’s crawlers may deem your page unrelated to a search it might otherwise be relevant to. 

Your videos should have high-quality thumbnails to ensure that Google can crawl and find them. To be discoverable, they must be publicly visible.

Assign Clear and Descriptive Alt Tags to Your Images and Videos

The alt tags of your images are another important SEO component. Google wants you to use relevant alt attributes that describe the context of the image in a meaningful way.

If the image URL is different on mobile and desktop, then the indexing system may have a hard time ranking you properly.

When you post videos, keep in mind that it is mandatory to provide a high-quality thumbnail as well as to ensure that Google can find and crawl your video.

Interactive visual content could generate a lot of high-quality inbound links which will help your page rank higher in the SERPs. It also makes your content more shareable which gives you the potential to go viral. 

5. What Are the Best Types of Content for B2B Content Marketing?

Content marketing can be expressed in various ways with blogging being the most popular approach. Valuable content is the most important ranking factor for search engines like Google. And the pages that are shown in the top results receive almost all of the user traffic.

In order to boost your ranking, we have picked some of the best content options to use for B2B content marketing on your website. Here are some Dos and Don’ts to help you improve your digital presence and increase your SEO performance.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Don’t Stop Blogging

Statistics show that blogging is the most popular and effective instrument to use to promote your business.

Blogs are a superb way to answer some of your audience’s most pressing problems and display your authority and expertise. They generate more organic traffic for your website and help build stable relationships with your readers.

Google doesn’t rank all sites equally and there are some factors to consider when building your blog. Your articles need to be informative and with added value. Here are some key factors to keep track of when writing a blog article:

  • When writing a blog article, consider the E-A-T ranking factors. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness and is of great importance when it comes to Google’s website evaluation process. In order to receive a higher E-A-T ranking, your article should be written by an expert in the field that it is covering.
  • There is room for experimentation with a blog post’s length but the sweet spot is somewhere between 1500 and 2000 words per page.
  • Companies that blog frequently will notice a staggering 67% difference in monthly generated leads than companies that don’t blog as consistently. 

Do a Case Study

Case studies are a B2B content marketing classic and a way to display your ability to resolve problems. Through them, you can demonstrate the success of a particular approach you have used in solving a certain type of problem.

Pick a project that will demonstrate how your products can positively resolve the problems that your target clients are facing. For that matter, you can ask existing clients how it helped them resolve an issue they had.

Do a thorough investigation on the topic. Gather intelligence from the team that worked on the project you chose. The different departments that were involved will probably have insights you don’t. Include as many facts and statistics that show that your solutions work. 

Be careful not to make your case study sound like a self-promoting commercial.

Make sure your case study is written in an impeccable way with no grammar, spelling, or style mistakes. It has to be short, concise, and very informative and should include a call to action at the end.  

Host Webinars

Webinars are another great way to cultivate leads and strengthen your current business partnerships. Through them, you can talk to your customers and provide them useful insights. You can also invite your existing clients to take part in your webinar and share how you helped them with their business development.

Your webinars should be short and straightforward – no more than one hour long. Make sure you polish your information, remove any unnecessary fluff, and provide a Questions and Answers (Q&A) segment at the end. The feedback you receive from the participants is always going to be useful in future strategizing. 

Promote your webinar in the right way. Email campaigns to your target clients may prove very effective as 57% of webinar participants register through them. Social Media is another great tool for promoting webinars through both organic and paid reach.

6. Set KPIs and Analyze Performance 

Tracking and analyzing your Key-Performance-Indicators (KPIs) is the blueprint to long-term growth and content marketing success. 

They are a great way to understand what your audience is most interested in. Accurate analysis of metrics will result in better lead management. It will help with tailoring future marketing strategies according to your specific audience’s needs.

Most businesses find the Return-on-investment (ROI) to be the most important part of their marketing efforts. It is directly connected to the revenue gained through your marketing strategy. 

Conclusion

Executing the perfect B2B content marketing strategy requires a lot of experimentation and tweaking of ideas. Approaching it in a step-by-step manner will ultimately lead you to your desired destination and improve your performance. 

Define your goals clearly, develop detailed buyer personas and focus on the right types of content in order to achieve a successful B2B content marketing strategy. This way you can develop the ultimate experience for all your clients, present and future.