B2B content marketing is about building and transforming ideas into a variety of content that can be produced and distributed to boost brand awareness, thought leadership, and traffic in a way that encourages demand and lead generation, builds brand equity, and helps boost sales contributing to company growth.
Successful B2B content marketing features personalized, valuable content that appeals to prospects on their preferred channels and provides them with relevant information and solutions to the challenges they face. With the rise of digitization in B2B marketing, most content is currently found and shared online as digital content marketing.
Who Needs a Content Marketing Strategy?
The need for a content marketing strategy depends on the goals and objectives that a company wishes to achieve. Content can be tracked via interactions, downloads, and increases in traffic to evaluate its performance, guide adjustments, and to determine successful content strategies.
If existing content is not giving you the desired results, it’s time to implement a new content marketing strategy. If current content is failing to boost brand awareness and demand generation, developing content marketing strategies can help to achieve these goals.
Content marketing strategies help marketers make the most of their content and maintain a high ROI, while creating lasting equity for their brand.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Converts
Define Goals
Objectives should be clearly established from the beginning of the content creation process to give content a greater purpose and define its success. Without this due diligence, solid content ideas are at risk of being poorly optimized and losing out on their potential.
Managing keywords boosts the search engine rankings of proprietary content and websites and helps to ensure that content appeals to the needs and interests of potential clients while kickstarting the nurturing process.
As such, mapping and spacing out publishing with a content roadmap is an essential feature of a successful B2B content marketing strategy.
Pillar Pages
B2B content marketing strategies, traffic to content site SEO, and site links can be improved with the creation of pillar pages. These are long-form pages that cover in-depth analysis or breakdowns of important topics related to a company’s services, products, or industry. These pages also include target keywords that boost their reach. Pillar pages are an effective way of establishing brand authority and thought leadership by providing detailed, relevant information.
Broad topics covered in pillar pages can then be explored in further detail with shorter types of content marketing that link back to pillar pages such as articles and whitepapers. This capitalizes on reader interest by encouraging them to stay on websites longer and explore more related content. Pillar pages act as a hub for important topics and as a result, are integral to improving the performance of multiple pieces of content.
Content Distribution
Without proper distribution, B2B content marketing is much less likely to succeed in reaching its intended audiences.
Along with content creation, promotion and distribution should also be guided by in-depth knowledge of specific target segments and their preferred channels. Publishing with an omnichannel strategy fueled by these insights can avoid wasted budgets and time.
There are several types of distribution that can implemented depending on the type of channel marketing strategy you are developing and your network: