Content is an essential marketing tool for B2B brands — it can be used to expand your brand’s reach and connect with your target audience, if utilized correctly. In this article, we will explore a few different ways a B2B organization can experiment with content to win more leads. Let’s dive in.
Why is Content Important for B2B Brands?
Content should always be designed to increase awareness of your brand, drive traffic to an organization’s website, and eventually bring in more leads and sales. The primary focus for content that’s targeting other businesses though is that it always has to be useful and valuable to an organization’s audience.
Becoming a go-to resource for people working in your industry and establishing your organization as an expert authority on content should be priority number one. That doesn’t mean it should be boring and dull, it still needs to be engaging, but based on facts, data, informed opinions, and useful, actionable advice.
Identify Your Target Audience
You probably already have customer personas for your business that give you a clear idea of who you are trying to sell to — where they are, what their job role is, and their interests, and concerns. To start experimenting with content you need to consider what they already read, watch, or listen to and where they look for this.
Research what kind of day-to-day issues they might have to deal with, the industry news sources and experts that they would follow, and the kind of things they might need information on as part of their job.
You should also take into consideration the current visitors to your website, using Google Analytics to understand how they find your website, their demographics, and their interests. Once you have a good idea of who you are trying to target you’ll be able to understand what content they engage with and where you need to share it to reach them.
Create Engaging Content
Content marketing includes a range of different formats such as written blog posts, videos, webinars, tutorials, podcasts, and infographics. It’s usually a good idea to choose a couple of different formats that will connect with your audience, but ensure you’ve got the skills to produce your content on a regular basis to help build up an audience.
Try planning out a few months of content at a time, this could include:
- Guides and insights on relevant topics for your audience
- Problems that they might face in their job — solutions, tutorials, how-to guides
- Current news and updates in the industry
- New research, data, and insights
- Interviews with experts in your industry
Optimize Your Content
Ultimately you want your content to increase leads and sales by increasing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website. To achieve that you need to ensure all the content you produce is optimized.
Blog posts on your website need to be SEO optimized — this includes using relevant keywords in the headings, subheadings, URL, meta description and throughout the content. You also need to ensure that your posts match search intent — this is key for ranking well in search results as Google wants to provide results that match closely with what someone is actually searching for.
As well as optimizing your content, a good way to make sure you’re matching search intent is to look at what type of posts and content appears in search results for your keywords. Try to match that type of content whether it’s how-to guides or lengthy blog posts. If the results on page one are actually for homepages, software, or tools, then reconsider the keyword you’re targeting.
Content you’re producing for other platforms such as YouTube videos or podcasts also needs to be optimized with relevant keywords so that people can find it on that platform, and it needs to include links back to your website.
Share Content on Social Media
Social media is another great way to connect with and grow your audience. While you should use social media to promote your blog posts, videos, and any other content you might be producing, you can also create or repurpose content to share directly on social media platforms. There are lots of different social media marketing strategies you can try such as:
- Hosting a weekly Twitter chat with industry experts
- Get involved with groups on LinkedIn, share useful content and join conversations
- Repurposing blog content and data into shareable infographics
To grow your social media following and drive people to your website you need to post regular, useful content on the right platforms for your audience, at the right times. Use a social media scheduling tool to plan out a couple of months of posts in one go, but also allow time each day to respond to comments, engage with current trends and other users.
As with all your other content you need to be optimizing it by using the right keywords and the right hashtags. Look into what hashtags your target audience is following, and which ones your competitors use. By targeting the right ones your people will come across your brand content in search results on the platform, giving it more reach.
While you might be looking to optimize and pandemic-proof your business operations in other areas, it’s also a good time to look at ways in which you can market and grow your business. Using content can help establish and develop your brand leading to more awareness and an increase in engagement and sales.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
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