Content marketing is a strategic approach for B2B companies that helps them drive inbound, outbound and paid marketing.
With inbound marketing, content takes the form of blogs, website content, long-form content and videos. These are used to attract customers autonomously to the website, using SEO. Inbound marketing is the most common use of content.
However, content is critical to both outbound and paid strategies, too. Offer your content as a conversion to offer value to relevant leads.
Great content is very important. However, it is just as important to understand how to use your content to reach an interested audience. Content without conversions is time-consuming.
Provide Value
The biggest factor to engagement with your content is providing value. Your content should be a reliable and valuable resource to your potential leads.
Use your content to build a reputation as a leader in your market. This generates trust and credibility amongst competitors and potential customers.
Your content should include a variation, to attract as many leads as possible within your niche. Create blogs, infographics, video content, white paper and more. Different content will attract different customers, depending on their preferences.
Those in the early stages might prefer video content. Whereas customers that are close to a purchase may prefer long-form whitepapers and web pages. Ensure you’re attracting customers at every stage in their journey.
This may not bear fruit immediately. Your content should place you front of mind. You will be their first call when a prospect is ready to find a solution for their problem. Content marketing requires some patience, and monitoring of analytics to see positive ROI.
Improve Website SEO and Drive Traffic
A major advantage of content marketing is that it improves your website SEO. Ultimately, good SEO drives organic traffic to your website, improving engagement and conversion.
In order to take advantage of the traffic that content offers, your content needs to be well optimized.
Begin some keyword research in your market. Consider what your buyers are likely to be searching for. Be specific on search terms. This might change depending on the stage in their journey with you. Create content around a variety of keywords, in order to rank for them.
Optimize your body text, headings, images and other content using your keywords. Your web page should demonstrate to search engines that you are relevant to specific search terms.
The reason that SEO and keywords are important is that they drive organic traffic. This is key to really attracting customers, as good SEO provides relevant leads. Relevant and qualified leads are far more likely to convert.
Outbound
You can be forgiven for thinking that content marketing is an inbound strategy. However, it is important to utilize your quality content across all of your distribution channels.
Content is just as valuable within your outbound marketing strategy. Email and outbound messaging conversion rates can be a challenge. However, consider the conversion that you’re requesting.
So many marketers request meetings, or some form of contact within their email or messaging sequences. The problem with this is that people are rarely willing to take meetings with strangers.
Instead, provide value to your leads by offering content as a conversion. Prove that your company is useful, and just wants to help, rather than sell. This builds a positive relationship, before official contact.
As a marketer, once your lead has downloaded your content, you learn something about them. Use this information to qualify them, and provide even more relevant content or contact. Nurture their interactions with you, in order to attract and convert into customers.
Paid
Paid advertising uses content in a very similar way to outbound marketing. However, it is just as valuable here.
Typically, the most effective B2B paid campaigns sell content rather than meetings. The reason is the same as in outbound marketing, people aren’t willing to meet strangers after one interaction.
There’s a variety of valuable content that can be utilized in paid ad campaigns. Consider creating and timing a webinar. This is ideal, as your webinar can attract customers on multiple occasions. Or, you could offer the download of a relevant whitepaper.
Once you have receives some conversions, it’s important to follow up. Get in touch with those that made use of your content, and learn more about them.
Content results in higher conversions. However, it is just as important to nurture the leads that your content has generated. Ultimately, this is how they turn into customers.
Shareability
Content is shareable on social media platforms and forums. In fact, most social media users enjoy sharing content with their friends or connections.
It’s important to note that video content is increasing in popularity on these platforms. It is more engaging, and attracts new prospects. In fact, a combination of user-generated content and professional video increases engagement by around 28%. Those that do engage can share your useful video with other connections.
Utilize video content in email campaigns, and on socials or forums. This should be a palatable example of your best content, making it more sharable than blogs or white papers.
Your leads can work for you, and enhance the reach of your content to other relevant audiences.
Grow Existing Customers
Among your focus on attracting new and relevant customers, it can be easy to forget about your existing ones. However, these should be your biggest advocates.
Ensure that you’re utilizing content to keep them engaged, and interacting with your company. Create content that is useful at every stage of their journey, including post-purchase.
Great content should help you to grow your existing customer accounts. Continue to serve your customers, and they are far more likely to make recommendations and references to other relevant buyers.
Not only that, but testimonials can be useful pieces of content for your other marketing strategies. Ensure you’re nurturing those relationships to continue building connections and new customers.
At Nituno, our content marketers implement a test and learn approach to enhance lead generation. We create a variety of content, to offer value to your leads and potential customers. Get in touch with us today.
