Looking to boost conversion rates and engagement? Take your startup to the next level with powerful B2B content development best practices.
Driving brand awareness and conversions through B2B content development isn’t easy to get right. You’re balancing startup demands, limited resources, creative decisions, and more, so you might dismiss the need for a content marketing program.
However, developing valuable content can bring benefits such as elevating your startup, increasing brand awareness, and converting more buyers into loyal customers. Your content not only sparks emotions among your members of your target audience but also amplifies your credibility.
Here, we go over four best practices for B2B content marketing to drive results in the cost-effective manner.
Key Takeaways
- Content lets you deliver consistent messaging to help convert prospects into buyers
- B2B content must concise yet valuable
- Focus on every stage of the customer journey in your content marketing program
What Is Content Marketing?
HubSpot, a provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software, defines content marketing as “the publishing of written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business.” Among the kinds of content that fit into this category are blog posts, social media posts, videos, and case studies.
Why Should Your Startup Care About B2B Content Marketing?
Roughly 90% of B2B marketers turn to content marketing to help generate leads.
But developing B2B content goes beyond marketing materials. B2B content is a collection of various types of content. To consistently deliver high-quality content, you must create a content marketing strategy that targets your audience.
With the right content marketing strategy in place, many startups see a boost in brand awareness, brand authority, customer engagement, and lead conversions.
4 Best Practices for B2B Content Marketing
As you’d imagine, B2B content marketing differs from B2C content marketing. The key differentiator, of course, is that B2B content is aimed at a business audience and B2C content is targeted at a consumer audience. As such, B2B content can’t necessarily be produced or published in the same way that B2C content is.
Here are four best practices to guide your B2B content marketing efforts.
1. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy and Communication Boilerplate
Before publishing even one blog post or video, you must come up with a broad content marketing strategy, including a communication boilerplate for everyone in your organization to follow.
Your content marketing strategy should answer these seven questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are the pain points of your target audience?
- Which technology will you use to produce and distribute content?
- What types of content will you focus on?
- What are your content marketing objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs)?
- How will you repurpose and promote content?
- How will you track and measure your content’s performance?
In tandem with your strategy, develop a communications boilerplate. A communications boilerplate can help ensure your brand consistency throughout all of your content. The boilerplate should summarize high-level information about your company, products, and services. The boilerplate should also address your brand’s tone, voice, and terminology.
2. Add Content Marketing Experts
While your employees might wear several hats, it’s important to leave content marketing to the pros.
If nothing else, you should add a freelance writer to your team who specializes in B2B content. Going a step further, you might want to hire a content marketing consultant to develop your content marketing strategy. And if you’ve got enough money in your budget, consider hiring full-time content marketing specialists.
Assembling a dedicated content marketing team should lead to better business outcomes, such as higher rates for lead generation and conversion. In addition, it allows your employees to concentrate on their regular roles rather than taking on ad hoc content marketing tasks that add even more to their workload.
3. Tailor Language to Your Audience
B2B audiences lose patience when they come across lengthy content littered with complicated language. After all, the average person has an attention span of 12 seconds. When it comes to B2B content marketing, less is more.
Consider these three tips when it comes to language:
- Use precise language with terminology that’s relevant to your audience’s industries.
- Offer key takeaways that summarize the key points in a piece of content.
- Communicate in a dynamic way with active verbs to hold your audience’s attention.
Ultimately, B2B content is designed to establish credibility with your audience so that they trust your brand and enter your lead funnel. When you’re able to effectively communicate your subject matter expertise, you’ll more successfully convert leads and generate sales.
4. Focus on the Customer Journey
A 2024 survey for the Content Marketing Institute revealed a tough truth about B2B content marketing. Thirty-nine percent of B2B marketers who rated their strategies as moderately effective or worse cited misalignment with the customer journey as a reason.
A successful B2B content marketing strategy should feature content at every stage of the customer journey. To get started, identify how you can deliver the right content at the right time throughout your marketing funnel. For example:
- Awareness stage: Blog posts, whitepapers, videos, social media posts
- Evaluation stage: Case studies, webinars, newsletters, podcasts
- Purchase stage: Reviews, testimonials
Along with content aimed at the customer journey, you should create content for current customers, such as product guides or email updates about products and services.
Amplify Your Brand with B2B Content Marketing
The success of your B2B content marketing strategy relies on connecting with your audience on their terms. By understanding the types of information your audience wants and needs, you can develop top-quality content that supports your startup’s credibility and contributes to your bottom line.
Ready to start building your brand through great B2B content? Set up a meeting today with our team to get started on your Blueprint for Branding.