Are you missing the chance to create better content for your B2B audience? Use these five content marketing best practices to engage them with more effective B2B content marketing.
Content marketing has emerged as one of the best ways to inform and connect with your audience. Generally, a B2B audience is smaller and more focused, and they have some expertise in their field or position. Buying cycles are longer and usually center around a relationship with a company or brand. These five best practises can help engage your audience through B2B content marketing.
1: Clearly define your audience
Before you start creating content, define who you’re trying to reach and why. It might be helpful to create buyer personas that give you a sense of your audience’s:
- Role within a company.
- Key challenges or pain points.
- Day-to-day work habits.
- Motivators and influences.
- Trusted information resources.
2: Tell better stories with content marketing best practices
B2B content marketing targets professionals, but that doesn’t mean your audience only wants to receive statistics and industry jargon. Telling stories helps you connect with your audience in a meaningful way and creates an image of your brand as both informative and helpful.
Effective methods include highlighting the pain points of your customers, telling your company story and discussing how customers use solutions in day-to-day work to appeal to your audience on a personal and emotional level.
3: Use video, graphics and images
Add visual elements like images, infographics, charts and videos to keep your readers engaged. These visual breaks help illustrate your point and allow a reader to easily scan the page. Videos that reinforce written text also allow people to consume information in alternative formats, boosting your B2B content marketing efforts.
4: Collaborate with others
Collaboration is a powerful tool to break up the monotony that can creep in when your customers hear from the same content creator(s) over and over. Collaboration can take many forms:
- Reach out to industry influencers to request guest blogs.
- Work together with other businesses that have a similar audience to expand the educational value of your content through events like panel discussions and webinars.
- Pitch your own content on platforms where your professional audience is already looking for information.
5: Tailor your content
The best B2B content marketing is distributed on multiple platforms to generate more views and leads. However, the solution is not to create a single blog post and publish it in 50 places online. This approach can damage your reputation with search engines (which remove websites or push them down search rankings if they find duplicate content) and doesn’t optimize your content for each platform.
Start with a central idea, then build content accordingly:
- Publish a blog post on your website.
- Create an informative Q&A to post on Facebook.
- Design an infographic for Pinterest.
- Break up the infographic into smaller images and publish it on Instagram.
- Create a video with a subject matter expert discussing the topic for YouTube.
- Turn the content into a question and solicit feedback using a poll on LinkedIn.
- Create a longer slideshow to publish on an industry special interest group’s website.
Start doing better B2B content marketing
If you’re looking for better B2B content for your audience, download our e-book to learn 100 common mistakes you should avoid, then fill out the form to see how easy it is to create better content with the help of Tempesta Media.
