In 2021, seventy-three percent of successful marketers spent 10 to 70% of their marketing budget on content marketing.
And 78% of the successful marketers had a documented content strategy.
That’s no surprise because, in 2020, 69% of successful B2B marketers attributed their success to a well documented and tracked content marketing strategy.
So, B2B content marketing involves a sound content strategy built around your target audience. But beyond that, content that will guide and nurture them to become paying customers.
And that’s my basis for creating this guide. You’ll learn how to create a B2B content marketing strategy practically and directly targeting the people that matter to your business.
But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page on what B2B marketing is.
What is B2B Content Marketing?
Business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content (videos, blog posts, social media posts, etc) to attract and engage potential customers (business owners or company decision-makers).
For example, Hubspot provides software products for sales, inbound marketing, and customer service. Their target market is other businesses. So they’re a B2B company.
For their content marketing strategy, they distribute informative blog posts, newsletters, industry reports, templates, ebooks, and more to educate their market about their problem, possible solutions, pain points, and their software products as a solution.
Besides generating leads, B2B content marketing increases organic traffic to your website and pushes the leads down the sales funnel.
It also increases brand awareness and educates your offering and its value to your market’s problem.
In fact, the Content Marketing Institute found that B2B marketers achieve their brand awareness goals more than any other with content marketing.
What are the different types of B2B content formats?
B2B content marketing includes a solid strategy and creating content in any of the following formats:
- Blog post: Short pieces of content or long, in-depth posts that promote your product or service and educate your audience.
- Webinar: Digital events that you can host to promote your product or service.
- Testimonial: Short video content or written accounts from customers that speak to the success they’ve had using your product or service.
- Case study: In-depth documents that speak to the successes of a specific customer.
- Ebook: Long-form content that can be downloaded and read at the reader’s convenience.
- Industry report: Pieces that take an in-depth look at trends happening in your industry.
- White paper: Detailed reports that focus on a specific topic. They’re usually quite lengthy but offer readers in-depth information.
- Online course: Multimedia presentations that focus on a particular topic. They’re great for educating potential customers about your product or service.
- Email Newsletter: Weekly or monthly emails that feature content related to your target market.
- Video content: Educational content that can be published on a youtube channel to help drive targeted traffic.
- Infographic: Visual presentations that help explain a complicated topic to potential customers in an easy-to-digest way.
- Podcast: Audio segments can be hosted on your website or another site. They educate potential customers about your product, service, and industry.
B2B vs. B2C content marketing
B2B content marketing is directed to organizations or businesses looking for a solution from other organizations. It could be a marketing director, chief engineer, product lead, etc.
Conversely, the audience for B2C content is a direct consumer.
While B2B content marketing highlights the expected return on investment and how to improve an organization’s bottom line, B2C content marketing efforts mostly appeal to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (basic needs, psychological and self-fulfillment needs).
Other differences between B2B and B2C content marketing include: